You know what?
I’m no longer holding Star Trek or Star Wars “accountable” for their clunky-looking sixties-and-seventies future technology.
Why?
Because the Enterprise is off on a years-long voyage through space. There’s no Verizon store, no Radio Shack, no Geek Squad out there. If the Klingons fire photon torpedoes and the bridge shakes and Spock’s head bangs against the fancy iPad72 touchscreen and cracks the glass, the ship’s toast. If Han Solo’s fingerprints get all over the starchart and the touch-calibration is off by half a centimeter, the Falcon is going right into a star. But if Mister Worf accidentally twists the command knob too hard and pops it off, he can just screw that thing right back on and it will keep working. Dust gets in there? Take it apart and clean it out. All the plugs are big and universal, all the power cells are functional and have a decent battery life, and nothing is built to expire in the next six months so you have to buy a new one.
That tech isn’t anachronistic or suffering a bad case of Zeerust–it’s practical, effective, and it works. Apple tried launching its own space exploration craft, it had to come back for full repairs within three months, and then it had to be upgraded over the next two.
But this? This is just good, long-lasting, fully-functional, and reliable craftsmanship.
The actual real-life space shuttles’ electronics looked pretty much like that for their entire lifespan and this is exactly why.
Here, have a fun romp through the world of industrial and military/aerospace electrical technology vendors!
A big point of this stuff: Making it extremely rugged (because enviroments are harsh, having it break is bad, and if you’re in the military people are shooting at you), making it extremely reliable (because you’re dead if it breaks, imagine the equivalent of having an arrow key get stuck down on your computer), and making it easy, or at least possible, to field repair. You might not be able to see the screws and bolts that hold the connectors together, but they are there. No molded-blob-of-plastic USB connectors or featureless monolith ipod cases allowed here.
(A specific thing that irritates me: The exclusive use of touchscreens or holograms for controls. These are great ways to make a complicated system easier to use or let lots of functions be controlled with a simple panel. However, they can’t be used blind and they lack tactile sense, so they are not good for important stuff like flight controls or turning your engine on and off. Modern fighter jets have a lot more big screens (”glass cockpit”) but flight controls are still your classic joystick with buttons on it. Also, in the military, often instead of a touchscreen you have a row of buttons around the edge of the screen, and the labels for these buttons appear on the screen.)
(This can lead to problems. The USA’s main battle tank contains several tons of copper that’s just carrying weak electrical signals, on a tank that only weighs about 70 tons in the first place. That’s several tons that can’t be armor, ammo, engines, or the gun. There’s a plan to upgrade to fiber optics. One of the reasons that Elon Musk is able to eat the lunch of all the other rocket vendors is by taking a much more liberal approach to this kind of thing. All computers in any military ever are dreadfully obsolete and NASA sometimes needs to lurk Ebay for spare parts. An awful lot of this equipment has been updated to have some basic computer control and internet connectivity but with zero security.)
Okay, but consider this - the entire crew of the Enterprise should be paramilitary cyborgs able to manipulate all this machinery with their thoughts, with manual controls built throughout the ship as a backup.