Where are the seatbelts ?
When you have intertial dampeners, seatbelts are irrelevant. That and structural integrity fields help prevent the crew from being splattered all over the bulkheads.
That's the excuse they use, but it doesn't wash, because we're constantly seeing people thrown out of their chairs and across the room. Even without splatter danger, that kind of thing can be more than sufficient to cause serious, even lethal injuries. If the inertial dampers are only good enough to block 99% of the acceleration and let enough through to toss people around like that, then any sane engineer would put in seatbelts, safety harnesses, the works.
For that matter, any sane engineer would never think, "Well, safety system A can be trusted absolutely so safety system B is totally unnecessary." That's not the way it works. No good design ever assumes that a single system will never fail; there should always be backups, redundancies. Murphy's Law was coined by an engineer, and it's a solid engineering principle: if you don't guard against a possible failure mode in your design, then that failure is the one that's going to happen. Anything that can go wrong -- anything you
allow to go wrong -- will. Design a ship that relies entirely on 100 percent effective inertial dampers to keep the crew safe, and you'll have crew injuries or fatalities from damper failure.
It's like I said above -- the priorities of action storytellers are the opposite of the priorities of engineers. Action storytellers want there to be danger and excitement, so they hobble or exclude the safety systems.
Why are crew members forced to use work stations at angles that are likely to cause back problems and RSI?
Can you give an example of such a station? I'm trying to think of one that matches your description and the only one would be Spock's station on the original
U.S.S Enterprise.
No, actually I think it applies to all the consoles. You seem to be thinking in terms of having to lean forward into a hooded viewer, but the point is that the slanted console surfaces and the distribution of control panels requires the operators to have their hands and arms positioned in a way that's bad for the back. And RSI is repetitive stress injury; the point there is that there's no wrist support on those consoles.
