3 iconic things in Star Trek that the series should’ve done without

Keyboard flight controls

Now, it may make sense for a ship the size of the Enterprise to rely on touch-screen buttons and that could be accepted. The big problem that I have is with the runabouts or shuttle pods that the ships use. There’s no reason for them to tap in all the coordinates and directions into a computer when a single control port would have been much more efficient. In theory, it’s far less efficient to punch in what you want the ship to do, as opposed to just making it do what you want to do.

That’s one of the reasons I think people love Battlestar Galactica (at least the remake) so much. It was very grounded in realism. Like with Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica built its big ships around the idea of a naval fleet. While you could argue that Star Trek was more focused on large, sea-barring vessels, as opposed to Galactica’s more submarine-like design, the idea still stands.

Both had similar controls and ideas for how their big ships should behave and operate, their smaller ships were vastly different. The two types of ships we see used routinely in Galactica are the Vipers (attack fighters) and Raptors (tactical transport ships). Both of these ships used joysticks to maneuver and fly. This would make more sense for smaller ships in Star Trek but we rarely, if ever got to see it.

That doesn’t mean that such maneuvering techniques aren’t used in Star Trek, we know the Enterprise-E has a joystick control port, as we saw in Star Trek: Insurrection. So why bother not highlighting that more often?

While we’re talking about the wonky controls; the keypad flight is bad enough but if we’re going to gripe, we should go all in, the computers make no sense either. Three-buttons? What do those three buttons do? It’s not touch screen technology, no one in the 90s knew what that was yet. Plus, you see Janeway using the buttons.

I know what you’re going to say; “it was designed for looks, not practically” but man, it bugs me