Even when the life support systems have completely lost power, everyone is dying, etc. Gravity is the one system too critical to reroute.
In Star Trek IV, The Undiscovered Country, exactly that happened. It is kind of a unique scene, because it had to be a bitch to film.
The Undiscovered Country is VI. Star Trek IV is The Voyage Home. Both are great, anyways.
One is a great Star Trek movie. The other is a beloved comedy starring Star Trek people.
Star Trek IV: The One With the Whales
A go to for sick days in bed for years.
I never know the number, but I know the whales!
Production costs!
The expanse did this well because they used acceleration not artificial gravity.
Expanse did it amazingly imo, it also adds some realism into a otherwise very fictional story, which makes it somewhat easier to vibe with it.
Gawwwd, the scene where mid fight there are unsecured wrenches floating around was so beautifully tense.
They also made amazing computerized wire rigs for the actors they used in conjunction with motion-controlled cameras. The production of the show was super impressive.
Also - everyone should read the books. They’re fantastic.
Ty Frank, one of the authors and the Amos actor Wes Chatham had a really fun podcast (“Ty and That Guy”) that did lots of fun deep dives on genre stuff.
Just flip around halfway and start slowing down! Free acceleration / deceleration gravity.
Well, not free. Acceleration usually requires a bunch of energy.
I guess if you have to do it anyway then it’s a really convenient side-effect.
They actually do that in The Expanse.
That would be why I brought it up, yes.
“Captain, we were hit by a Class IV Photon torpedo in the aft. The production budget exploded!”
And magnetic shoes.
That was such a nice touch and just cost some red leds. I’m the books they spend a lot of time on the float (to expensive to burn all the time). The way the TV show got around it all was great
Don’t forget the sound, that clunk with every step is what sold it as real.
I find not many things are destroyed unless integral to the plot but there are times where it does because the story wanted it to. I think its more incommon with video games though as it makes a nice alternate gameplay thing to have in.
THE EXPANSE
GO WATCH IT!
No stupid gimmicky “artificial gravity” horseshit, the “gravity” is caused by acceleration and deceleration.
Which is fucking cool because it’s one of the few space travel things that really does work. Like if we can figure out the fuel/propulsion thing and some kind of equivalent to deflector shields (not for space battles but for all the random shit in space that could destory your ship in a collision, especially if we get up to relativistic speeds), we could have space travel where you can walk around normally on the ship.
Also the gravity increasing ships like Goku used in DBZ, so we could actually have someone doing extreme gravity training while en route to a big fight.
And it works for both acceleration and deceleration, only difference is you’re either travelling up or down.
Also loved the special seats they used when doing combat maneuvers. ST didn’t just make up artificial gravity (since their ships moved forwards rather than up), they had inertial dampeners, because the evasive maneuvers would have been much more dangerous than the shocks from getting hit.
ST is more rooted in science than SW, but parts of it are just as much fantasy as the force, which was depressing to realize when you’re hoping for humanity to eventually go in that direction. The biggest human tech fantasy in the Expanse is an engine upgrade that gives improved thrust and efficiency. Not to light speed, but just by like an order of magnitude. And they’ve even got a brutally realistic scene about the discovery that was great world building imo.
the expanse is the only universe where Epstein actually killed himself
I mean, gravity is just acceleration anyway.
Weird fucking acceleration due to the curvature of spacetime and how shit moves through time. But still, just acceleration.
To be fair; if you could build a fusion torch and fully direct the flow; aneutronic fusion fits the bill; the thrust numbers they are using are not crazy.
You would use stupid amount of fuel to get that much delta-v; but with advanced reactors using readily available fuel sources…maybe not an issue.
Yeah, it’s not even that much of a stretch, like that future could be within humanity’s reach. Not sure we’d actually want that particular future, but there’s just something about realistic sci fi that makes this reality feel cooler.
Matter/antimatter would theoretically be a lot better.
Spin up the drum.
Up until the space magic bullshit, anyway.
So disappointing when the hand waving started.
Well the show didn’t finish the story.
E: though, it didn’t get less “magical”, just more explained in a soft-scifi sense.
I wouldn’t know, it got stupid well before the end
That’s why I prefer hard SciFi like The Expanse books, where science is a main driver to life and motivations to drive the story.
Ive sen some of the show ad liked it a lot. Are the books even better??
Yes, and continue on about 30 years after the show, giving an actual conclusion to the story.
Bet, thank you
Strap in and wait for the juice, the show never really leaves our solar system
Doylist explanation: it would be too expensive for the FX department.
As it happens, the same worldbuilding project I mentioned in another post here sort of addresses this. The same aliens mentioned there don’t use artificial gravity at all. Being arboreal creatures they’re well suited to microgravity and can happily live permanently in zero G. Upon meeting humans and learning that we want artificial gravity (specifically centrifugal gravity), they wonder why we spent all the effort to get away from gravity only to spend even more effort to bring it back.
Since human orbital colonies take the form of O’Neil cylinders, you can cut off the gravity by halting the cylinder’s rotation. If stopped abruptly enough this would cause a lot of damage initially as objects go flying. It would also put the terrestrial, bipedal humans at a disadvantage compared to the aliens with five prehensile extremities.
Adrian Tchaikovsky has some sci-fi books that make use of this idea.
Gravity is a very dense liquid. Generator makes it in big batches at a time and it just stays there for long even after the generator is gone. After the battle is done and everything is repaired, they just top up the pool and all is good.
Thanks, Calvin’s dad
Gravy. You’re thinking of gravy.
You mean Bolognese?
The movie with Sandra Bullock trapped in space?
Well, now I am
Titan AE
“Just think of it as floaty time!”
I like the movie and atmosphere but damn the villains are whack
I wish there were some spinoff or something similar.
Who else is thinking of that one scene near the start of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country?
That was my first thought and I am having trouble thinking of additional examples.
Or Star Trek: First Contact, when Picard, Worf, and redshirt Neil McDonough test out their zero G combat training, further cementing the fact that Star Trek only remembers that space has no gravity when it’s relevant to the plot.
They do throw things out the airlock an awful lot. Though, somehow, Borg don’t have the strength to stop it but Beverly Crusher does.
Beverly Crusher fucked a ghost. She can do anything.
Good ol’ Blazin Bev
My wife abused star trek of being a soap opera at some point. At first I thought, maybe she’s just showing up at the worst possible time?
No. It’s all of the time. Every episode has some weird soapy bullshit. Beverly fucking a ghost, LaForge fucking a hologram, Riker fucking anything with genitals INCLUDING a hologram. Everybody be fuckin. That’s not even the soapiest thing. Voyager is basically Soaps in space.
I love classic trek, but guys I think it’s a soap opera.
guys I think it’s a soap opera
It always was, but it was our soap opera with spaceships and laser guns.
and had her own PERSONAL UNIVERSE she got trapped in.
I assume that the Federation has better space OSHA regulations that mandate more reliable artificial gravity than the Klingons.
“Gravity plating!” As long as there is floor, you’re good.
This is covered in the Attack Pattern Trunks web comic. If I remember correctly it works even when all power is disabled due to thermal power or some such, I’d have to go searching through all the episodes to cover it.
I’m glad somebody else caught this, it always irritated me in Enterprise when they insisted that it was a gravity generator and not just plating.
Magnetic shoes?
If it were expected to be more than a 1 in 1000 risk, they would probably have handles on the walls and ceilings to help move about during an emergency.
starships have redundancies most likely, much like the life support systems. its like artificial gravity isnt coming from an actual generator, but the whole ship itself in some unknown mechanism, most scifi genre dont explain how its being created, it looks more like an energy field throughout the whole ship generated from every “system” in the internally.
Well… Star Trek The Undiscovered Country.
Yep! One of the more rememberable parts… Floating pink Klingon blood droplets everywhere!
