1: earlier cars were probably safer due to the lower speeds. Over time we increased the speeds but with speed came an increasing lack of safety as its not the tech thats the problem. Its the driver. Ive been in two auto accidents, one I was too young to remember. In both cases it was some maniac running a red light. A costuming friend of mines fiance was for all intents and purposes murdered by a repeat drunk driver who ran them over as they were crossing the street. Sure, the tech can fail and fail spectacularly. But far more prevalent its the driver.
I guess my points weren't clear.
Point #1 is that an enormous amount of modern automotive safety mechanisms were introduced well after the car was commonplace: the seatbelt, head/neck support, air bags, side curtain air bags, crumple zones, energy dissipation and crash management, alternating windshield wipers, tire blowout detection, crash tests, automatic collision detection, firewalls/fire mitigation, how to protect the fuel tank, backup cameras, puncture resistant tires, traction control, etc. Only some of these are onboard computer related (e.g. collision detection), many of them are better modeling and better understanding of failure modes. This is with respect to Reckall's point that cultures with hyperspace tech would not let said tech be used until the safety corners were filed off.
Point #2 is exactly your point: the ability of people to fuck things up continues in spite of these safety developments. This was meant to support the idea that there's interesting risk space even with some amount of safety mechanisms in place, potentially even large ones. Or not. You know, do the right thing for the party/campaign/etc. But it could be interesting to toy around with.
2: Theres a rather interesting youtube channel that documents air disasters and in a majority the problem was faulty maintenance. Not the actual tech itself. In one case this lead to a literal ghost plane flying along with everyone on board dead due to a poorly installed altimeter I believe that caused a cascade of disasters.
This is something you learn early on. Your equipment is only as good as the maintenance crew and one slip up can cause disaster. And due to the complexity of some tech now it can be thrown out of wack, sometimes disasterously by just one damn screw.
Yes, totally agreed. The majority of them are due to tragically simple mistakes or hubris, rather than unique and interesting failures of high tech systems. (The Concorde crash being caused by a part falling off of a Continental MD-80 comes to mind.) Still, there is also the potential of the fancy system going haywire, and what happens then: the AF 447 crash is one such example.
Killing the whole party every d100th time they get in a train, car, or space ship, or just try to cross the street, might be "realistic" but its sure as heck not very fun in a game. Unless its the Wandering Damage Table...
Yeah, by no means do I intend to dictate to a GM that hyperspace travel needs the foibles of historical tech development projected onto it. But depending on the circumstances of the tech and campaign, it might be an interesting space to play with and take inspiration from real human history and mistakes. Or not! That was my intended suggestion.