This would be helpful in explaining the inner geometries here and there, but personally I think we should mostly believe in a universal down for one reason and one reason only - those cutaway drawings they have on their bridges.
Those diagrams don't preclude using ceilings as floor and vice versa, though getting the Turbolift properly oriented would be a bitch, and the Jeffries ladders (if they are called that) that go between decks certainly wouldn't work well then. Then again, a spinning turbo and shifting gravity orientation might not be that hard to work. Anyway, those ladders might not go through the whole ship, but just short sections of it where G is all one way.
Wouldn't it be a laugh if the AG tech required one upward gravity plating for every downward one to "balance" each other out and reduce the costs to nearly zero? They don't have to be back-to-back, but less than one-for-one and it cost a lot more energy. You do it right, it could be . . . free, and even work when the power is down.
But if not, then most decks are probably in the normal "downward" gravity orientation, even if a few odds places and corners probably could benefit from a different orientation.
OTOH, I'm convinced the turbocars get oriented this way and that while zipping through the ship! They are the one bit the most difficult to squeeze in, after all. And if a cab from Deck 1 has indicator lights for upward movement, I really, really want to think it tilted and now is diving head down.
Just how often do we even see sideways movement in the lights on the turbocars? What episodes, and where are they going? I clearly remember at least one they were moving one way, then stopped and started moving in another, but I can't recall what episode that was in, or if they did it a lot.
Hmm... Forcefields holding cold neutral deuterium vs. magnetic fields holding hot plasma (as they can't hold neutral deuterium) seems like a match going to the forcefields. Perhaps magnetics kick in with the drive plasma, which still contains antimatter residue and for that reason gets mentioned in the context, while forcefields store the fuel before it enters the process?
Even normal matter plasma has charge and could be contained magnetically. Antimatter residue? I wonder exactly what that is supposed to be. I would expect all AM would eventually annihilate itself with matter, and the product be pure photons. Well, that assumes the AM particles meet comparable matter particles, like a positron for an electron, a neutron for an antineutron, a proton for an antiproton, or a deuterium ion (deteron) for an antideterium ion (anatideteron), yet if you hit regular hydrogen with antideuteron, you'd have a radical antineutron left over. AM Residue? I'm sure it could find a regular neutron somewhere. Residue? Hmmmm. I guess the photons must energize regular matter and turn it into plasma (drive plasma) for some good reason, like being able to magnetically contain and direct normal matter plasma all over the ship through plasma conduits (until a EPS tap turns it into electricity).
It's even more magical than that: if you create a tractor beam out of 'em gravitons, it's not a lasso nor a rigid pole but something else together: the target can be made to suffer major forces while you yourself feel nothing! Just see Wesley levitate a big chair using a handheld unit in "The Naked Now"...
Maybe he's just partially nullifying the effect of the AG, so you shouldn't expect him to carry the load.
Speculating - wasted effort (but a fun pastime). But pointing out consistencies vs. inconsistencies - potentially taking us somewhere.
To speculations about even greater possibilities. To infinity, and . . . well, it's infinity already, so give me a break.
We sort of hit middle ground in DS9 "Battle Lines" where our runabout heroes say they have to eject the antimatter, and do, and then crash. After the crash, a big pod like component that cannot be part of the runabout (unless it's an interior part, but the runabout didn't exactly split open) is sitting right next to the wreck... Oops! But fortunately for our heroes, it's not ticking or sizzling or anything, and they ignore it.
Ejecting AM almost certainly means ejecting its container. And AM bottles, or AM PODs are probably tough, small, containers using room temperature super magnets and contained battery backups that make it all better than the mythological indestructible black box. You still wouldn't want to be around one, or find an ancient one whose battery life is suddenly coming to an end. Better to drop them in space where, when it does happen, it won't hurt much of anyone.
Shuttles in theory might have antimatter pods aboard, and they could be as indestructible as the "Battle Lines" example. Indeed, "Contagion" suggests 24th century heroes disbelieve in containment failure as a thing. One way or another, a shuttle even in TOS ought to leave that "antimatter residue" when moving. But admitted that it could still be a product and not a storable.
He doesn't really believe it's impossible - just that there are so many redundancies it makes it highly improbable. You thought the emergency overload bypass was a wise precaution, well, I've got 6 of them, and each one can only fail 1 in a million times. Wouldn't that mean all of them failing at once would only happen 1 in 1 x 10^36 times? Isn't that "impossible?"
Anyway, maybe the antimatter residue is just a stray antimatter particle they got rid of since that is easier than trying to contain it again and putting it back in the POD (for if they made a mistake they could get matter in there, too) so it gets dumped. Oh look, an anti neutron floating in empty space. How quaint. You wouldn't expect to see that naturally laying around in space. Not in this neighborhood.
Perhaps AG involves understanding of subspace physics which gives warp in no time flat? After all, we haven't seen good examples of non-warp societies with mastery of their own star system - perhaps that's a step most people skip due to the laws of nature of Star Trek?
Perhaps. All those dimensions to play with, and we hardly dipped our toe in any of them yet. But I guess it's a good idea to colonize more than one star system anyway, or next thing you know, a probe like Nomad comes along and destroys the whole stellar system, and then where could you keep your eggs? Nowhere man, the only basket you have was flawed and imperfect. That, or a giant amoeba like organism just eats you, and that's all she wrote for you. Nothing left for a man like Picard to even dig up a million years later. So sad.
Doubtless, we have to discover AG and make IC before we can get to warp. Luckily this seems to avoid relativistic effects, too. Or maybe the big corporations already have it but are still sitting on it since it's a product of alien tech or salvaged time travel ships that crashed. I just don’t see how we can get there to discover it first. We probably just need to do some more math. Or the kind that is tedious, so only when we have AI will it let us know what it found. AI. Hmm. And Data actually using a positronic brain. Ohhhh, that sounds so cool, Issac, but it's just the matter equivalent to electrons or an electronic brain, so how is it really better than an electronic brain? Seems a lot harder to contain the positrons and prevent them from annihilating the normal matter of the rest of the system. So, ever considered a good "reason" for that? Apart from an homage.
Meh, the TOS review thread is bogged down again. 2 post limit annoys me. You'd figure they cut some slack when more than 24 hours had passed.
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/tos-rewatch.283254/
) amounting to the quoted "great deal"...
IS trailer if need be, or left to be nothing but basic air-containing sacks.