This has increasingly been bothering me for some time now - the very fact that the consoles -can- explode on the command deck indicates that they have vastly more power running to those specific endpoints than is at all appropriate. This is not a safe situation!

A much more sane design from a safety standpoint would be to have low power control consoles that link via optoisolators to the various systems that they control - that way, a "flashback event on the plasma conduits" or whatever would burn out a chunk of wall someplace -other- than "right next to a critical crew member" and would have zero possibility to propagate up to their console to blow up in their face and kill them.

I've had a few folks moot the notion that the explosive consoles are somehow intentional to 'inform' the captain of the state of damage of the ship - but this is nonsensical; when the ship is critically damaged is precisely when you'd need your crew to be most capable, rather than writhing on the floor with burns and such. A "health bar" style display on the main screen would do that job just fine without the need for exploding consoles.

And this also brings up another fun notion - the likelihood of a false-positive signal on a ship going on an ostensible peaceful five-year mission is going to be non-negligible. So the Enterprise is ticking along past a perfectly normal nebula at Warp 5 when all of a sudden the nav console gets hit by a stray cosmic ray and decides to blow up - now you've got Kirk sounding red alert and firing phasers and photorps all over to eliminate a threat that doesn't exist, on a ship that can no longer navigate.

I don't know what kind of lunatics they had doing health and safety reviews in starfleet, but they should have been fired.