“If you would like to meet on one of your space craft please let us know.

“Um we used to have ‘em but they are all in Museums not.”

“I see, because you developed better space craft?”‘

“Um no, we just  went back to our old 3 men in a box on top of a chemical cocktail of explosive force to get out of the gravity well.”

“It seems odd that you would return to a more primitive method of space travel. ”

“Yeah, but it’s okay because instead of spending money on exploring space we were able to channel it to killing other humans, so don’t try and mess with us. ”

“So you have a planetary defense grid that can stop kinetic weapons from space ? ”

“Oh yeah, we totally have that. We even made a video game about it. 

Here’s why: The code running the OV flight control system is not only complicated, it’s also very well tested.  Software Quality Assurance was performed to an almost unprecedented degree on these programs and the people who had written and tested them were largely retired or otherwise unavailable at that point.  To reduce risk while still gaining real advantages in equipment reliability without incurring prohibitive costs, they focused their efforts on emulating the old displays. 

The glass panel units (which weighed much less, consumed less power, etc etc etc) accept the signals that the old monitors did and show them as they did, but they additionally can be switched back and forth like a flying KVM.  They actually added safety capability by making it so the various PFDs could be interchanged as needed at the click of a button. 

End result: the operation costs of the displays was lower, the view was clearer, the reliability was higher, and the cost was a fraction of what it would have been to re-write the whole system from the ground up. 

Just something I thought would be worth sharing, hope someone else finds this as interesting as I do.

Wow did they make some major mods.