Star Trek: Starfleet Academy's key command system was a bit clunky. The designers helped that particular situation in Klingon Academy with this feature called the "Verbal Orders System" (VoS). The basic movement, weapons, and targeting commands (direction, throttle, fire) were really quick and easy to memorize, and a lot of other stuff could be done with the VoS.
Here is the basic concept:
One option was to use the primitive speech recognition of the day: you would say "Emergency Turn" and it happened. Maybe. Now it's a little more likely to happen.
The other was to assign all the stations a number, like this (at the bottom of the screen):
... and flesh out the categories of commands. and the commands themselves. Press a number, and you get a new list of numbers for commands and categories. Press one from this list, and you either gave an order, or got another list.
Here's the list for the engineer (officer #1):
Press 1-1 (no dash), and you toggle power to damage control.
Press 1-2, and you get a list of numbers corresponding to power levels for damage control. They go from 1 (off) to 2 (minimum) to 8 (50% of ship's power). Press another number, and the power is actually allocated.
Press 1-3-, and you get a list of power macros. The default list:
1: Standard combat stance: full impulse, weapons and shields to minimum power
2: Offensive combat stance: half impulse, overloaded weapons, ready tractors and transporters
3: Defensive combat stance: half impulse, basic weapons, extra power to shields
4: Stealth: Cloak if possible, ECM if not. Keep weapons ready.
5: Hunt for cloaked ships: Half impulse, shields and weapons at standard settings, extra power to sensors.
6: Withdraw and repair: Cloak, full impulse, and all extra power is given to repairs.
7: Repel boarders: Cloak, full impulse, and divert all available power to security system.
8: Warp out: Cloak, all available power to warp drives, divert all the rest of the ship's power to damage control
9: Custom power macro
(Press the number next to the macro to engage it)
Press 1-4, and you get a list of ship's systems to repair:
1: Combat systems
2: Hull and power systems
3: Internal systems (security, sensors, sickbay, and the like)
4: Equalize everything.
Press 1-5, and you get a damage report.
Press 1-6, and you get a power report.
Weapons stations included:
Weapons officer [7] - Shield control [2] - Shield Facing [1 (all shields) to 7 (the rest are individual shield facings)] - Power setting [1 (off) to 7 (maximum overload)]
And, if you press 9, you go to the bridge station for more careful fine-tuning of the settings on your simulated ship.
The result was a much nicer learning curve than the huge wall of key commands in most of the other space combat games of the day. Wiki says not everyone found it intuitive, but I liked it a lot better than "just memorize the key command list" of, say, Freespace 2.
Vegastrike's ships and controls are complex enough for a VoS-like control system to be very useful.
