10 More Crazy Star Trek Fan Theories

The Original Series obviously had an incredibly different aesthetic from everything that came afterwards, and one of the biggest changes was going from consoles with random blinking lights, no labels, and mechanical buttons, cranks, and levers to the more familiar electronic screens and touch screens with every system clearly labelled.

Of course, the real reason for these changes were because of both an increased budget to improve background details and improved picture quality that made these details more noticeable, but that hasn't stopped creative fans from coming up with various explanations for the weird TOS console designs.

One theory speculates that, following the war with the Klingons that devastated the Federation, Starfleet adopted more coded, confusing controls to stall anyone who may want to take over the ship. After all, it's harder to find which button fires the phasers when it doesn't have the words "fire phasers" on it. Presumably, after the Federation reached an era of relative peace, these coded controls were phased out in favour of a more intuitive design. It's possible that advances in encryption and user-recognition also helped.