gravity drive by SpacemanSpiff76

GENERAL DISCUSSIONS

gravity drive

POSTED BY: SPACEMANSPIFF76
UPDATED: Sunday, August 5, 2007 08:36
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Friday, August 3, 2007 8:27 AM

one thing i was never able to figure out was the gravity drive situation. i can accept almost anything that happens on the basis that its a tv show and therefore just about anything can be made to happen. but when serenity docked with the big alliance cruiser, as has happened a couple times, i never could figure out how people stayed on the floor in the portal. serenity would always invert and dock upside down relative to the cruiser. yet on both ships, people were standing right side up, on the floor. somewhere, theres got to be a gravity discrepency. halfway between, youd fall on your head right? or how come they were never on the ceiling of serenity? this one little detail always confuses me.

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Friday, August 3, 2007 8:46 AM

DAVESHAYNE

Serenity has an artificial gravity device that can be turned on/off. (see Serenity: the Episode.) When Serenity docks with the cruiser in Bushwacked it flips over and docks with the bottom portion in relation to the outside observer (us) but there is no reason to assume that it's upside down in respect to the artificial gravity on the cruiser. In fact with artificial gravity there is no reason to assume that up and down are the same thing everywhere on every ship. There may be places where gravity goes upside down, sideways, or isn't provided at all. It's all about what seems most useful in the situation.

David

"Looks like we got here just in the nick of time."

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Friday, August 3, 2007 12:19 PM

SPACEMANSPIFF76

that does make sense but wouldnt the grav drives of each ship work against each other in close proximity? i still think theres got to be a spot halfway between where you go 0-G or you fall over or something.

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Friday, August 3, 2007 12:35 PM

NBZ

It actually works differently.

Each floor has it's own gravity, which is fixed and does not extend past that point. It does not depend on a power source either.

Otherwise in OoG they would have been floating.

The path from the dining area, past the crew quarters and to the bridge is actually a slope, but because the gravity is based upon each floor, they are actually straight.

The official blueprints have a massive amount of info on them.

(yes I realise this post is barely readable... just could not think of better words or phrasing.)

The only place for potential trouble is the loading mechanism. half way through do they have to go all upside down?

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Saturday, August 4, 2007 3:34 AM

SPACEMANSPIFF76

i missed that littel detail. that helps.

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Saturday, August 4, 2007 4:13 AM

FINN MAC CUMHAL

This is an issue that has always plagued sf tv/movies. In the sf books, it’s never that big of a deal – people float all around, but on screen, it’s expensive to create that effect. So it’s ignored in the hopes that the audience, unused to low-gravity environments, will not notice it, but it gets noticed a lot. And I think it’s noticed a lot more today then it used to be. Special effects have made it possible to produce a more realistic experience in some ways, but ironically, this only has the effect of making the gravity thing more noticeable. Secondly, sf audiences are more sophisticated then they used to be, and are not as willing to accept budgetary compromises.

You could rationalize it in any number of ways, just like you can rationalize the sound in space stuff or the River the Reaverslayer stuff, but in the end, there’s probably not a rational explanation. Likelihood is that no one, the writers, producers, etc, stopped to consider what you are talking because the whole gravity thing, in side the spaceships at least, is just ignored. So I doubt anyone even stopped to consider that in an environment where an artificial normal is arbitrarily imposed, that when two different coordinate systems meet there has to be some sort of transformation from one to other for them both to make sense. Of course, in the real world, we don’t have gravity in space ships. When the shuttle docks with the space station, there is no up and down.

I don’t think we are very close to any kind of real gravity generation, and as long as sf fans continue to demand a realistic experience, sf tv/movies will eventually have to start seriously considering this problem. And I think they are. They may have made this little mistake with regard to geometry, but at least they recognized that the coordinate were arbitrary. In Star Trek, for instance, when two ships meet in space, they always seem to “right-side-up” in relation to one another. So while Firefly may have gotten this one thing wrong, I think they at least thought about the broader concept, which is more then you’re likely to get from a lot of sf shows.

Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.

Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.

-- Cicero

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Saturday, August 4, 2007 4:58 AM

NBZ

But that is the thing... It WAS considered to some level.

It surprised me too, considering that everything had to be possible on real earth.

Even today, artificial gravity can be mimicked. (though it is not real gravity, just a force of acceleration.)

Just get a large tubular structure spinning in a zero-g environment. The center is up. the outside down. For a ship it could be possible to travel in a looping fashion to keep the acceleration for gravity.

Ofcourse any real motion towards a real object would cause havoc.

Going into the future, it is possible that the Higs-Boson could be found and manipulated. (It may already have been found... but the group are not publicising it... just more or less sabotaging a competing scientist group from getting their equipment ready this year...), and the way gravity is explained could become practicable. or not depending on what is discovered, but currently it is close to how Firefly does it..

Also, do not forget the "worlds" in Firefly. Some are small, others are large. All have equivalent gravity. (Even though climate would be the real problem... how do they keep the further out worlds warm? space mirrors? greenhouse gasses? nuclear cores? aliens?

)

A good show should have answers for these questions, even if those answers are wrong. IMO.

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Sunday, August 5, 2007 8:36 AM

FREEBROWNCOAT

Nahhhh. Too many answers.

"Hey. A tussle."

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