* Props inside the cockpits are wildly out of scale with what we'd expect. Those handholds you see? Take a closer look with the ctrl-alt-space camera. They're about two feet long. The fire extinguisher? For use in low-G only, unless you spend a few hours in the gym each day. The spyglass-looking thing in the DBS? Not for human-sized eyeballs
I went one step further and walked around a few of the cockpits in roomscale. I've done this before, of course, but had to refresh my memory - I don't recall things having looked "wildly out of scale" in any of the cockpits I've visited.
None of the ships in the station I'm docked in had fire extinguishers or spyglasses so I can't comment on them but I'll have to call donkey doo doo on the handholds. They're all exactly the right size to be grabbed by a human hand. If anything, the space between the handle and the wall looked a bit narrow on some of them, at least if you imagine someone with big hands wearing thick gloves trying to use them. On a NASA spacecraft the handles would probably be larger and farther away from the surface. The handles on the Clipper cockpit are an exception, at least there's ample extra space from the depression under the handle.
The keyboards in SW and Cobra mk3 are the right size for a usable keyboard - maybe slightly on the smaller side but not to an extent where it would look strange. I have never used a BBC micro but it looked consistent with other microcomputers from the era that I have seen. The original rubber speccy was even smaller if my memory serves.
The only things that looked too large to me were both found on the Type 6 - the huge volume of empty space above the pilot, which may look awkward in a picture looks even stranger when you're standing on the small floorspace below and looking up - there's no reason for that space to be there. Also the computer screens behind the pilot's seat (why are they behind him anyway? You can't see them there and I bet most non-VR players don't even know they're there), they look bulky, like something from the 70's, but I guess that's more of an art style thing than a "this thing was scaled wrong" thing. I could imagine them existing on the set for Alien. The number pad on the door on the other hand looks the right size and right height.
The cockpit / bridge on my Clipper is excessively spacious as ever but I guess that can be pinned on the Imperials wanting their interiors to feel as luxurious and extravagant as possible.
You may have a point about the canopies being larger than "what we'd expect" but then again none of us has seen a real starship and if we start nitpicking about realism there are dozens of things that are "wrong" about how the ships in Elite (and in majority of SF movies / games / TV) are designed; the first thing being that these ships would be very unlikely to have glass canopies in the first place. Just stick a bunch of telescopic cameras around the hull and have the pilot observe things through a VR headset or something like that bubble-like cockpit with projected 360° view in Rogue System. If anyone were manually piloting these ships at all that is, instead of letting a computer do it.
In VR most of the canopies don't actually feel wrong to me, some Lakon ships being an exception.
