Bridge console engineers: .... oh wow look at this guys ... liquid napalm is a great electrical conductor ... we should use this amazing liquid to power these consoles
Why does the ship getting hit move everyone this way or that?
If the ship is tilted, the gravity is still coming from the gravity generators in the ground right? That is the same relative position regardless of ship tilt.
Wouldn't blowing up also render the console inoperative? I would think safely shutting down would be preferable to exploding if the end result is still a dead console.
This is one of the better explanations for the exploding consoles I've seen. It still doesn't justify them, but at least it's something.
The main issue is that there's no reason that consoles should explode. These are effectively touchscreens. If you push a touchscreen beyond its operational parameters, it should glitch, it should have trouble recognizing inputs, but it shouldn't blow up. If it was pushed beyond what was safe it should either break or be annoying to use. Not dangerous.
Even with 21st century technology, a touch-screen type thing basically sips power. Smart phones can sometimes explode, but that's only because they contain a relatively huge battery. These things are hooked into the ship's power so they should only be drawing a few watts.
Still, if we combine your suggestion about battleshorts with the idea that for some ridiculous reason they run everything on the ship on plasma that comes directly from the warp core, then maybe...
I saw someone once theorize that the console designers knew their creations would get dumped with tons of heat and current under battleshort conditions, and had to come up with some fallbacks. So they just filled it with a ton of mass to soak it up as long as possible, a big hunk of basalt. Unfortunately, when it gets overloaded, it tends to explosively fracture. But that's better than cooking every ensign to touch a panel when under fire
Why not? Plasma moves like a fluid, and we are perfectly capable of shutting off or limiting the flow of a fluid in an emergency.
They wouldn't employ a technology across an entire fleet of starships, and practically every corner of civilisation on and off world, if they weren't able to manage it to am extremely high degree of safety.
Just look inside the armoured citadel on a battleship for examples of how every single thing no matter how small are designed to ensure the crew remain unharmed and the vessel functional.
Anyway, the real problem is that we fill our consoles with rocks.
The real problem is they don't reinforce those damn plasma conduits enough. Your running plasma for your fucking power grid. Don't put it right behind a stupid panel or console. The terminal does not need that much electricity!
Also I love how there were instances where power was of the essense, but the holodecks were explained to have their own, independent power supplies so it wasnt relevant to shut down.
I mean, given what a holodeck does, basically a sustained, massive, active energy to matter transport, one would think it would be useful to design the ship to tap into it in important instances. Holodecks are great, but when life support is failing and phasers are down to 13%, not super relevant.
Like wouldn't voyager prefer to use that energy to make food from their replicators?
Ooh! I have headcanon for this: An uncontrolled holodeck shutdown turns the holomatter into effectively high speed razor wire.
Which means in my headcanon, some holodeck engineer once met a very grim ending - so that Moriarty could later amount to any more than a simple reboot.
The warp core was originally a space babble replacement for a boiler on a steam ship, since it was based on WW2 navy ships. On old steam ships literally almost everything ran directly on auxiliary steam. As a result of probably not revisiting this since the 60s: everything in trek runs directly on warp core plasma.