Gravity In Ships?

[Guest DoubleHelix]

When you see scifi movies and some ship is hit by an object they shake and everyone falls and moves around, this is not correct in space gravity on your ship would not throw you to the ground if your ship were struck by somthing youd literally only feel the vibrations and be alerted of it because your ship is not based on a gravity on a planet but its based on your own gravity so you can not likely be falling to anything but rather your entire ship will move in space from newtons law. you see with Yet another crude drawing that the ship with gravity mearly shifts in space but while the ship without gravity throws its astronauts againts the wall because the ship moves and if your not attached to it you wont move at all.

[Ophiolite]

If you would be kind enough to repeat that, with punctuation this time, I should be able to comment.

[towjyt]

If nothing else, the inertia dampeners should keep you from being affected by a hit from another ship, rock, or whatever.

[Anjruu]

From what I could gather with your overly long sentences that lack any sort of structure, you are completly correct. However, in sci-fi movies, you hear "zaps" and "bings" as lasers fire from ships, which is also total bull.

[Janus]

It depends on your orientation of the ship's gravity to the impact.

 

If the impact is at a right angle to the "up" of your ship's gravity and strong enough, then, yes, you will be thrown off your feet.

 

While the gravity will pull you down to the deck plates, it has no sidewise component. If the ship is hit hard enough to shift it sideways, your feet, due to the friction between them and the deck plate, will go with it. your upper body, however will try and stay in place (law of inertia). Your feet come out from under your center of gravity and you lose balance.

 

If you were hit from the "bottom", you would feel heavier for a moment. If the impact is large enough and you weren't prepared, you could also end up falling.

 

If you were hit from the top, you would feel lighter, and again, depending on the severity of the impact and what you were doing at the time, it could throw off your balance.

[Guest DoubleHelix]

Hmm i didnt take into account of the inertia dampeners those throw a new twist in, like say what would happen if you only had inertia dampeners?

[Ophiolite]

Do a simple calculation. In the typical SF movie setting the sub-light drives accelerate the ship to near light speed in a matter of seconds. Let's be conservative and say it takes almost two minutes to arrive at 0.5c.

So, we have:

v = u + a.t

Assume the initial velocity, u, is zero; the final velocity, v, is approximately 150,000,000 m/s (half the speed of light); the time, t, is 100 seconds. Solve for the acceleration, a.

That comes out as 3,000,000 metres/second/second acceleration. That's a shade over 300,000g. Even cockroaches have difficulty when it the acceleration gets up to a mere 100g.

So, we may safely deduce that our sf inertial dampers are startlingly effective: otherwise, with even a tiny amount of inefficency in the system (say .01% 'leakage', which would subject our brave heroines and heros to 30g) would splatter our crew on the floor, not just shake them up a bit. Consequently all that staggering around when two craft collide and subject themselves to a paltry 200 or 300g, or even 2,000 or 3,000, is not only abominable science, its pretty awful science fiction.