Of course the real-world reason is that it’s cheaper to shake the camera and set off a firecracker than to build a scale model just to paint a burn scar on the side.
But my thoughts were always that the in-universe reason had to do with the modular nature of federation starships.
In almost every episode, someone on a starship either suggests rerouting something, shunting power from one thing through another, bypassing something, compensating for one power source with another etc.
It seems that in space, being able to re-configure everything at a moment’s notice is important, and to be able to do that, you need easy, fast and direct, access to everything, therefore it needs to be immediately accessible, ergo high voltage power directly behind the controls.
The lack of seatbelts goes right along with it. If a console blows up in someone’s face, the next guy over needs to be able to quickly move down and take over. Don’t need to have to be fighting with seatbelts when nobody is steering the ship.
I don’t know why they don’t have safety glasses however…
Now explain the rocks
safety foam that absorbs the energy of the plasma, turning the super heated plasma into more harmless solid matter
In the 32nd century, ‘rocks’ would just be the result of programmable matter ‘bricking’.
Earlier though…
Easy. Electroplasma is very hot and very energetic. When it ruptures out of the conduit, The hot energetic plasma not only mechanically fractures the materials around it, but the plasma itself is a form of matter that will, when it’s energy is released and it cools, return to whatever state it would normally be at room temperature.
Surface ships use deuterium and anti-deuterium as fuel, deuterium is liquid at room temperature. Assuming the combined plasma is also deuterium, that would mean it is eventually condensing to liquid. So I imagine the interaction between the plasma and some other material would turn the other material into a sort of spongy texture, which is probably dark due to being scorched. Thus, I don’t think that’s rock at all. It is scorched material from around the plasma conduit, that has been melted and integrated with the plasma which then returned to a lower energy state, namely deuterium steam or liquid.
I think you are confusing Deuterium with heavy-water. Deuterium is a heavy isotope of Hydrogen, and so is gas at room temperature. Heavy water is water where the Hydrogen atoms of the water molecule are of the Deuterium isotope, and is liquid at room temperature.
You’re absolutely right. But that actually makes even more sense. Squirt superheated plasma into a solid mass, it basically all melts together into a slurry, then the deuterium cools into gas and is released, the resulting material which is solid at room temperature ends up looking like scorched foam