Why don't corridors have any safety features in Star Trek?

Question

In Star Trek, whenever a ship is hit with something — whether it be weapons, an energy wave, or some large and massive object — it shakes. Sometimes, the crew is just rocked back and forth on their feet (or in their seats if they're on the bridge — the stabilized GIFs look hilarious!). However, the motion is sometimes powerful enough to throw the crew off their feet and out of their seats in a dramatic and unnatural fashion (at least Discovery makes it look believable and painful).

We know from earthquakes that horizontal motion in the ground makes it really hard to stand up straight, let alone walk or run properly. It could be easy to lose your balance on a starship when it is hit by something.

But when a ship is under attack, and dozens of people are sprinting through any given corridor segment under low-light red-alert conditions, someone is bound to lose their balance and slam sideways or even face-first into a wall or the floor. Anyone could be seriously injured.

And yet, I've never seen any safety features in the corridors. No handles, no soft and shock-absorbing padding of any kind, no fold-down seats with seatbelts, no straps to hold on to. When something big is coming and a massive impact is imminent, someone on the bridge often declares to the crew, "Brace for impact!" What will everybody on the lower decks (wink wink) do?

Am I missing something? Have I just not seen some hidden safety features? Or are they truly missing from ships? Why haven't I seen them before?

Answer 1

Although Gene Roddenberry served in the Air Force during WWII and not the Navy, he (and/or the show production designers) nevertheless drew inspiration for The Enterprise from naval architecture, specifically battleships and aircraft carriers. These vessels don't have seat belts and it would seem, they also don't have handrails in the corridors. Presumably, when a starship captain alerts the crew to "brace for impact", the crew is already at some form of action stations so ought to be near some sort of fixture they can grab on to.

In-universe, we might assume that the ship is equipped with features (e.g. inertial dampers) that eliminate the need for crew to either "buckle up" or "hang on" under most circumstances, so when they do get tossed around, the situation is rather exceptional (which seems to happen in most episodes). Consider that impulse drive (which does not warp space) can fairly rapidly accelerate a vessel to a substantial fraction of the speed of light in a very short time. If we make a few assumptions and do some "back-of-the-envelope" math, let's say 0 to 0.5c in one hour... that's 1.5x10⁸ m/s in 3,600 sec which is about 42,000 m/s² or about 4,200g of acceleration. Without something like inertial dampers, everything in the ship would become a puddle on the back wall, assuming the structure of the ship could even take that stress. If such inertial dampers can be so finely tuned that maneuvers in normal operation would be essentially imperceptible, there ought to be no need for any sort of restraint system.

Out-of-universe, tossing the crew around (and exploding consoles, for that matter) is an effective way to ratchet up the drama and inject action into a scene that would otherwise lack it as crewmembers stand/sit at their stations giving orders and/or operating controls.

Answer 2

Starfleets primary mission is deep space exploration, science and the general advancement of knowledge. The federation is largly at peace and missions consist of looking at boring stars and negotiate with boring diplomats about boring topics such as the supply of boring unobtainum in exchange for even more boring doobtanium.

But once in a while one out of the 10.000 starships gets in real trouble - for some reason it's always the Enterprise, the captain should be fired - and than we get a TV show about it.

After the Borg attacked, starfleet actually build some warships. And if you look at the Defiant, it's much more fit for taking hits. The tactial officer even got a seat to sit in!