An often overlooked piece of tech in sci-fi

[Zaune]

Regarding Klingon AG tech, I believe it's also at least semi-canon that being a proud warrior race, homegrown Klingon technology not directly involved in blowing stuff up tends to lag behind the rest of the Alpha Quadrant.

[Uraniun235]

That strikes me as poor reasoning on Jefferies's part. Among other things, it means that the surface directly below the skin of the ship becomes very cluttered. It means you cannot put an armor belt directly under the skin, because there's too many externals in the way. You can have an armor belt, but it has to go inside the pressure hull, which adds a certain amount of redundancy to the design.

Ultimately, it's not healthy operating on a starship if you don't have vacuum gear and the training to use it for the crew. If you do, there's no reason to keep certain components in atmosphere; if anything, gravity is far more useful than atmosphere for working purposes.

Why would it be "very" cluttered? Can you produce any documentation on the density of instrumentation and equipment on the Enterprise exterior?

I don't know about "no reason" - working underneath the protection of the ship's skin from cosmic rays, micrometeorites, and vacuum strikes me as safer, easier, and much more comfortable. (It really sucks to have an itch on your nose in a spacesuit.) And depending on the nature and location of the equipment, a lot of it might be accessible from gravity-enabled sections.

If I remember right, the DD(X) program for the US Navy appeared to move towards a similar approach of locating equipment underneath the superstructure - but I've heard DD(X) has some very significant issues, so this isn't me saying "hey it's a good idea" so much as it is "hey, actual high-paid naval contractors seemed to think it could be done, so maybe it's not such a bad idea for an overworked art director to have ".

[Stofsk]

Isn't a lot/most of a submarine's equipment contained inside the hull? That may even be a better analogy, because a submarine that's dived below the waves is in the middle of a hostile environment that is sort of similar to a hypothetical spaceship being in space.

[Freefall]

If it takes more energy than simply magnetizing a pair of boots, it's a waste of energy. Incidentally, there's plenty of areas where it wouldn't make any sense to have artificial gravity generators. Why would you need them near the nacelles, or the deflector dish? If enough equipment is between the outer hull and the livable space inside it seems like artifiical gravity would be a waste.

I think that's oversimplifying things a bit. It takes more energy to run a heater than to put on a coat, but people still run their heaters, even when it's not cold enough to really risk getting hypothermia or getting sick. And again, I'm not saying they should have it running constantly, but that it would be there so that they could activate it if they ever did need to go out on the hull. I think maintenance crews would rather like the idea of being able to put their tools down without having to worry about them floating away.

And yes, like I've said, this is predicated on the idea that their AG system is, by all appearances, a nearly trivial technology to install. If they can afford to put perfectly functional AG systems in every shuttlecraft they build, then it doesn't seem like it can be that much of a problem. I also said this was assuming it was generated by the floor instead of the ceiling.

Anyway, this was really just one example too. The main idea is that for such an apparently cheap and foolproof system, you'd think they could come up with far more interesting things to do with it than just allow people to walk down corridors normally.

Hm, anybody know how the tractor beam is supposed to work? Maybe it's a derivative of the same technology.

[Connor MacLeod]

I suspect alot of the so called "artificial gravity" isn't real gravity in the same way whenever you hear sci fi mention a "singularity" or "black hole" it is not how we traditionally think it is. RAther, we have a magic forcefield that can simulate gravity sufficiently well for puproses of the universe - the nature of the force or the properites we may not know, but it works.

This of course makes it completely arbitrary as far as things like "how do they generate it" and "does it require a energy input/constant energy input." Which pretty much makes it like alot of sci fi tech - We don't KNOW in depth how it works (The way in real life we know how alot of our own tech works in detail - or at least someone does and the capacity ot learn) because that level of info doenst exist. We can only speculate, and we only need to really form a complex theory about it when there is an apparent violation of science (EG momentum or energy.)

[Lord of the Abyss]

I suspect alot of the so called "artificial gravity" isn't real gravity in the same way whenever you hear sci fi mention a "singularity" or "black hole" it is not how we traditionally think it is. RAther, we have a magic forcefield that can simulate gravity sufficiently well for puproses of the universe - the nature of the force or the properites we may not know, but it works.

Yes. If I ever started writing, personally I'd just throw in the occasional reference to "pseudogravity generators" or some such term and pre-empt a lot of arguments. Unlike gravity, it's not like anyone can say "but pseudogravity fields don't work like that!"

[Simon_Jester]

That strikes me as poor reasoning on Jefferies's part. Among other things, it means that the surface directly below the skin of the ship becomes very cluttered. It means you cannot put an armor belt directly under the skin, because there's too many externals in the way. You can have an armor belt, but it has to go inside the pressure hull, which adds a certain amount of redundancy to the design.

Ultimately, it's not healthy operating on a starship if you don't have vacuum gear and the training to use it for the crew. If you do, there's no reason to keep certain components in atmosphere; if anything, gravity is far more useful than atmosphere for working purposes.

Why would it be "very" cluttered? Can you produce any documentation on the density of instrumentation and equipment on the Enterprise exterior?

I'm fairly sensitive to issues of shipboard surface area. It seems to me that surface area is as important an asset as tonnage in some ways. Many of the things a ship needs in order to move, observe its surroundings, take on or unload cargo and passengers, and fight require a fixed footprint on the surface of the ship: shuttlebays, sensors, weapons (especially things like phaser strips that are supposedly 'array' weapons, those take up lots of surface area).

Moreover, for a warship you want redundancy, further increasing the demand to put stuff on the surface: one radar antenna isn't good enough, so you want three or four, which increases the footprint of the sensor system.

I'm of the opinion that a 'realistic' military spacecraft will make very heavy use of the volume near its surface. Cargo haulers might get away without that because they're just a big steel box wrapped around a bunch of inert material, but warships need more than that.

This is one respect in which big spherical dreadnoughts have a disadvantage: a great deal of their mass is located far from the surface. On the one hand, it's protected from enemy fire. On the other hand, relative to her tonnage, the dreadnought has a lot less room for sensors, small craft bays, and gun turrets.

I don't know about "no reason" - working underneath the protection of the ship's skin from cosmic rays, micrometeorites, and vacuum strikes me as safer, easier, and much more comfortable. (It really sucks to have an itch on your nose in a spacesuit.) And depending on the nature and location of the equipment, a lot of it might be accessible from gravity-enabled sections.

A fair point.

If I remember right, the DD(X) program for the US Navy appeared to move towards a similar approach of locating equipment underneath the superstructure - but I've heard DD(X) has some very significant issues, so this isn't me saying "hey it's a good idea" so much as it is "hey, actual high-paid naval contractors seemed to think it could be done, so maybe it's not such a bad idea for an overworked art director to have ".

Also a fair point.