Interfaces in Darkness Between Stars | World Anvil
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Interfaces

Technology in space is very analogue: all switches, levers, CRT screens, and heavy blast doors. There are no fancy touchscreens or polished white surfaces.   Everything is either flickable or pressable, environments were claustrophobic, badly lit, and covered in wires, pipes, and grating, and the people involved were regular Janes and Joes: engineers, suits, police officers, and everyday citizens. The technology is harsh and physical, but that’s what you want in the back end of space: hardy, solid machinery and technology that can be replaced or repaired easily.   It’s all very well having flashy voice-activated quantum computers with holographic projectors, but the moment it goes wrong you’ll need a crew member with a PhD to get it running again. There’s no time for that in the back of beyond, where the company is trying to save money and is just sending whoever wants to earn a bonus out there.   There’s no reliance on fancy gadgets or equipment, and you’re forced to deal with situations using just what you have to hand. If the job can be done with a big three-foot spanner, then there’s no point in spending money on high-tech solutions. And if where you’re going is 100 light years away and takes two years to get there… well, out of sight, out of mind.  

Controls

Smartphones have been replaced with retinal contacts or smartglasses - smaller, more intrusive, and absolutely ubiquitous. Controls are based on contextual interaction with the environment, always-on subvocal commands, hand signs, or a control pad mapped to flat surfaces in your field of view (like your hand). Everyone knows at least one interface sign language, which is broadly mutually intelligible with spacer vac-sign.   Instead, spacers swear by bulky monitors and mechanical controls. Switches, keys, dials, levers, blinking lights - all of these are easier to diagnose and manipulate than a screen that might lag at a crucial moment or misinterpret an input through some programming fault. Touchscreens have fallen by the wayside for control schemes, and joysticks are back in a big way because they're more space-efficient than mice.  

Screenwrap

Habitats are littered with screenwrap. Imagine a sheet of plastic wrap, the durability of a plastic bag, see-through and running a digital display with a basic touchscreen interface. It's replaced paper. They make plastic bags out of this stuff, ponchos, umbrellas, banners, pamphlets - anything cheap, disposable, and that you can stick some virtual ad-copy on. It wrinkles, tears, glitches, and crumples like nobody's business, and collects in melted wads in gutters once it's been improperly disposed of.   No one knows how to use screenwrap properly. It's the texture of a plastic bag, so you can mostly flatten it out but it's always going to be crumpled. Scrolling and touch input is deeply finicky, it's covered in ad copy by design, and editing it requires a proprietary interface pen and software attached to a different computer altogether - but it's just so goddamn cheap it's impossible to get rid of.   Naturally, spacers hate it. Screenwrap collects in intakes, is just a little too hard to recycle through the waste processor, and if there's a sheet shorting out somewhere in your field of view you're going to want to strangle whoever brought it aboard.

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