Artificial gravity

[kkozoriz1]

^The depth would crush them.

I was not aware that submarines only operated at great depth.

Why aren't flight attendants and passengers wearing parachutes? In 1988 Aloha Air flight 243 had part of it's fuselage ripped away and a flight attendant was sucked out of the plane. Surely, it would be safer if she were wearing a parachute.

 

[YARN]

You are drastically underestimating the difference in scale between the mass of an astronaut pushing himself around during EVA and the mass of a Galaxy Class starship performing an orientation maneuver.
I think the assumption you keep making is that the ship and its occupants will always be going the exact same speed relative to each other when gravity/inertial damping fails - this will not necessarily be the case.

That they will be traveling at the same speed is a matter of necessity, not assumption. They are passengers on the ship. Whatever direction the ship is traveling in is the direction they are traveling in.

When a ship loses power in a vacuum in interstellar space, it cannot, by itself, maintain a curved flight path - rather, Newtonian physics kicks in, and the ship simply will fly off like a ball released from a tether.

The only real concern is if you lose power while spinning, because the ship will continue to spin. Timo exclaims that occupants would be turned into a fine paste in this case. I am, however, skeptical. The Enterprise is almost always shown making rather leisurely maneuvers.

And how is our starship still engaging in maneuvers if she has lost power? If the ship still has to engage in battle maneuvers, it would seem that the systems have not been prioritized correctly in the first place (or an absurdly improbably malfunction has occurred). Gravity and Life support should be the very last systems to fail on a ship.

However, I'll grant that if you are in combat and you have to choose between systems, you ought to prioritize artificial gravity and worry about the life support later.

Of course it runs on electricity,

I seem to recall an episode where they claim that their systems do not run on electricity - then again, is there money in the future or isn't there?

it's just derived from a futuristic source - namely plasma. The plasma is generated by the fusion reactors, which get pretty damn hot themselves.
Even if all electrical circuits on board the ship had plasma flowing through them instead of tried & true AC/DC power, those circuits will still have resistance and inductance requirements to function properly - both of which generate heat.
There are a lot of electronics aboard the E-D... plus probably several hundred kilometers of plasma conduits supporting them.
Not to mention any radiative heat energy the ship may absorb from the local star while orbiting the planet of the week...

Which is precisely why you need life support. These super hot conduits and other sources will burn the crew alive.

At any rate, you have no idea what the heat dispersal rates of these systems are, so please don't waggle your finger at me like as if you do.

Which you have to admit was absolutely ludicrous when you think about how the laws of motion actually work.

You know what else is ridiculous?

*Universal translators
*Transporters
*Warp Drive
*Holodecks
*Phasers

Why should we get up in arms about just one detail? The Trek universe is its own universe with its own rules.

The best evidence that we have is that when a Trek-universe ship loses power people simply float around.

Trek Tech tech is like the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. We may speculate that real-world physics applies, unless Trek has already ruled in a given case, or set of cases, that real-world physics does not apply. In such cases, the answer lies not in our physics books, but in terms of narrative coherence/consistency of the show itself -- the "rules" of warp propulsion, for example, cannot be deduced from the actual laws of physics as we know them, but rather must be inferred from the techno-babble on the show.

Again, NOT if the ship is radically accelerating or decelerating beyond a point that the humanoid for can withstand.
Per Newton's rules.
Hence the old "chunky salsa" metaphor.

If the ship has lost power, it should neither be accelerating nor decelerating. Per Newtonian physics an object that is in motion will remain in motion, and you would have to expend energy to change its relative motion. On the other hand, if the ship still has power to maneuver, we must ask why this system would be prioritized to last longer than life-support and gravity.

There are three accelerations which can give us the chunky salsa effect - Mass, straight line acceleration, and rotation.
Starships are big, but are not massive enough to produce significant gravity. If you've lost power, acceleration goes out the window too (you simply keep flying off into space). Again, the only acceleration to worry about is rotation, if the ship happened to be spinning when it lost power. And that concern is addressed above.

At any rate, the best argument for your side has already been made by Timo - Starship safety systems shouldn't be optimized for saving a ship from "benign danger". They should be designed to protect the ship from grave danger.

By his reckoning, combat is grave where losing life support is benign danger. I'd say losing life-support is not benign at all. Ask a submariner or miner who has ever choked for air if losing life support is "benign danger." I do agree, however, that the danger of combat is a more immediate than the threat of losing air and heat. This is a solid point.

My only response is that you should not be losing EITHER life support OR gravity unless and until all other systems have failed - in which case, the point is moot, because having gravity wouldn't keep you in the fight anyhow (as you would've already lost the power to engage in combat maneuvers, and weapons, and shields).

 

[sojourner]

^The depth would crush them.

I was not aware that submarines only operated at great depth.

Why aren't flight attendants and passengers wearing parachutes? In 1988 Aloha Air flight 243 had part of it's fuselage ripped away and a flight attendant was sucked out of the plane. Surely, it would be safer if she were wearing a parachute.

You must have missed the post where I discussed this as a precaution when going into a known dangerous situation such as combat.

 

[kkozoriz1]

Perhaps the parachutes should be worn during turbulance then?

 

[sojourner]

^Laugh now, but the way laws are headed in the U.S. .....

 

[kent]

I think each deck has gravity generators. There may be a network of hundreds scattered across all 40+ decks of a Galaxy-class.

There are gravity "generators" on starships, including the Galaxy class. However, more accurately named, they are 'graviton' generators that produce the theoretical gravitons, which get 'pumped' into machinery that spread these to the gravity deck plating of each deck. Each plate acts in tandum with other plates on that deck to produce a balanced graviton feild extending only so far up as the next deck. this could be supported when the Enterprise 1701-A ''fired'' on the Gorkon in Undiscovered Country. They knocked out a generator, but a good portion of the ship lost gravity, so basically it could be said that the graviton generator stopped feeding the gravity plating on a bunch of decks.

As for that I can only assume that the top of the gravity plating exerts force "upwards"(holding people "down" at 1 g), while the bottom of said gravity plating exudes a null force to the gravity fields of the deck below (negative energy??)

Negative energy is also an explanation of why starships can slow down and "stop" without foward facing exhaust ports...the deflector dishes exert a negative energy force ahead of the starship gradually stopping the enertia of the ship without using exhaust. I read about this a while ago so sorry that i'm not going into more detail.

Smaller shuttles use vents to stop though, as seen by on of the speedboat shuttles on Voyager...jets on either pylon fired foward to help stop the shuttle, presumably with the help of negative energy force as the jets were pretty small in comparison to mass. but that addresses the physical properties of propulsion in space on smaller vessels at least, on larger ones the method is still in real life only theoretical.

 

[Timo]

The Enterprise is almost always shown making rather leisurely maneuvers.

This is one of those things where we can stop worrying about the complexities of future technology and science, and base our arguments solidly on simple, well-known and intuitively clear physics that should apply everywhere.

Those "leisurely maneuvers" become something else altogether when one stops to think about the size of Star Trek starships. The slightest spin (a maneuver that requires no power, and really is more common than the very special case of lack of spin) would have the ends of a multi-hundred-meter monster spinning at dozens of gees, much more than is required to completely incapacitate a human and usually enough to maim or kill him. A deliberate maneuver such as turning around to face the enemy within less than ten seconds would induce those hundreds of gees discussed. A sudden weapons hit, like the one against Kronos 1, should pulverize the interiors with thousands of gees.

...Then again, gravity aboard that Klingon ship was said and shown to die out slowly, a few seconds after the impact that rattled her.

Overall, failure of breathing air is a calamity that starships encounter relatively seldom, and they basically always survive such a calamity with minimal casualties despite the crew never wearing precautionary breathing aids.

In contrast, failure of gravity is a calamity that in all conditions (except in the extremely rare one where the ship would not be turning at all, but would be holding absolutely still) should put the entire crew at risk, all at once. That starships never encounter such calamities on screen is probably simply the result of the fact that they would not survive such. The surprising durability of AG aboard the starships is thus both an "observer bias" thing and a technological necessity: Either there's perfect AG, or then the story ends.

In short: we see consistency. Why interpret it as inconsistency?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[C.E. Evans]

I think each deck has gravity generators. There may be a network of hundreds scattered across all 40+ decks of a Galaxy-class.

There are gravity "generators" on starships, including the Galaxy class.

Good enough.

 

[YARN]

Those "leisurely maneuvers" become something else altogether when one stops to think about the size of Star Trek starships. The slightest spin (a maneuver that requires no power, and really is more common than the very special case of lack of spin) would have the ends of a multi-hundred-meter monster spinning at dozens of gees,

Is it Dozens of g's? Hundreds of g's? Thousands of g's?

How do you know that spinning is more common than non-spinning? It is rare indeed to see a starship spinning on an axis unless the ship is purposefully being reoriented.

You need to establish that a starship that loses power would have a significant probability of not only being in a spin, but be spinning at a rate that would produce the effects you claim.

Your claims vary wildly from thousands of g's (which hardly seems plausible) to dozens of g's, which is more plausible, but how fast would a starship have to spin to produce "dozens" of g's at its extremities?

Someone should do the math or we should move on to another point.

That starships never encounter such calamities on screen is probably simply the result of the fact that they would not survive such.

LOL, the anti-gravity (hereafter referred to as "AG") almost never fails because they couldn't budget for it or convincingly portray it in most instances; a fact that we as the audience are well aware of even as we squint just enough to maintain our suspension of disbelief.

We have is positive evidence of what happens in Trek when you lose gravity (i.e., not much) vs. the inference drawn from lack of evidence/instances. Reasoning negatively, you say since AG failure does not happen often, (here is where the supposition comes in) there must be good reason as to why it is of the highest priority in the fictional Trek universe. The positive evidence, what we do see (the K'tinga losing AG), however, is stronger evidence than the negative evidence that we don't see - especially since we as the audience are aware of the non-fictional reason for the lack of its depiction (i.e., costs and limitations of special effects).

Let's apply your inferential reasoning to life support (hereafter LS). LS fails surprisingly often on Star Trek, so often that it appears to be a particularly weak or vulnerable system. Perhaps we should infer that life support is an unimportant system in the Trek universe? This inference, however, is absurd on its face.

Of course, the real reason why anything malfunctions in fiction is to produce dramatic tension. You put lives in peril when you turn off LS. If they had the money and FX to show the difficulties of the crew floating around in zero-G, they would do it. That is, that LS fails does not signal that it is not a crucial system, but rather that it is a highly crucial system. The writers are saying "Look, our heroes are in serious peril !" Ironically, if life-support were not of the highest importance, the writers wouldn't have it fail so often.

Going through the looking glass (pretending we are in the Trek reality) we might say that Starfleet should find ways to make LS a more robust system. It is hard to imagine a ship engineer or Starfleet officer deprecating the importance of LS. Ask the Apollo 13 astronauts if LS is important. On the other hand, it would seem that officers and engineers would have to agree that LS fails on a disturbingly regular basis and has done so over a period spanning Enterprise to TNG. Confronted with their agreement that LS is crucial and that LS fails too often, one could see them agreeing that more needs to be done to make LS robust on star ships.

Complaining about AG never failing when LS is prone to failure is simply a humorous way of pointing out the LS failure is a rather overused device of imperilment.

I think that we are all agreed that AG is a crucial system that should be one of the last to fail on a ship. The question here is not whether you need it, but whether it should be the #1 priority or a rung or two down the ladder.

Again, I think your proximity argument is probably the best one in the thread, but if systems have already been prioritized right, we should only be losing LS and AG well after other systems have failed.

 

[Timo]

Is it Dozens of g's? Hundreds of g's? Thousands of g's?

Close to a hundred if a ship almost a kilometer long makes a 180 degree turn in a matter of seconds, as seen in TNG. Dozens if it merely rotates in the fashion of "derelicts" as commonly seen in TOS. Never thousands due to simple rotation - but there'd be peak accelerations of thousands of gees from weapon impacts, if they indeed rattle the ships as significantly as Kronos 1 was rattled by those two torpedoes, or the Enterprise by the ventral hits in "Errand of Mercy", or send it suddenly spinning like Q's snap of fingers in "Q Who?".

Supposedly, SIFs or IDFs or other AG applications would handle the peak accelerations near-perfectly, leaving only less than one gee of bouncing so that we get the familiar shaking scenes.

How do you know that spinning is more common than non-spinning?

I meant that non-spinning is a rare (indeed infinitesimally rare) state of motion as compared to all possible states for a non-powered ship. One'd have to "park" the ship very carefully to eliminate all spinning. Such care is unlikely to be available if a ship catastrophically loses power, and even less so if the loss is the result of an impact.

It is rare indeed to see a starship spinning on an axis unless the ship is purposefully being reoriented.

But tellingly, a damaged and powerless ship is typically shown spinning "off kilter", say, in "The Ultimate Computer" or "Best of Both Worlds" or "For the Uniform".

...how fast would a starship have to spin to produce "dozens" of g's at its extremities? Someone should do the math or we should move on to another point.

The math is simple enough. In SI units, angular velocity in radians per second would be one variable, the radius of the starship in meters (typically, half her length or width) another. Radial acceleration in m/s^2 would be radius times the square of angular velocity. Divide by roughly ten and you get gees.

The example I used earlier, a Galaxy caught in mid-turn: about 3 seconds for turning 180 degrees or one pi (although we generally see some faster turns because stock footage time is at a premium...), 320 meters from centerpoint to Ten Forward. That's some 35 sudden gravities towards the windows. A "combat turn" from typical TNG or DS9 battle scenes is about twice or thrice as fast, about twice or thrice as hard on the people at the extremities. TOS-R also shows some faster turns for a ship of slightly shorter turn radius, so we're in the ballpark of dozens.

Perhaps we should infer that life support is an unimportant system in the Trek universe? This inference, however, is absurd on its face.

But is it? We see our heroes rather effortlessly cope with the loss of life support, so there's no inherently pressing reason to worry about it. Life support is a system that demonstrably can be restored with reasonable effort. It's also a system that can afford a loss/restore cycle. Antimatter containment by its very nature cannot afford a similar loss/restore cycle, so naturally it is an important system and life support is an unimportant one in comparison - indeed significantly unimportant. Gravity control would be closer to antimatter containment than life support in importance on that scale.

Of course, the real reason why anything malfunctions in fiction is to produce dramatic tension. You put lives in peril when you turn off LS. If they had the money and FX to show the difficulties of the crew floating around in zero-G, they would do it.

Naturally so. But the Trek universe, like so many others, is carefully engineered to reflect a specific type of fictional reality. Transporters are one aspect of this, borne out of dramatic necessity and budgetary corners, and carrying enormous dramatic implications on the nature of the Trek universe as a consequence.

The vital importance of gravity control is an outgrowth of dramatic conceits, just like the vital importance of maintaining power and not maintaining shields when moving people on and off the ship is. Other scifi universes would not necessarily have those dramatic conceits and their consequences, as the consequences don't necessarily make any inherent physical or intuitive sense if the dramatic conceits are taken away. But in Trek, we're stuck with gravity being infallible, and we're given every excuse to believe in the rationality of this: Trek science has mastered gravity and inertia, Trek ships maneuver accordingly, and Trek characters are unaccustomed and working environments unsuited for zero gee or acceleration-unprotected situations.

It is hard to imagine a ship engineer or Starfleet officer deprecating the importance of LS.

It's politically incorrect, yes. Yet in real life, life support or crew/operator survival is often close to the bottom of the list. Many vehicles or machines are not designed to promote operator survival, but to pursue a specific function that is at odds with such survival. A tank would be built without tracks if survival were a priority, because then it could never reach the dangerous battlefield...

Complaining about AG never failing when LS is prone to failure is simply a humorous way of pointing out the LS failure is a rather overused device of imperilment.

It could be. However, I'd argue that life support failure is virtually never used for dramatic effect in Star Trek. Air running out is a cliche in some scifi shows, but in Trek it only pops up perhaps once or twice: a space suit develops a leak in "Day of Honor", or threatens to run out of oomph in "Tholian Web", but that's about it.

Really, if life support hiccups to a dramatic end in Star Trek, it's almost always because the bad guy has sabotaged it.

Again, I think your proximity argument is probably the best one in the thread, but if systems have already been prioritized right, we should only be losing LS and AG well after other systems have failed.

I'd still insist on being a bitch about this very thing. Life support failure has demonstrably been a non-fatal occurrence in Trek - one needs life support, but one can easily afford it to fail early on in the game, and to stay failed for extended lengths of time. It's a ticking clock type of jeopardy. As such, it should warrant a relatively low priority on the reliability scale (or the scale establishing the order in which functions are lost), because so many other jeopardies happen so much more quickly and become fatal so much earlier on.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[YARN]

Timo,

We might both be wrong.

Perhaps Starfleet neither worries about/works on/prioritizes maintaining AG above other systems (your claim) nor undervalues LS relative to AG (my claim).

It may simply be the case the AG is a robust system.

Again, this possibility marks the limitations of how confident we should be about your narrative inference (i.e., AG almost never fails, so AG must be of the highest priority as a system).

For example, in the case of motor vehicles, engines are more likely to fail and need regular maintenance than glove boxes or speedometers. Using your reckoning, a Martian might conclude that Earth people put a higher priority of glove boxes and speedometers than engines and that these things are of greater necessity for a automobile to function.

If AG is a naturally robust system, there is no need prioritize it among the sensitize systems since a robust system is less likely to fail.

It might very well be the case that losing AG in Trek isn't that big a deal; the positive screen evidence we have indicates this is so (i.e., bad things don't happen when ships lose AG in Trek from what we have seen on-screen). If so, the crew never has to make a devil's bargain between choosing AG or LS or any other system. Moreover, if the choice were to appear, we might very well find our crew choosing LS over AG because you can live longer without AG than you can LS.

NOTE: We see the Discovery (a very long ship) rotating rather rapidly in 2010 (Arthur C. Clarke was science advisor on the film), and when our two astronauts get to the far end, they are not experiencing dozens or hundreds of g's.

If someone with a physics degree wants to weigh in on the "spin controversy", they're more than welcome.

I don't really trust your estimates Timo because, your estimates have varied wildly, you have a vested interest in the debate, you appear to have been "straw manning" this point a bit, and your math is coming in a bit late (smells like Google and not actual expertise or competence). I apologize if this sounds like an insult, but I am not persuaded on this point - but I am also too lazy to spend the time finding the answer myself. LOL

For what it's worth, I think that you're proximity argument is pretty much a game-winner for your side. I'd like for you to deal with my argument about how your point is moot, because by the time AG and LS fails you're out of the fight anyhow (I think the point is beatable though).

Thanks for the conversation! You are a formidable interlocutor.

Cheers,

YARN

 

[Timo]

Thank you for a gallant match (although I don't really subscribe to the concept of a victory in such things)... That was absolute fun!

The idea that AG would be an inherently robust technology should probably be accompanied by the idea that it is a cheap, easy-to-discover technology as well. All it takes is a conceptual breakthrough of some sort, and suddenly even the most primitive spacefaring culture can have artificial gravity for the deck plates of its spacecraft - and, more importantly, reaction engines that defy Newton's laws and can make sublight travel as effortless as the dramatic needs of scifi usually call for.

TAS once suggested that AG was discovered through xenoarchaeology: a flying belt of an ancient culture, stored against time in a stasis field, was reverse-engineered ("Slaver Weapon"). Nobody said when and by whom this reverse-engineering had been done, though; it appears that most species discover AG tech without contact to the greater galactic community, and that Earth had it before encountering any ancient cultures or their relics. So we might interpret that TAS episode as saying that some only slightly less ancient culture discovered AG that way, and then promoted it to most of the galaxy, perhaps a couple of million years ago, whilst humans and scores of other primitives came up with the tech on their own because they lacked connections to the galactic community that would have given it to them for free.

Who knows, perhaps gravity control is the basis of warp drive, too? It might be that we in our "real" universe haven't discovered gravitics yet because they aren't a feature of our universe, but that Trek universe is different and features a natural phenomenon that allows industrial civilizations to discover AG about the same time as the transistor, and then warp drive about half a century into that research?

I don't really trust your estimates Timo because, your estimates have varied wildly, you have a vested interest in the debate, you appear to have been "straw manning" this point a bit, and your math is coming in a bit late (smells like Google and not actual expertise or competence).

I did point out that the different orders of acceleration magnitude emerge in different circumstances. Acceleration would vary wildly. Scifi is generally poor on that sort of thing, due to the practical difficulties of simulating acceleration; similarly, when scifi does temperature, it ranges from "characters shiver" to "characters sweat" even though the obvious range of temperatures for space heroes should range from "characters' molecules stop moving" to "characters become plasma".

As for competence, this sort of math doesn't really call for it - it's elementary school stuff. Which means I probably made an error or two somewhere...

Cheers,

Timo Saloniemi