Of Gravity-Drives and Inertial Dampers

POSTED BY: PurpleYin
UPDATED: Friday, May 27, 2005 02:41
VIEWED: 7643
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SIKKUKUT

Wednesday, May 25, 2005 9:16 PM

The gravity-on-moons thing has always bugged me, and this is the best explanation I've yet heard.

I don't think your pumping idea would work for inertial dampers because a) that would then affect the downward gravity, which we don't see happening, and b) it doesn't seem like you could move this stuff around afterward.

I find it kind of funny that everybody worries about the gravity in Out of Gas but not the lights. The main engine is down, right? Which turns everything off. But there are back-up systems, because you don't want to suffocate every time your engine hiccups. It just so happens that in this case, the explosion knocked out the back-up life support-- and not the lights or gravity. So although exotic matter would explain the persistence of gravity in that episode, it's not needed.

I do, however, fully endorse it as an explanation of Earth-like gravity on moons.

What if they wanted to settle somewhere with more than 1 Earth gravity?

____________________________
Is it September yet?

CALHOUN

Wednesday, May 25, 2005 9:52 PM

So.. would this exotic matter be good to smoke?

CORWYN

Wednesday, May 25, 2005 9:53 PM

two points:

Zoe says they changed the gravity of the moons. Or close to it. "...as near to earth normal as they can make them, atmosphere, gravity and such..."

In Serenity, they turn the gravity in the air lock back on.

ZEEK

Wednesday, May 25, 2005 10:25 PM

It seems like a decent explaination. The one thing I'm worried about is in the Message when Kaylee says that they are entering the atmosphere and the planet's gravity and ship's artificial gravity fight each other for a bit. Where would the matter go at that point to not fight or add to the planet's gravity? Could it be equally distributed throughout the ship or something so it would lose all effect?

ILIZEDE

Thursday, May 26, 2005 1:24 AM

Most sci-fi refere to it as "gravity plating". I think I've only seen this "gravity plating" fail only once on one episode of Enterprise, and never on any of the other Treks, Battlestar, Stargate, or Farscape. I know babylon 5's gravity is produced by the rotation although I didn't watch the show for the specifics.

Since gravity is so important it would make sense to have a non-volitile system for gravity. Your explanation makes as much sense as gravity created through mechanical means, so why not? Just cast you up some floor made with these exotic particles or even more advanced like you said for the moving particles.

However the means is not important of Firefly, that's part of its universal apeal. The people I've turned on to Firefly don't like Sci-Fi space shows for its geeky improbable explanations of scientific technobable. Firefly completely avoids any technical explanation which is a good thing. How gravity works is not important to the stories.

Besides, it wouldn't work without gravity so it has to be there, who cares how?

CHRISTHECYNIC

Thursday, May 26, 2005 1:39 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Sikkukut:
What if they wanted to settle somewhere with more than 1 Earth gravity?

I don’t think that’s a problem. A long time ago I wanted to know what was at the center of a gas giant, none of my teachers would tell me. Damn them.

Regardless I found out that:
a) No one is totally sure
b) If they are right about there being a planet inside of all that atmosphere projections show that Earth is the largest planet in the solar system.

I have yet to hear anyone talk about a non gas giant being much bigger than Earth so I get the impression that we really wound up pretty near the top end of the spectrum.

Of course all of my information on this is outdated, a lot.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Thursday, May 26, 2005 1:46 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by corwyn:
In Serenity, they turn the gravity in the air lock back on.

Every time I come up with some kind of an explanation for why the gravity works when the engine is out I suddenly remember that. Screws up all theories I had.

Now I feel like an idiot, which is probably deserved:

Quote:
Originally posted by Sikkukut:
I find it kind of funny that everybody worries about the gravity in Out of Gas but not the lights. The main engine is down, right? Which turns everything off. But there are back-up systems, because you don't want to suffocate every time your engine hiccups. It just so happens that in this case, the explosion knocked out the back-up life support-- and not the lights or gravity.

It makes sense, perfect sense in all possible ways. The gravity was on because it wasn’t off, it was on an independent system.

Still have the planetary gravity to think about but really there is probably a much nicer way to do that when you don’t assume the same system is used on ships.

DROCCULARI

Thursday, May 26, 2005 2:35 AM

Two more cents on inertial dampening. As I recall, in the Train Job, when Wash is maneuvering Serenity over the train, the cockpit is shaking a bit, but in the saloon/galley where Book and Inara are talking everything is rock steady. So it looks like the inertial dampening is not consistent throughout the ship or can be set differently in different areas. It makes sense to back off the dampening a bit in the cockpit to give the pilot a seat-of-the-pants feel while flying a touchy maneuver.

ROBINHOOD

Thursday, May 26, 2005 1:35 PM

Deleted.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Thursday, May 26, 2005 2:09 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by robinhood:
Enjoy the often exciting, always engrosing story lines, the complex array of different characters, the whitty and intelligent script and the incredible special effects.
Nevermind trying to figure out how the gravity drive works, or how inertia damping is created. Or why moons don't have different rates of gravity.

Analyse everything. When you go to see a magician you ask yourself, "How did he do it?" Does that make the magician any less enjoyable?

Science is magic, and so long as you don’t know the answer for sure the questions you ask contribute to that magic.

If you say, well the characters are real but the rest is total bull how does that make the show better? A complex array of different characters is only useful if you can convince yourself they are real people, and you can only do that if they are in a real world.

Quote:
What could possibly be gained from seeing all of our favourite characters floating about in slow motion on Whitefall because it has only a 6th or maybe 1/2 of Earth's gravity.

Wouldn’t work anyway, how do you know the moon landing wasn’t faked? Because the dirt (moon dust to be proper) traveled in a path that is impossible in Earth’s gravity. No way every bit of dust was on a wire.

Slow motion always looks like slow motion.

Quote:
How much impact would the Ep 'Out of Gas' have if the gravity on the ship had also been lost due to the engine not running.

And how much impact does it have if you say the ship is powered by magic? If it’s magic why the hell isn’t it working?

Quote:
Oh and the lights? Well, everything would be pitch black wouldn't it? What could be gained from that?

Lights were on a different system, we all figured that out on our own. Unless you’re talking about the outside of the ship, which Nathan Fillion said he liked because it had external lighting rather than assuming there was a spotlight on every ship in deep space.

Quote:
Why focus on such tiny niggles, when you should be looking at the bigger picture?

I thought the point of Firefly was that there is no bigger picture, these are just normal people on a ship that has gravity when the main power is down. Well normal people except for River, but when you get right down to it she’s a normal person too.

Quote:
But please try not to apply it to Firefly, because non of it's important as ILEZEDE said. Keep them seperate because to me, it's dragging it down to the same level as ST TNG. All technobabble to pad out a dull script, and cardboard characters.

How does talking about how stuff might work make the characters cardboard? Is Mal suddenly a cliché if the gravity works for a reason other than, “It looked better that way?”

Cardboard characters padded out by babble are something found in much of Star Trek (though far from all) and Shakespeare. Not Firefly.

-

Shakespeare did make many important points though, and one of them is in the famous, and annoying, “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” speech.

What surrounds a person does not change the person, be it a name or an inertial dampener. The characters are not now and never will be cardboard because no matter how many times you watch Out of Gas and how many things you say about it it will never change. OoG will always be what it is and the human drama will remain no matter how much technobabble a fans say when thinking of it.

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Quote:
Here's a little concept I've been working on.. why not just sit in front of the TV and watch one of the greatest pieces of Television ever created.

If you truely feel that way about the show I direct you here:
http://www.fireflyfans.net/thread.asp?b=2&t=10330

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