Starship bridges

[Starglider]

Especially since, for ships as absurdly advanced as Star Wars ships, the mass penalty of a telescope, sextant, some star charts, and a small pressurized superstructure outside the armor belt is negligible.

For big ships, as an emergency backup, that does seem reasonable. Note though that the weight may not be 'negligable' for medium-sized ships unless you have amazing materials tech - the ISS cupola manages to weigh almost two metric tonnes despite being essentially a bay window that clips onto an existing module - and that's just to cope with micrometeorites and radiation in low orbit, not the rigours of interstellar travel or resisting any sort of weapons fire. Even if you had one, you wouldn't use it for routine docking operations (incidentally the original Galactica featured exactly this kind of bubble for making nav sightings, but it was disused and treated as a curiosity by the main characters).

Oh that's right, advanced technology never breaks. That's why my cell phone is rock-steady reliable, while my 50s vintage Western Electric rotary phone drops calls and sometimes just mysteriously refuses to work...oh wait.

Not necessarily a valid analogy. That's consumer grade tech that was relatively new at the time. Not milspec and certainly not space qualified. I think a more valid comparison would be fly-by-wire systems in aircraft: it's tech that potentially could fail, and certainly when it was first introduced people questioned the safety and insisted on redundant mechanical backups. But the reliability eventually got so good that the mechanical backups were dropped on high-performance aircraft to save weight, cost and maintenance complexity. Actually the Ace Combat series has a nice fictional treatment of this exact issue; the more futuristic and advanced fighter designs abandon canopies and have a redundant camera/3D display system, then eventually direct neural interfaces. The backstory details similar concerns about reliability (a lot of pilots don't trust it) that delays deployment, but eventually it just works so well that no-one bothers with canopies any more.

[Jade Falcon]

I liked the bridge design of the Omega class destroyer in B5.

[Starglider]

Would a 3d display even be that useful? Space combat and maneuvering is probably going to be a very abstract thing to the captain and crew, and I'm not so sure it would really map that well to a 'regular' display

In most hard sci-fi, visualising the relative positions, current velocity vectors and future position+trajectory probability volumes (i.e. where the target might be in the future, given their assumed thrust and delta V) of the ships and any in-play missiles/KEWs would be vital to commanding space combat. The only way to avoid this is to turn the entire thing over to computers and limit the human input to answering 'we have an 82% chance of destroying the enemy and a 47% chance of being destroyed if we engage now. commit [yes/no] ?'. Some kinds of soft sci-fi might avoid this requirement, but not many. Though it's certainly true that packing all the additional information into a 3D display without making it too hard to read would be a tough HCI challenge (this is already true for current battlespace visualisation systems, in applications such as AWACS operator stations).

[Big Orange]

In Iain Banks' The Algebraist, Mercatoria warships and gascraft are piloted by a direct neural interface with the crew themselves fully encased within gel filled neural pods. But that's pretty soft sci-fi...

[Shinova]

I imagine a tactical display, preferably holographic, table or pit in the center of the room, which the captain and his second-in-commands hang around, with the bridge stations arranged in a circle around that table/pit, all facing the center, with stations farther back situated higher above the table, sort of like a Greek ampitheater would be an ideal arrangement.

[Luzifer's right hand]

Spherical holograms are used to visualize space battles in modern Perry Rhodan issues(not in the old issues from the sixties). However the series is as soft as it gets. Two command centers of terran ships, they are always more or less in the center of the spherical ships a hangover from the days before "shields down>instant-gib" weapons.
Note: Don't inline huge pictures

[Major Maxillary]

in my stories involving the Confederate Aerospace Infantry, the AI troopers' suits in a squad are all linked into a network where they share all data and information regarding the fight; I.e. if one threat is spotted by one of the troopers, all the squad will see it as well.

since the troopers are practically hardwired into their suits, and due to the extremely chaotic pace they go at in a battle, they don't have time or mental facilities to waste on reading a computer screen, so the onboard computer in their armor processes all the data and broadcasts it right to their brain, cutting out the middle man. they don't have to look at their hud to know that there's a target 20 meters away between 4 and 5 o'clock high; they just know. also, they don't have to check an ammo counter to know their low on ammo, they just know.

what does this have to do with space ship command and control?

spaceships have bigger computers. food for thought.

DON'T INLINE HUGE PICTURES MORON

[Knife]

If you're going to have large amounts of automation, there is no need for a huge 3d display. Rather a simple 2d display screen is easy enough, hell modern fightercraft and naval ships use them.

Range, bearing/heading and altitude realitive to you is enough. Why a weapons officer would need to actually see a symbol hovering at an odd angle to your ship is silly. He needs the numbers, if that, so the targeting computer can create a firing solution.

Indeed, a strong comparison to submarines is due. Same with Navigation, elaborate visual effects wouldn't be needed.