Mdthbs

The licenses are too expensive

If there's mining on Ceres, it's probably run by big corporations. In an effort to control the colony and all activities in the belt, the corporations have introduced/lobbied for laws that strictly control space ships and all electronics with everlasting patents and costly licenses to allow use. These are ruthlessly enforced with EM-scanner equipped patrol ships.

After a number of ships were abandoned on Ceres with the owners jailed or executed for falling behind on payments, some enterprising colonists stripped out all patented electronics and replaced them with pre-patent tech. The corporations tried to outlaw that as well, but suffered a narrow defeat against the "right to fly" movement. That made the basic propulsion tech free to use for all.

Some years later, these free flyers have found a niche running odd jobs for corporations and private people unable to afford proper transport. Of course, they also provide a good deniable method of transporting things the corporations really don't want to be associated with...

The scenario can be modified to suit your taste:

• The protagonist might be the first or only one to have exploited the loophole.


• There could be tiers of technology licenses available, resulting in ships with varying levels of tech on board, from levers and vacuum tubes to screens to AI piloted ships.


• The use of EM-emissions scanners might be the primary means of detecting ships in the asteroid belt, since it's fairly easy to pretend you're an iron-rich rock when radar is looking at you. This gives smugglers and the protagonist a very good reason to go low-tech.

Maximum security (or paranoia, if you prefer). Rightly or wrongly, your protagonist believes that someone might use more advanced technology as an avenue to take over the ship or otherwise do him harm. All the controls are manual so that no one can take command away from him. All of the data displays are analog so that no one can use them to figure out where he's going or where he's been. If he has a computer, it's just for crunching numbers and charting the odd orbital path (and doing his taxes) - when he arrives at a course, he makes sure to double-check it before entering it by hand.

Since you specify that you don't want this to be a personal eccentricity on the part of your pilot, you should figure out why he and/or his employer would be so worried. Maybe the government has a habit of spying on ships and seizing those involved in shady business. Or maybe they have some cutthroat competitors who wouldn't be above staging an "accident" if they had the means to do so.

A computer screen takes power. A physical switch, on the other hand:

A) Can display its state with no power needed

B) Provides physical feedback when used, or can be checked by touch when looking at something else

C) Can't suffer from a glitched display showing the wrong information

That physical "clunk" of disabling exterior vents before exiting atmosphere is reassuring. A weedy "beep" doesn't have quite the same tactile response.

Also - have you ever tried looking out of a window at night, from a brightly lit room? When trying to avoid crashing into another spacecraft, you don't want the viewport to be covered in a bright reflection of your monitor.

As for GPS? Well, GPS can be spoofed, and some of the cargo he delivers is valuable to other parties. This lack of reliance on GPS is one of the reasons that your character is seen as a safe and secure transportation method

Love the answers so far! One option I haven't seen yet, though, relates to the nature of Ceres as an environment, both physically and economically.

Because of Ceres' low gravity, you don't need to make a ton of complex calculations: you can escape the gravity well pretty easily with a minimum amount of fuel. On our world, we think of getting to orbit as more complicated than flying a plane, but that's because Earth's escape velocity is so large that it takes a lot of work to get there. On Ceres, though, things aren't nearly so difficult.

Basically, to go from surface to orbit, all your protagonist needs is the spaceship version of a rowboat.

As such he doesn't need a lot of bells and whistles. He's basically in an airtight room with some thrusters attached. Everything can mostly be eye-balled, so just point your nose towards the blinking light and press the gas pedal. No need for computers, and in such a situation, you don't want a bunch of displays; something dead simple, easy to repair, and with hardwired redundant systems will win the day every time.

Around Ceres, all those electronics would merely be a distraction.

Now, why doesn't he have at least a smartphone? Why can't he use GPS? Simple: economics.

The OP says that computers and screens and such are cheap even for the humblest of craft in his universe, which I think may not be an accurate assumption (remote areas have to import everything, which makes everything expensive – all the more so fancy electronics), but for the sake of argument, let's just concede the point.

Even if he has a smartphone, it may not be terribly useful. From a smartphone maker's perspective, Ceres is not what you'd call a 'large market.' Why, then, should you mass produce devices that work in the Ceres environs? Rich people will pay you to make custom versions with high precision scans of Ceres and all the other inhabited asteroids, custom features, and AI flight controls; they can probably make a ton of money outfitting space yachts. But to do that for some asteroid dweller who can barely afford food? Why even bother.

Maybe, even, he has a smartphone, and it can pick up GPS signals. Unfortunately for him, though, Google Maps is made for earth, not Ceres, because, again, not enough of a market for that. As such, it doesn't even have a map of the surface, let alone being able to locate you on or around it.

So, to sum up:

1. He's driving a space rowboat.


2. Most of the spaceflight he's doing can be eyeballed


3. Electronics in his price range aren't helpful, and are probably just distracting.

Retro fitting a space ship with more modern systems is a nightmare.

This holds true already on existing systems. Look at the Space Shuttle or at some airplane or car designed in the late 70es: you will hardly find modern stuffs, even though the whole assembly is still used today (or until few moments ago for the Space Shuttle).

If the thing works fine and there are no major issues, it is simply convenient to let it run as long as it can and not spend money in upgrading it. This would especially fit your character:

He's poor, with little opportunities, stuck in a dead-end job, working long hours for crappy pay, and he's doing it in a leaky, worn-out ship held together with duct tape. I am really trying for a realistic feel to everything, with one concession for style: I love retro tech! I want the spaceship cockpits to be filled with switches and levers, analog dials, and gauges, and I want to avoid computers, holograms, and anything high tech as much as possible. The ship is cobbled together from spare parts and ingenuity.

Fashion. The driving force behind this in real life.

The retro movement over the past decade or so has produced many modern cars that have been specifically designed to look old. While they've stopped short of actually using outdated technology (I've yet to see a new MINI with a choke cable), I wouldn't underestimate the power of fashion.

That's just mainstream releases from large manufacturers. There's also a growing industry producing essentially brand new examples of classic cars (with only select upgrades).

• If you have oodles of money, Eagle will produce for you an updated (but still thoroughly antiquated) E-Type, as will Jaguar themselves (using unregistered chassis numbers from their low-drag project in the 60s).


• 
  Singer will similarly liberate you of a small fortune and produce what amounts to a brand new and thoroughly modified classic Porsche 911.


• 
  Pur Sang in Argentina will even manufacture for you a completely ground-up Bugatti Type 9 or Alfa Romeo 8C to entirely original interwar specifications.


• If you're not an oil baron (but still not wanting for cash), Frontline Developments will manufacture for you a brand new MGB (again, with suitable upgrades).

A similar, or even more exaggerated retro movement at some point in the future could well lead to spaceships being designed using retro technology. 'Evoke the feeling of the first spaceborne pioneers', or some other marketing line ;)

Of course, yours being a rickety bucket I expect it isn't one of the megabucks retromods. Perhaps your protagonist owns the spaceship equivalent to a PT Cruiser (shudder)...

The ship was originally built for an eccentric bajillionaire who wanted it steampunk classy theme. With everything custom made over the years all repairs have been jury rigged temporaryish solutions that just never got fixed properly if they even could since the bajillionaire is long dead and gone.

(Really) bad spaceships can only carry robust devices

The ship is cobbled together from spare parts and ingenuity.

Imagine the engine is good enough to allow surface to orbit flight, but the hull is at the "handwork" level. As a consequence, all devices on board undergo sever shocks and vibrations. Modern electronic components would be able to endure it for a while, but would suffer frequent breakdowns on the long term. Your character is poor, and can't afford to replace his devices on a regular basis.

Then, he has to go for technologies less subject to vibrations. He can't afford pieces of electronics dedicated to these special conditions. The only (cheap) possibility for him is to use old-fashioned wires and switches.

Realistically, he would have a GPS receiver though. But for the same reason, he cannot entirely rely on it. So, in case of breakdown, he gets in the habit of computing his position and trajectory himself using basic technology. He just uses the GPS to check his results.

........................................................................................................................................................

You can say that he used to employ modern and convenient technology, but had to change his mind over time for these reasons. You can also imagine that one day he almost died because of a GPS failure, which would explain why he only trust "sextant, stopwatch, observations" and his own calculations.

There has been a serious problem with rogue AIs and a human-machine war that humans barely won (possibly leaving Earth a blasted wasteland). As a result all advanced computation devices (basically anything programmable) have been banned.

Maintainability
You can replace a lot of switches with a touchscreen and it will save you cost but if your touchpad fails you basically have to buy a new one. If you have switches you can possibly rewire them so that the dysfunctional ones are on non-vital systems. You can also replace them individually which might not makes sense in a proper cost-benefit analysis but might be the only option for people with money problems.

User experience
You can replace a keyboard with a touchpad but touch typing is almost impossible. I don't know what kind of user interfaces people could eventually get used to but there is definitely a benefit to having simple, tactile things.

Cost
At least this holds for holograms. Since we don't know how to make them yet, it might still be difficult and therefore costly in your future.

Admittedly, none of those will justify the absence of even a basic computer.

Radiation
Or a similar phenomenon. It doesn't actually prevent electrons from going to and fro but it induces sufficient fluctuations that complicated electronic components get fried.
Of course the rich people have 5 levels of fall-back systems to check each others results and enough shielding to not even need it.
There might be an issue with this being a problem for humans, too. I have no clue bodies work. :p

Sextant
Just to point this out, I don't think a Sextant would be a good device for your runner in any case. If you want a mechanical navigation device you can and probably have to devise something better with modern techniques. Even if it's purely mechanical.

If your protagonist is only making trips from Ceres to surrounding stations he might also be able to fly by sight and not need a sextant in the first place. After all, a sextant tells you where you are. Given a fast enough ship you don't have to verify your position between leaving from a point which you already know and having sight of your destination.

The "Corps" workers get the Tesla version of spacecraft, while the rest of the contractors and low level employees are stuck with the equivalent of a 1960's Volkswagen Beetle, if you assume that it is entirely assembled from spare parts... And not just Volkswagen parts, but bicycles, a couple tractors, and even a couple washing machines and refrigerators. Plus your average Joe can learn the mechanics a lot quicker the more simple the craft is constructed. The construct won't last long, but it is easy to repair if you have the spare parts laying around (or you can find an unattended washing machine or broken repairbot).
Just substitute some of the aforementioned parts for futuristic similies.

Short answer:

You can't.

Long answer:

You can't, because seat-of-the-pants flying doesn't happen for orbital mechanics.

You're misunderstanding just how sophisticated the 1960s tech was.

There's a reason that after NASA had selected America's best pilots and put them in spaceships, they ran those spaceships on precalculated trajectories with no manual intervention. The reason is that the maths behind orbital mechanics is hard, and trajectories over distances where you can't see the other side are not something which can be done by intuition. The astronauts' skill was only required for the final touchdown of the lander on the surface of the Moon and for connecting the lunar module back up to the command module - everything else was calculated for them by a team of some of the country's best engineers and mathematicians. That's how the 1960s technology worked.

Even with sailing ships, the maths to follow the shortest distance between two points on a sphere is notoriously tricky; and similarly the maths to work out your location from a sextant sighting. It's the reason navigation was a skilled job for officers, because it needed a serious level of maths skill. It's easier these days when we have electronic calculators, but you still need to know what you're doing. And that's just for going round a sphere.

For sure, if you've got a computer then it can work out the trajectory for you. In which case you can program the 1960s tech with the trajectories which your computer comes up with - and then set it going and sit tight until you arrive at the other end. If you haven't got a computer, you can spend a week doing the calculations for your trajectory - then program it, set it going, etc..

As with the Apollo landings, the only seat-of-the-pants element is with the final approach and landing. The rest of it is all maths, and very hard maths at that.

Trying to go in a different direction here, I would suspect the reason to use analogue equipment and jury rigging is that the space environment is seriously hard on digital equipment.

There are no fabs or chip factories on Ceres or anywhere else outside of Earth because the vibrations from launching manufacturing equipment into orbit seriously degrades the equipment. Optical masks no longer are in alignment, which makes building chips to micron level precision impossible, for example. Similar effects happen to high end 3D printers and other advanced forms of manufacturing. Once you are on the Moon and beyond, the only way to make "new build" equipment is to use industrial techniques from the mid 20th century-lathes, milling machines, welding, riveting...locally sourced electronics are vacuum tube for many of the same reasons.

Because the size and weight of industrial equipment, very few machines are actually being shipped to orbit, so you have the bottleneck of either buying bespoke items built and tested on Earth, then launched into space for you, or hard pressed machine shops with limited amounts of equipment needed to actually build or repair your stuff on Ceres. This would also explain why you actually need humans doing things, buying bespoke robots from Mitsubishi and boosting them into orbit and then to Ceres would be extremely costly, while humans are still far better at general purpose work and can switch jobs in a heartbeat or train to do now jobs long before a new robot can be delivered.

So there would be a huge dichotomy between the very wealthiest of people and companies, which can afford to have everything build on Earth and delivered to them, and everyone else who is essentially using the town blacksmith to build things.

This state of affairs isn't going to last forever. The tools are being used to build new tools in a geometric progression, and eventually it will be possible to make chip fabs or 3D printers on the spot, but this might take decades due to the small base they are starting with (a few machinists and a handfull of tools), and the fact the industrial base is fully engaged already with keeping the existing infrastructure going. At a meta level, you could ask yourself if factions on Earth are deliberately exacerbating the situation to wring the most profit from the space colonies.

The current GPS system has two levels of precision - military (10m I think) and civilian (100 meters). The GPS system on Ceres might be similar - or even pay-only, and the license to use it (or the monthly payments) much too expensive for some company or another.

Or maybe the space-GPS is expensive (similar in a way to how the car-specific GPS units won't run on the 24V electric system of trucks, and if you solve the voltage problem they will recommend you to take your 18-wheeler into historic villages with narrow streets, building overhangs, impossible grades and tight corners.

Tl: DR: Electronics can be hacked, humans can't. Humans are greedy, a series of incidents forces governments and corporations alike to start using more and more human-piloted craft to prevent theft and terrorist attacks. A single drone that is hijacked (during it's mining operation for example) will be catastrophic if it rams an orbital station or a colony. The cost/effectiveness of using pilot instead of drones rises and might be made mandatory.

Long version:

"Today Mining corporation X reported the disappearance of 2 of it's supply ships. This is a disturbing continuation of the trend with the 4 disappearances that happened earlier this month. Mining corporation X has accused Mining corporation Y of theft, although if these allegations will ever reach court is doubtful..."

"Mining corporation Z suffered a malfunction in one of it's mining ships, causing it to ram their orbital station with great loss of life and materiel. Shortly before the incident a strong external signal was detected that is suspected to have hijacked the ship, causing it to lose contact with it's controllers. Spokesmen of Corporation Z have issued their condolences along with open threats to the other corporations..."

"To safeguard the international community and trade in space the UN has voted with a large majority that all spaceships should be manned during their flight, so that further drone incidents can be averted. Too little too late according to many of the families who have lost loved one's in the brutal competition gain a mining monopoly. Most of the corporations had already started employing manned ships. The cold statement issued by some of these corporations was simply that the costs of life support and fuel outweighed the potential for theft and destruction a single ship represented..."

"The United armed forces are to patrol space and seek out any drone vessle they can find. After two incidents where an unknown mining corporation used unmarked drone ships to destroy large portions of a surface colony and an orbital station. Any ship that looks like it is controlled automatically will be investigated and if need be destroyed. Protesters fear for the quality of life of the pilots that are often stuck for months in a small space. Drones could easily try to emulate human pilots causing a high risk that piloted ships might show up as a false-positive due to it's many electronics. This has prompted the mining corporations to reduce the amount of electronics pre-emptively, severely reducing the quality of life of it's occupants..."

Extrapolating from current-day technology, I'd suggest that in your future scenario, hacking and spam may have escalated to nigh-unimaginable pains in the ass. Virtually every electronic system may be so infected with spyware, viruses, and advertisements that nobody dares rely on it. Some of the worst malware may be written by pranksters to activate at the worst possible moments, e.g. in the last half-second before landing rockets fire to make a safe landing. It wouldn't take too many incidents like that before people started to study how to make their own calculations and rely on the computers as little as possible.

For realism, I would avoid the (2nd) Battlestar Galactica scenario where evil robots hack our computer systems to disable and destroy our ships; it's much more depressingly realistic to imagine a self-induced apocalypse of advertisements, malware, porn, and spam consuming the Internet from within.

Robustness, redundancy, parts flexibility, system visibility, and human control:

You're in space, you have limited resources, and small mistakes mean you die. - Are You going to trust that a programmer sitting in a cubical back in earth actually double checked his math before punching out on his last day at the company?

Build the controls out of small and highly task specific modules with limited functionality coverage - These have been tested for decades, and we know what they do. [This is part of why we're still sending 486 era, and even older, hardware designs to space.]

Things like touch screens and complex computer systems are delicate, and not flexible in how they're fit together - while you could cram all the controls into something the size and weight of a small smart phone, fixing it [or spotting faults] in something like that would be difficult. And faults are deadly.
- Much like we can build "All glass" cockpits in aircraft today that controls all functionality from a single screen, we still typically fill a cockpit with an array of dials and switches - Because dials and switches don't disappear if a single power cable to the one screen has a fault.

And why take manual navigation measurements in place of trusting the 'GPS' [or space positioning system? Orbit positioning system?] - Treat it like some seasoned sailors still do: A handy tool that aids the manual measurements rather than replaces it.

Make it a cultural norm to simply not place blind faith in such a system, possibly to the point that pilots even just leave them behind to save on mass and energy usage.

Your protagonist is still driving around in a "first gen" spaceship.

This would be roughly equivalent of taking really good care of your car built in 1976 and still being able to drive it today even after 500,000+ miles.

• New spaceship models come out every year, but your protagonist still prefers using what he already has.


• He doesn't need any fancy tech to travel in space, because that fancy tech didn't exist when humans explored space (in this story's universe). He prefers the 'manual transmission' of spaceships.


• Most parts on his ship have been replaced at one point or another, making many trips to the space junkyard to keep his ship in working condition.


• Your protagonist has extensive knowledge on the mechanics of his spaceship, since he's spent significant amounts of time replacing parts (and using duct tape).

It’s an Accessability Option

The aliens of robots or whoever this ship was really designed for have a fancier way of piloting it, but humans don’t have built in wi-fi or telepathy or the ability to see ultraviolet. Fortunately, there’s a backup system of switches and gauges. It was thrown in only because it had to be, but it’s the lowest-common-denominator every species can use. Not everyone can see the same colors, but everyone can tell that a button is lit or unlit.

It’s the Emergency Backup

The ship came with “manual” overrides, but was never intended to be flown that way on purpose. In fact, a ship with no working computer would be sold for scrap.

iT Only Looks Primitive

There’s a computer in the spaceship; it’s just accessed through an analog interface because that’s how people like it.

It’s Simple and Reliable

Mechanical fire-control problems were a solved problem decades before space flight.

If You Made It too Easy, Any Idiot Would Do It

The real danger isn’t human reaction time, or that somebody will fail to enter the right coordinates with his life on the line. Space flights are long and boring, and mostly an exercise in Newtonian mechanics.

It’s letting anybody get into a spaceship and say, “Plot a Course for Mars.” Making people perform the basic steps manually guarantees that they understand the principles of space flight in order to get anywhere.

He doesn't need it

Ceres has a diameter of less than 1000km. Even at plane speeds, you can orbit it in a few hours. If he has been flying long enough, he knows the landmarks. If the settlers installed an artificial magnetosphere to protect against solar storms, he could use a completely non computerised compass to navigate.

Whilst you might call it a "spaceship" it's not going interplanetary so it really doesn't need computers, navigation, life support (beyond basic heating) or any electronics. It's little more than a glorified space bus. It will only be out of port a few hours so already contains enough air. Portable scrubbers and spare O2 tanks can be added for longer trips if needed or an emergency one in case of a break down.

Any further navigation needed can be done via a directional antenna. He sets the radio to the control tower of the destination and rotates the antenna for the best signal and then heads in the direction of the antenna. One dial to set the station and a crank to turn the antenna and you have your direction.