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OK, so, we all know that the reason space opera shows and movies seldom depict weightlessness is because the suits are too dark cheap and won't let them film on location. So a few sci-fi works - 2001, Babylon Five, The Expanse - have made gravity part of the plot but most just hand wave it. Or don't even hand wave it.



Amongst the incest and cannibalism, Piers Anthony's Bio of Space Tyrant made gravity lenses a major plot point. But gravity lenses could focus, disperse and bend gravity, not create it.

While there've been plenty of explanations about how FTL works in various franchises, I can't think of any where artificial gravity even got a passing mention.



OK, Star Trek Enterprise, that's one.
One one episode of DS9.



But other Trek shows, Star Wars, Blake's 7, Battlestar Galactica, 40k whatever, not a word, even when it might be an issue.

So...

How might artificial gravity work?

Consider, artigrav (as the cool kids like to call it) always works, even when a ship is having trouble with life support, food and lights, the artigrav is always there working. So it must be:

Very reliable
Low power or independent power
Necessary

So I propose:

Artificial Gravity is an easy mature technology, just a matter of running a current through a specific material that generates a gravity field but without adding mass. If you have the right material - oh let's call it Gravity Fluid just to be lazy - it's no harder than an LED.

Requires very little power since we never see it fail. Artigrav has a short range, maybe ten feet or so, which is why there's no gravity when people step outside their ships. Most deck plates just have a battery in them because you don't want them to fail. Ever. Because...

Artigrav is what keeps crew members from being splattered against the rear bulkhead. Starships accelerate, maneuver and decelerate at enormous speeds, speeds that would crush bones, splatter brains against the back of your skull and send people flying into the walls, ceiling and floors. Even when they're 'only' going slower than light. Star Trek has mentioned 'inertial dampeners' and left it at that. So let's fold it in. Artigrav creates a cradle that keeps people secure and y'know not splattered. It's not 100%, people still get tossed out of chairs and such, but keeps them alive.

So that's the basic idea, addresses how it works on screen, and opens the door for a whole new technology for space operas to explore.

Every square foot of ceiling has a really powerful air conditioner pointed down.

It is a big plot point in Star Trek VI (and a really great scene for the whole franchize, for its time also a cool animation of klingon blood).

In terms of Star Wars, the visual media may not have gone into it much, but the Legends books at least did a lot of stuff. they clearly have artificial gravity in terms of tractor beams, Gravity field generators (Interdictors) and gravity plating.

One of the Rogue Squadron books had a super star destroyer buried upside down in the ground being used as a prison and hard-labour mining prison camp. If anyone tried to escape, then they were actually trying to escape downward toward the planet core due to the local gravity field being reversed.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also, did you also write the Stargate wiki entry, as it seems to perfectly summarise your position above

https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Artificial_gravity

Its like the apocryphal story of a Trekkie phoning up one of the technical writers on Start Trek asking "How do the Heisenberg Compensators work?"

To the response of "Very well, thanks"

Babylon 5 made it a point to remind us that while Humans had starships, we still used centrifugal force to create artificial gravity.

The station rotated, same with the Destroyers. Every other ship required you to strap in.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Babylon 5 made it a point to remind us that while Humans had starships, we still used centrifugal force to create artificial gravity.

The station rotated, same with the Destroyers. Every other ship required you to strap in.

It did, but none of the alien races seemed to need to do that. Even the Narns, who were an agrarian race subjugated for only a century, seemed to be sufficiently advanced that their ships were all gravved up. presumably with tech derived from captured Centauri ships?

 Flinty wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Babylon 5 made it a point to remind us that while Humans had starships, we still used centrifugal force to create artificial gravity.

The station rotated, same with the Destroyers. Every other ship required you to strap in.

It did, but none of the alien races seemed to need to do that. Even the Narns, who were an agrarian race subjugated for only a century, seemed to be sufficiently advanced that their ships were all gravved up. presumably with tech derived from captured Centauri ships?

The Narns were usually strapped into their seats - They got some high tech Centauri stuff but not everything and could not maintain it all. Quite a few of the other Non-aligned races are either much older or focussed their tech on non military aspects so yeah they used it.

There’s a really fun short story by Harry S Turtledove where FTL and anti-gravity are really simple, but don’t have any other technical uses:

https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf

We’re told, and shown on occasion, that Federation ships and facilities can offer a range of gravity ratings. From the whole ship to a single room.

What we’ve never seen is that being used defensively. As in “Captain, we’ve been boarded. Shall I erect the forcefields we use for a hull breach, and turn the artificial gravity up?”.

I had an idea years ago for a setting where ships had 'gravity keels' that when powered up would simulate a required mass. They would be stowed and off during FTL, and then deployed 'underneath' the ship and powered up during regular travel a sufficient distance away from other ships/stations/planets/etc... with the obvious potential for plot to happen when competing gravity keels are brought too close to each other. Never did anything with it though, aside from playing with some ship designs back in my Bryce tinkering days.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
We’re told, and shown on occasion, that Federation ships and facilities can offer a range of gravity ratings. From the whole ship to a single room.

What we’ve never seen is that being used defensively. As in “Captain, we’ve been boarded. Shall I erect the forcefields we use for a hull breach, and turn the artificial gravity up?”.

Does seem like a neat way of repelling boarders. Or just dialing the gravity into reverse and flinging them back off the hull.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
We’re told, and shown on occasion, that Federation ships and facilities can offer a range of gravity ratings. From the whole ship to a single room.

What we’ve never seen is that being used defensively. As in “Captain, we’ve been boarded. Shall I erect the forcefields we use for a hull breach, and turn the artificial gravity up?”.

Enterprise has a couple of places on her, where the gravity is a little wonky.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
We’re told, and shown on occasion, that Federation ships and facilities can offer a range of gravity ratings. From the whole ship to a single room.

What we’ve never seen is that being used defensively. As in “Captain, we’ve been boarded. Shall I erect the forcefields we use for a hull breach, and turn the artificial gravity up?”.

That's the sort of obvious use for this technology that we just don't see anyone use. It would be easy to film - sound effect and stunt men falling to the floor - but after you do it once it's not that dramatic. So you introduce a countermeasure - they're wearing anti-grav boots! - and then you're done.

Since I'm trying to explain what we see on screen, I'll go with "it don't work that way". When a bank is being robbed we can't turn up the florescent lights to MAX POWER and blind them. Lights aren't meant to do that. So you can't just 'turn up the gravity" since the maximum is built into the floor's hardware.

It would be neat to create a Space Opera where gravity tech is a big part of it, but so far - other than Bio of a Space Tyrant where everything that wasn't incest and cannibalism was about how gravity lenses worked - no one has.

Seriously Piers, is everything OK at home?

I don’t think he was OK at home.

And its still probably a better entertainment experience than the Rebel Moon series...

 Flinty wrote:
And its still probably a better entertainment experience than the Rebel Moon series...

Did you know there are Rebel Moon novels?

I wonder if they are better than the films...

But how do you capture excessive pointless slow-mo in print?

Robert Jordan managed it, but hopefully took the secret to the grave with him.

 insaniak wrote:
But how do you capture excessive pointless slow-mo in print?

Read Slowly?

 insaniak wrote:
But how do you capture excessive pointless slow-mo in print?

It's just one word per page.

One thing I remember about the "behind the scenes" of Star Trek Deep Space Nine is that they wanted to stop using the "hover sleds" that they used on Next Generation. Yes, these were only seen in a few episodes, and mostly in the first 2 seasons.

Apparently they made shoots tricky (necessary camera angles and such). So, when it came to DS9 the in-universe explanation was that the Cardassian gravity plating was incompatible with Federation anti-grav sleds. It's why one character had to use a "normal" wheelchair and why we've seen workers moving things on wheeled dollies and such.

Budget and ease of shooting influenced the SCI FI universe of the show.

Slipspace wrote:

 insaniak wrote:
But how do you capture excessive pointless slow-mo in print?

It's just one word per page.

Being totally off topic, I don't think that would actually do it.

We got a book ages ago for our kids when they were really young, and its got big pages, and very few words, but its not a slow book



It also has some of the best onomatopoeia out there (BAAAAAAAZOONGIFACE!)

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
What we’ve never seen is that being used defensively. As in “Captain, we’ve been boarded. Shall I erect the forcefields we use for a hull breach, and turn the artificial gravity up?”.

It does appear once in one of the mirror universe Enterprise episodes.
https://youtu.be/CK7NZ9IDtTc?si=zMlLyKzDe5OG2oRZ&t=53

A.T. wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
What we’ve never seen is that being used defensively. As in “Captain, we’ve been boarded. Shall I erect the forcefields we use for a hull breach, and turn the artificial gravity up?”.

It does appear once in one of the mirror universe Enterprise episodes.
https://youtu.be/CK7NZ9IDtTc?si=zMlLyKzDe5OG2oRZ&t=53

It was Also used in Andromeda, twice. And on the reverse side in DS9 they had the gravity turned off so a low-grav worlder could kick some butt.

 Flinty wrote:

Slipspace wrote:

 insaniak wrote:
But how do you capture excessive pointless slow-mo in print?

It's just one word per page.

Being totally off topic, I don't think that would actually do it.

We got a book ages ago for our kids when they were really young, and its got big pages, and very few words, but its not a slow book

Spoiler:

It also has some of the best onomatopoeia out there (BAAAAAAAZOONGIFACE!)

The best way I imagine the literary equivalent of slow motion to function is to disrupt the action in the scene with an examination of any relevant developments in absolutely excruciating detail. You can supplement exhaustive description with commentary by the narrator, by exploring every possible meaning of a thing to the future narrative, or going through the focal character's thoughts and feelings on the matter, depending on your chosen style.

You'd probably have to establish what is normal pacing throughout the rest of your writing and make sure you stick to it so any instance of slow motion effect would be understood as a deliberate effort rather than unsteady pacing.

So I should imagine Anne Rice books to be told in Zach Snyder slo-mo?

☆☆☆

I think Enterprise was really the only Trek that dealt with issues like gravity, repairs and logistics. Voyager just waved it's magic wand and fixed everything.

If you want to talk about the biggest issue in sci-fi, look at the universal caveat of "inertial dampners."

Not a major plot point, and you really need to be paying attention, but in the original Star Trek listen carefully to background chatter about damage reports. Occasionally you'll hear things like "gravity down to .9 on deck <blah>", which implies reduced power or damage to the artificial gravity system.

 Geifer wrote:

 Flinty wrote:

Slipspace wrote:

 insaniak wrote:
But how do you capture excessive pointless slow-mo in print?

It's just one word per page.

Being totally off topic, I don't think that would actually do it.

We got a book ages ago for our kids when they were really young, and its got big pages, and very few words, but its not a slow book

Spoiler:

It also has some of the best onomatopoeia out there (BAAAAAAAZOONGIFACE!)

The best way I imagine the literary equivalent of slow motion to function is to disrupt the action in the scene with an examination of any relevant developments in absolutely excruciating detail. You can supplement exhaustive description with commentary by the narrator, by exploring every possible meaning of a thing to the future narrative, or going through the focal character's thoughts and feelings on the matter, depending on your chosen style.

You'd probably have to establish what is normal pacing throughout the rest of your writing and make sure you stick to it so any instance of slow motion effect would be understood as a deliberate effort rather than unsteady pacing.

It's much harder in novels, but in poetry this would be caused by line and stanza breaks interrupting your train of thought. In children's books, you can do it with turning the page, as is so expertly executed in "The Monster at the End of This Book" .

Also, Tolkein's 5 pages of tree description would certainly slow any action toa crawl, if applied to a loving description of a weapon or move.

I’m trying to remember the author, but earlier this year I read someone just like that.

“A blur of motion in the corner. Protagonist threw himself into a roll, snapping upright behind the marble counter. With a sensual snick, he slid out his .45 caliber 1975 Keckoer Moe Schmeizer Hi-Fi with the grip recalibrator, night sights and dupler barrel, a custom job capable of blasting 9 pound 10 grain shells through a cat-sized target 500 yards from the scrimmage line. “Ooh baby,” he whispered as the walnut-paneled decompooper racked into the slide hammer. The carbonized steel receiver smiled back black as death, bright as a man’s love for his weapon. She was a most propitious violation of UN regulations. Protagonist spun around the kitchen island and planted two lead roses square in his Anarcho-Hungarian opponent’s forehead with a reverberating thunderclap.”

Part of the trick of Junji Ito's horror is that it depends on the reader's control of the pacing. He builds the "don't go into the room" suspense of a good horror film by letting you know there's something terrible behind the door, but the reader has to be the one to actually turn the page and find out what's really there.