Basic Trope: A location has lots and lots of buttons.
- Straight: The starship Alice's Comet has several thousand buttons for controlling various components. Her crew seems to press a small fraction of them.
- Exaggerated:
- All of the visible surface of Alice's Comet is covered in buttons, with literally billions of them in total.
- The buttons on Alice's Comet have buttons on them.
- Opening the consoles and various compartments reveals even more buttons.
- Downplayed: Alice's Comet's control panels are Glass Cockpit consoles, but there are still several thousand buttons in the odd location in cases of emergencies.
- Justified:
- Truth in Television: Real Life locations, especially ones which control multi-million-dollar hardware, often have hundreds of thousands of buttons. Many of them control a specific system which may not be used very often.
- Alice's Comet is overengineered with a dozen redundancies for vital and non-vital systems.
- Inverted: Alice's Comet is an Ascetic Aesthetic starship or White Void Room with no visible buttons whatsoever; all control is done via voice commands / telepathy.
- Subverted:
- Bob, the pilot of Alice's Comet hops into the control chair. Instead of performing a complicated series of maneuvers to activate the ship, he presses a big blue "Go" button and the ship magically launches into space.
- We see Bob peering over the cockpit at hundreds of buttons, dials, and switches. He finds the one switch he wants, flips it, and resumes piloting the ship. Then the wall of buttons fade away to reveal that it was merely an advanced Holographic Terminal.
- Double Subverted: ... and later on, we find out that the backup systems of Alice's Comet have dozens of buttons and manual controls that are almost impossible to navigate.
- Parodied: Bob picks up his coffee mug, which has dozens of buttons on it. After pressing a sequence of buttons to get the perfect blend of coffee, he holds the mug up to his lips and presses a button to dispense it.
- Zig Zagged: Alice's Comet seems to have been designed by several different people with varying viewpoints on how much manual control to offer the crew; we pass through some levels which lack any buttons at all and others with a countless array of buttons and switches.
- Averted: Rather than buttons, Alice's Comet has a wide variety of controls that have a form that fit their function.
- Enforced:
- "Everyone knows starships have lots of buttons! If we don't put lots of buttons in there, people will think that Alice's Comet is some kind of weird luxury cruiseliner! Oh, and make the characters press many of them even when they don't seem to be doing anything so they're not just sitting around; we don't want people to think they're lazy."
- "We don't have the budget to design an futuristic-looking control system. Let's just buy some old aircraft cockpit panels and put them together."
- Lampshaded: "Do half of these buttons even do anything?"
- Invoked: "Look, I want to be able to do anything on my ship with a press of a button, no matter how impractical it is. Just figure out how to let me do that."
- Exploited:
- A saboteur throws Alice's Comet into chaos by pressing every button he can get his hands on.
- An obscure error pops up on a screen that no one knows how to fix. Bob looks around until he finds a button designed to fix that exact problem and presses it.
- Defied: "This design is way too complicated; it's going to take months of training just to teach people how to open a door. Let's cut down the number of buttons in this ship just a little bit, shall we?"
- Discussed: "There's way too many buttons around here. The other day I found a button that simply said, "SNDFLDCMD". I'm not sure what it does, but I'll be damned lucky if I can find it again if I need it.
- Conversed: "If this is supposed to be the future, why does the ship look like the inside of an old submarine?"
Trying to find the link to take you back to Billions of Buttons? Good luck. I'm sure it's around here somewhere.
