Over at Daystrom, this comes up from time to time. I’ve formed a head-canon for it as well. To quote one of my comments on a thread there regarding the explosions (and the “rocks”):

My understanding is that the “rocks” are a product of the electroplasma system being exposed to air. Whether that is some sort of coolant that is meant to seal the EPS leak in that console or some sort of EPS byproduct reacting in air, I don’t remember or have a head-canon for it.

All of that said, if I form this reply into one worthy of Daystrom, then I say it is an intended safety mechanism to protect the crew against catastrophic failure of the EPS conduits.

So, the consoles are exploding from the failure of the EPS conduits and the expansion of the coolant.

Creator or Daystrom here: the conditions that created Daystrom eleven years ago don’t exist on Lemmy. More simply, Lemmy isn’t big enough to host a new Daystrom.

I made Daystrom because /r/startrek was so full of memes and jokes that it was increasingly difficult to have an actual discussion about Trek. Discussion posts were drowned out between low-effort posts like memes and jokes and even if you did get a discussion prompt to garner some votes, the thread itself would have a bunch of jokes at the top, because jokes are easy to upvote. If you wanted actual discussion, you had to go hunt for it.

On Lemmy, the meme subreddits have already taken off and so it’s unlikely that StarTrek@lemmy.world is going to be flooded with memes. StarTrek@lemmy.world is so small that if you posted a discussion prompt right now, it would very likely be the top post in the community for the next 24 hours.

Now of course, there’s no guarantee that if you posted a discussion prompt in StarTrek@lemmy.world, the answers won’t be jokes and dismissive replies. For whatever reason, Trekkies love to respond with comments like “the real answer is ‘don’t think about it!’” which is mildly rude, honestly: if someone makes a thread about it, obviously they would like to think about it. But, outside of the very largest communities on Lemmy, there is so little comment activity that it’s easy enough to sift through the replies and discuss with people who would like to discuss.

One could make a community that enforces Daystrom’s two key rules: only discussion prompts allowed, and no memes/jokes/dismissive comments. But daystrominstitute@startrek.website exists… and it’s pretty much dead. Enforcing these rules in a place as small as Lemmy comes across as heavy-handed.

So, tl;dr if you want “Daystrom on Lemmy,” I invite you to post discussion prompts to StarTrek@lemmy.world.

Yes, you could just go to https://startrek.website/communities for the list of communities on that particular instance.
However, subscribing to a community on an instance where you do not have an account takes a few extra steps.

When looking at the list of communities on another instance where you do not have an account, clicking the Subscribe link from the list will result in a popup stating that you’re not logged in and if you click on the community name, a Subscribe button will not be shown.
However, most, if not all, communities will have instructions in the sidebar for how to subscribe from your main instance without the need for creating an account on the instance where that community resides.

To do this using the example of the startrek.website instance, if you wish to subscribe to the daystrominstitute community, you would enter “!daystrominstitute@startrek.website” into the search field on your main Lemmy instance where you are logged in.
Generally the first item in the results will be a link back to that community, which will look like:
“Daystrom Institute@startrek.website - 448 subscribers”
Click that link and you will see the content of that community again, but now notice that a Subscribe button will be shown in the sidebar.
Clicking Subscribe may result in a note that says “Subscribe pending”, which I believe is due to some syncing that needs to occur between instances. Just give it a few minutes and then that community will appear in your list of subscribed communities.
You can now read, post and reply to that community just as if you had an account on that instance.

There’s also startrek.website, which has a significant user population already

https://lemmy.world/c/startrek@startrek.website

https://lemmy.world/c/risa@startrek.website

https://lemmy.world/c/daystrominstitute@startrek.website

Don’t forget !risa@startrek.website and !daystrominstitute@startrek.website too

Okay so, i’m viewing this from a kbin instance. I clicked through to the link, found a community i’d like to join, but can’t figure out how.

!daystrominstitute

It’s (i think) a Lemmy instance. I can’t figure out where to paste the above in order to follow it. I tried the search in my instance here and it came back “empty”, which I don’t know if that means that they’re not federated together, if this is a temporary “the servers are getting hammered” situation, or if i’m doing something wrong. Can anyone help?