From the start I remember, if I remember correctly, that there is no artificial gravity in Elite. Stations I suppose has it because they rotate, but not ships. The smaller stations you see have no rotation, so how do people survive on board those? They must all use the gym daily to avoid muscle atrophy and organ failure. I am not sure if these issues have been addressed through lore and so on and so forth.
So space legs might be a break with canon if you can walk around in your ship. It would be more like floating. I never lied the idea of no artificial gravity because it just causes limitations for the game. There is no real need to maintain this notion that ED ought to be 'realistic' in terms of technology. And that for this reason in the far future something like artificial gravity deck plating isn't possible. Maybe it won't have to be in ships, but that means, no walking aboard the boat. Maybe hovering around, but then all ship interiors need to have guide rail along their corridors and spaces.
As for small factory stations, I suppose some kind of plating could be invented into existence. For large stations that rotate, why would they if there always was anti-gravity. So such stations must still have all these myriad issues that arise out of your distance from the outermost areas to no gravity at the center.
So walking around, it won't happen unless Braben breaks his own lore and Design View. Or they introduce it with some explanation as to why we never noticed it before. That would preferable to sticking to old ideas. For any decent expanding space sim, artificial gravity technology is a must in my opinion. It opens op possibilities, that you don't have to take, so, are optional but not to have them will limit any expansions of the game even if you are ready to grow all players some space legs.
The problem is, that gamers now live in a 3D game world, the days of 2D are gone. Centuries ago people had no perspective in paintings. Painters didn't know how to do it. But when they figured it out, they could not go back to how they did it before. Artists are the people who lead society into new directions. If you say game design is an art form than surely a developer must lead into, literally, new Frontiers. So to me this means that walking around inside assets, on assets, through assets is no longer an issue of design choice, but a necessity that comes out of people's imagination no longer being satisfied with limitations such as 2D and old style game design.
You build a space sim? It no longer serves nor satisfies in flying a full 3D model but docked at a station you see static images in the outfitting section. You cannot even rotate it, because the game might not have a gimmick to use the camera suite within the station. If FD won't invent artificial gravity, games like Star Citizen will be the more likely choice for people, because young gamers and old gamers alike have been brought up in a 3D world more than ever before.
