www.ditl.org

But keep in mind, the Federation controls are touch screens. This is worse, as there's no way to differentiate between different buttons, as there is with a modern keyboard. This would make it much harder to train pilots to fly without looking at the panel, which is a bad thing to do in the middle of a dogfight!

So long as you kept your palms or elbows centered or some other point of reference it wouldn't be to big of a deal. Blind people can type bloody fast and they just use the little bumps on the J and F to center their hands.

Teaos wrote:Yes I have played flight simulators quite a bit. I prefer using a keyboard for them. I find it a more comfortable position for my hands and I am so used to using a keyboard for typing the keys come so naturally I seldom slip up unless I change from my PC to laptop. Then its just a case of the keys being smaller and me needing half an hour to get used to it.

And if your bouncing around while usong a consol your hands fly off. If you bounce while holding a joystick you could very well send your fighter into something.

And if you're using a console and get jostled you could hit the "drop shields" button, which would be worse. Another consideration, although probably not one that would apply to fly-by-wire is that with a stick you can feel what an aircraft is doing, whereas with a console you can't. Not really a factor in space, but in atmosphere, it's much easier to hold a level course if the stick is wobbling around in response to presure on the control surfaces. If you had rely solely on watching the instruments it would be a lot more difficult.

That can be easily solved by pressing the "Keep a steady coarse" button on the consol

So long as you kept your palms or elbows centered or some other point of reference it wouldn't be to big of a deal. Blind people can type bloody fast and they just use the little bumps on the J and F to center their hands.

And what if the blind guys suddenly found the bumps were gone? What if they found the gaps between the keys were also gone? Do you think a blind man could type effectively on a touch screen, even if he was able to type perfectly on a normal computer?

So long as he had a point of refernce yes he could.

Why can't we just assume fighters actually have manual controls and not the touch screen. Sort of like the joystick in Insurrection?

If every other ship has a consol control system it would be prudent to assume the fighters did to.

Teaos wrote:If every other ship has a consol control system it would be prudent to assume the fighters did to.

Every other ship is either a capital ship or a transport of some sort. A bit like saying that aircraft carriers and C-17s don't have HOTAS therefore F-16s don't either.

So long as he had a point of refernce yes he could.

And where would he get this point of reference on a completely flat surface? Can you gaurantee he wont hit the wrong button by accident? And what about if he needs to bring up a different menu? They surely can't have a button on the panel for every single thing the pilot would have to do, so extra selection menues are the only way to rationalise this.
And what advantages would a touch screen give over a more conventional design?

A point of reference can be were he rests his elbow or the place his wrists sit or a corner of a consol or a break in the flat top.

But the arguement of the blind man is just to show you can use a consol fast and effectivly with out having to look at it.

And what advantages would a touch screen give over a more conventional design?

What do you mean by more conventional design?

Just put both in and save the trouble. A Joystick doesn't take much space, use it if you like, don't if you don't.

Hey now we're saying it has to be one or the other. You cant cheat and say both.

Sure i can! BOTH, DO BOTH, WE DON'T TO CHOOSE! (ST writers taser deep and carry him away for speaking with IQ involved) "Nothing to see here folks, just carry on about your business!"

Wow... I didn'tr think I was going to open a can of worms quite this size... not that I mind!

My point was originally not to espouse the merits of the console over the joystick - I frankly agree that a joystick makes more sense to me, for atmospheric and orbital speeds at least.

What I was trying to say was that a console-based system should be included - either to replace OR to co-exist with the joystick system - because every pilot in Starfleet besides Tom Paris has training and experience with it. Whether or not the joystick system is actually better on its own merits, the net result will be worse if nobody can fly the damn ship effectively.