To Gravity or not to Gravity

[NorthernDevo]

Spinning mass generates gravity....?


Human ships only have grav in the spinning sections in B5 (like the empire ships). Sheridan's issue was he was floating towards a spinning space station surface moving at high speed! To generate some of the centripetal grav you're all talking about in this thread....

Well yes, but we also see officers on the bridge of Omega-class and other Earth Force warships (Notably the Alexander) standing on the deck and not strapped in like Sheridan was (with debris and corpses floating behind him) when he ambushed the Black Star.
It's handwavium - it works and only total nerds (like me LOL) nitpick it.

 

[varonica]

Pretty much...
Take the Babylon 5 approach. B5 spins to provide gravity; but there's no suggestion of varying gravity among the multiple levels.

It's centripital force not gravity as already mentioned, but there are isolated instances of it happening, although they are rather bizarrely juxtaposed with activities that indicate some sort of artificial gravity

In one episode it showed where all small ships dock at B5 enter at the center of rotation, are clamped and then taken down a moving platform to disembarkation areas where there is gravity.

In another episode it showed Sheridan walking in and boarding the central train and sitting down, actions that should have been impossible because on leaping from the train into the core of the open environment he was suddenly in zero gravity, he then slowly floated towards the garden area where he would have been killed by the movement of the architecture of the garden because he was stationary while that was rotating fast enough to provide earth like gravity. He was saved by Ambassador Kosh of course but the juxtaposition of obvious gravity and then zero gravity was jarring.

It seems in B5 they portrayed everyone walking around normally as if there was gravity, but then took advantage of the physics of station rotation to carry certain story lines. All in all I wouldn't take B5's treatment of rotation to provide artificial gravity type environment as anything but lip service to the idea.

 

[NorthernDevo]

It's centripital force not gravity as already mentioned, but there are isolated instances of it happening, although they are rather bizarrely juxtaposed with activities that indicate some sort of artificial gravity

In a minor way there is, in one episode it showed where all ship docking at B5 enter at the center of rotation, are clamped and then taken down a moving platform to disembarkation areas where there is gravity.

In another episode it showed Sheridan walking in and boarding the central train and sitting down, actions that should have been impossible because on leaping from the train into the core of the open environment he was suddenly in zero gravity, he then slowly floated towards the garden area where he would have been killed by the movement of the architecture of the garden because he was stationary while that was rotating fast enough to provide earth like gravity. He was saved by Ambassador Kosh of course but the juxtaposition of obvious gravity and then zero gravity was jarring.

It seems in B5 they portrayed everyone walking around normally as if there was gravity, but then took advantage of the physics of station rotation to carry certain story lines. All in all I wouldn't take B5's treatment of rotation to provide artificial gravity type environment as anything but lip service to the idea.

Yes. I should have said 'simulated gravity' as I explained it in my first post here:

It's important to remember that centrifugal artificial gravity is not gravity - it's inertia. When a body is on a spinning surface (the inside of the docking bay, for instance), they are moving with that surface - and the inertia of their movement pull them outward, like spinning a sling over your head (or rather, the stone in that sling).

Since the body in question (in this case you, standing in the docking bay) is standing on a rotating plane of reference, this force is referred to as centrifugal force, and simulates gravity.
It's not actually gravity - so battle debris in the space inside the bay wouldn't fall to the ground. It would act precisely as you see in ED: drift, bounce, ricochet. It would be a serious threat to ships, infrastructure and personnel inside the bay, so Hazmat is going to be a very important job on a station.

(Also, I'm sure Hazmat crews absolutely hate the trigger-happy defensive teams.)

B5 hand-waves a lot of gravity-related issues; ED can do so comfortably to provide spacelegs.

 

[aRJay]

True, but that's the same for every online game - at least every game I've ever played.
Over on my other online game - Naval Action - there's still a bunch of guys screaming that they need to have an autopilot...in a 17th. century sailing ship. (shrug!)

Wasn’t the auto pilot on one of those called the sailing master?

 

[varonica]

Yes. I should have said 'simulated gravity' as I explained it in my first post here:

If I had a beer for every time I missed someone saying something and later corrected them for the same thing I would have.......well a lot if beers



More than that, way more than that!

 

[M00ka]

Wouldn't the easiest solution for FD to implement is for some organisation or even an individual to discover the means to generate artificial gravity? It would be another module for the ship, but due to the number (and complexity) of the existing stations they will continue to use centrifugal force to simulate gravity. After all some of these stations are now centuries old and why change something that works.

The problem with just using mag boots is not everything is metal. Sure, it would work on ships, but too many here would expect the same when walking on a low gravity planet, and as far as I am aware, dirt/ice/rocks aren't very magnetic or contain enough metal for mag boots to be used.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

The interesting thing is that the game universe demonstrably has "artificial gravity" tech, because gravity is the curvature of space-time, and the FSD manipulates that for hyperspace jumps and supercruise travel.

However, it's quite justifiable - and hinted at by mass-lock - that while the ability to manipulate the curvature of large amounts of nearly empty space is relatively practical, doing the same thing on a more localised scale (safely!) is not.

 

[NorthernDevo]

Wouldn't the easiest solution for FD to implement is for some organisation or even an individual to discover the means to generate artificial gravity? It would be another module for the ship, but due to the number (and complexity) of the existing stations they will continue to use centrifugal force to simulate gravity. After all some of these stations are now centuries old and why change something that works.

The problem with just using mag boots is not everything is metal. Sure, it would work on ships, but too many here would expect the same when walking on a low gravity planet, and as far as I am aware, dirt/ice/rocks aren't very magnetic or contain enough metal for mag boots to be used.

It would make a helluva CG, wouldn't it?
There are LOTS of permit-blocked systems out there and a few undiscovered systems in/near the bubble as well. With a dropped hint from FD, a lucky explorer could find the bones of an ancient, advanced race...
Yeah, how cool would that be?

 

[M00ka]

It would make a helluva CG, wouldn't it?
There are LOTS of permit-blocked systems out there and a few undiscovered systems in/near the bubble as well. With a dropped hint from FD, a lucky explorer could find the bones of an ancient, advanced race...
Yeah, how cool would that be?

Yep, and the precedent has already been set by the introduction of Guardian modules like the Guardian FSD Booster etc. All FD have to do is say some 'scientist' stumbled upon a way of generating a stable gravity well that will extend around a ship (doesn't have to be bigger than that).

Of course it depends on how FD decide to do it, and knowing them .... anything is unfortunately possible.

 

[babelfisch]

I always loved the idea of walking around the massive cruise liner that is the Beluga, that there would be a pool and bars and shops etc that there was an artificial space beach under and artificial sun on deck 4 only to have my vision of being somewhere hot that wasn't in work spoilt by the fact you would be doing all of this in your enormous MAG BOOTS :-(

Don't forget that we are 1000 years into the future, in a fictional game.
Magnetic boots could be as comfortable as your sneakers.

 

[Morbad]

The idea that zero-g would need any thing special to implement for space legs is absolutely bonkers to me. About the only issue would be making character models, animations, and movement constraints look plausible. The game can already simulate all the forces involved just fine.

I'm told it's really, really hard for an FPS engine to do properly.

I'm convinced this is not the case and there isn't really anything that distinguishes an FPS engine from any other 3D engine...I highly doubt the game is going to switch engines, or adopt a separate one, for space legs.

Anything with actual physics should be fine...like most any major game engine in the last twenty years. COBRA would more than suffice.

If they don't have artificial gravity then they have to do multiple different movement models or they need to do physics

Physics was essentially a given in most first-person 3D games by the late 1990s.

I played gravity modded UT and Counter-Strike (back when it was in beta as a mod for half-life, which used the already old Quake II engine, which still had a physics engine that took gravity into account) when I was in high-school, and was flying tanks around maps with the recoil of it's main gun in the original Battlefield 1942 a few years later (gravity, again, was a parameter that could be tweaked to any arbitrary value and things would behave largely as you'd expect, within the limitations of the controls provided and detail of the objects depicted).

Wouldn't the easiest solution for FD to implement is for some organisation or even an individual to discover the means to generate artificial gravity? It would be another module for the ship, but due to the number (and complexity) of the existing stations they will continue to use centrifugal force to simulate gravity. After all some of these stations are now centuries old and why change something that works.

The problem with just using mag boots is not everything is metal. Sure, it would work on ships, but too many here would expect the same when walking on a low gravity planet, and as far as I am aware, dirt/ice/rocks aren't very magnetic or contain enough metal for mag boots to be used.

There is no problem to solve, let alone would that would true artificial gravity.

Thrusters distributed on one's suit could provide a near flawless simulation of gravity for all practical game intents and purposes. Just flip walking assist off to defy gravity and turn it back on again when you need simulated gravity.

Alternately, it could work largely the way the SRV does. The SRV's thrusters provide downforce in low g environments equivalent to half-way between actual gravity and 1g. So the minimum effective gravity felt while driving the SRV is just above 0.5g.

I'd hope they'd allow free zero-g movement, with a toggle for automatic compensation, but I could also see them over simplifying things for ease of access.

 

[drew]

So i have been thinking..... Artificial Gravity

If i remember correctly in the Elite Dangerous novel Reclamation there was a mention that the pilot wore Mag boots and other posts i have read seems to confirm that in fact there is no Artificial Gravity in the Elite universe.

In the original lore I worked with from Frontier back in 2012-2014 in order to write Reclamation, Frontier absolutely mandated that there was no 'anti-gravity' tech in the Elite Dangerous universe. This was a bit of a retcon from the original Elite where such technology did exist, but it was a strict rule in ED.

It's not entirely clear whether this is because anti-gravity tech is impossible in the Elite Dangerous universe, or whether it's just that humanity hasn't discovered how to do it yet.

From the game we have:

• Player ships which defy the laws of inertia with respect to maneuverability because gameplay;
• The Thargoids which appear to exhibit some kind of control over inertia at the very least based on their abilities to stop and start abruptly and 'hold' your vessel in 'glowy yellow stuff' (apologies for the technical term);
• The Guardian fighters which have bits of themselves not physically connected to the core vessel by means of 'glowy blue stuff' (apologies for the technical term) that appears to violate Newton's third law.

So... the answer is 'maybe' there is anti-grav tech in the Elite Dangerous universe. Lore-wise, humans hadn't discovered it by 3300, but perhaps, just prior to spacelegs... <insert new and forgettable npc character for purpose of hasty lore retcon> will state that a remarkable new technology has been invented allowing an new way of blazing your own trail... soon... and we should all be very excited about contributing to a new CG.

Cheers,

Drew.

 

[Cmdr Nemo]

The centripetal force created by rotation does not create "true gravity", it creates what could well be called "pseudo-gravity". It works similar to gravity in most situations in terms of creating a local sensation of "down", though it has its drawbacks. If you stand still and drop a ball while standing inside a station, the ball won't fall straight down - it will curve away, in the opposite direction to the rotation of the station; by the time it hits the ground, it will be noticeably rolling away from you. You'd probably get quite dizzy walking around in such an environment, because exactly how much "force" you'd feel would depend on which way you were walking. If you were walking in the same direction as the station was spinning, you'd feel less pull. If you were walking in the opposite direction, you'd fell more. You've seen those little trucks constantly rolling around the little endless trackway inside the station? The ones travelling in the opposite direction to station rotation are experiencing near-zero G, while those travelling the other way are experiencing double-gravity.

The pseudo-gravity comes entirely from being "attached" in some way to the station's inner surface, forcing you to rotate along with the station. You, standing there, would be attached by friction. A ship hovering above the surface of a rotating station is not attached and thus feels no attractive force towards the station - which is why our thrusters are constantly working overtime to keep us hovering in place just above the pad while we're trying to land, and also why you can't simply switch the engines off and drop into place, like you can on a planet. You also have the option of switching off the "rotation correction" thrusters so you can see directly what forces (or lack thereof) the ship experiences. A piece of debris from an exploded ship, likewise, feels no attraction to the "ground" inside a station but has no engines to keep it in place. It wants to remain motionless, which inside a station means constantly rolling around the station walls.

I'm old and perhaps physics has changed a bit since my youth, but it seems to me that if the person throwing the ball at the floor is spinning along with the rotation of the station at a particular speed then so is the ball in his/her/it's hand. And in as much as an object in motion tends to stay in motion. Then the ball would bounce straight back.

 

[drew]

I'm old and perhaps physics has changed a bit since my youth, but it seems to me that if the person throwing the ball at the floor is spinning along with the rotation of the station at a particular speed then so is the ball in his/her/it's hand. And in as much as an object in motion tends to stay in motion. Then the ball would bounce straight back.

Nope. The ball would drift away from the perspective of the person dropping it. Sapyx 's post is spot on.

Cheers,

Drew.

 

[Cmdr Nemo]

Nope. The ball would drift away from the perspective of the person dropping it. Previous post is spot on.

Cheers,

Drew.

If the station was for arguing purposes only the size of Earth. And both are rotating at or about a 1,000 miles an hour that the Earth is proposed rotating at. Why would the ball act any different on the station then the Earth. Going outside the box, Earth is nothing more than a space station if one were to get technical. Both rotate and revolve around stars. The difference is, any reference to up and down is backward from our norm.

 

[babelfisch]

If the station was for arguing purposes only the size of Earth. And both are rotating at or about a 1,000 miles an hour that the Earth is proposed rotating at. Why would the ball act any different on the station then the Earth. Going outside the box, Earth is nothing more than a space station if one were to get technical. Both rotate and revolve around stars. The difference is, any reference to up and down is backward from our norm.

If a space station would be the size of earth you wouldn't need any artificial gravity...

 

[Cmdr Nemo]

If a space station would be the size of earth you wouldn't need any artificial gravity...

I not sure exactly how the Earth provides gravity, something about it center core rotating one way while the surface is rotating differently. But a space station has no core rotating any differently than the rest of the ship.
If somehow the Earths rotation were to increase dramatically, we would be walking on the ceilings instead of the floor. And going outside would require an umbilical cord of sorts.

 

[Phongsalt]

Yep, and the precedent has already been set by the introduction of Guardian modules like the Guardian FSD Booster etc. All FD have to do is say some 'scientist' stumbled upon a way of generating a stable gravity well that will extend around a ship (doesn't have to be bigger than that).

Of course it depends on how FD decide to do it, and knowing them .... anything is unfortunately possible.

Could it be possible to build a containment field generator strong enough to restrain a nano-singularity?

 

[drew]

If the station was for arguing purposes only the size of Earth. And both are rotating at or about a 1,000 miles an hour that the Earth is proposed rotating at. Why would the ball act any different on the station then the Earth. Going outside the box, Earth is nothing more than a space station if one were to get technical. Both rotate and revolve around stars. The difference is, any reference to up and down is backward from our norm.

Earth has actual gravity caused by the mass of its composition. This is not the same thing at all. We're not dealing with gravity on a space station, only inertia. It would just 'feel' like gravity to us on board.

Stick with the interior of a more modest space station - easier to explain. Our frame of reference is external to the station and not rotating, so we see the station rotating. Peer inside and...

Whilst the person has a grip on the ball, both have inertia, but a centripetal force is acting on both the person and the ball from the floor of the station, pushing upwards towards the centre of rotation. The ball shares this force (let's keep things simple and assume the person is rigid throughout). If nothing happens both the ball and person describe a circle within the confines of the station due to its rotation and return to their starting positions after one rotation of the station. Crucially, both have a circular motion.

When the ball is 'dropped' no further force is acting on it, so it will continue in a straight line from our reference point. However, the person continues in a circular motion because the station floor is providing a centripetal force.

But the person is not in the same frame of reference as us, their frame of reference is rotating. So, from the persons perspective the straight line movement of the ball in our frame of reference appears to be a curve. They will perceive the ball falling in an arc until it hits the floor, at which point it will eventually stop moving due to friction.

Would look like this. https://space.nss.org/dropping-the-ball-in-a-rotating-space-settlement/

Cheers,

Drew.

 

[CMDR Big Mike]

Watching the Expanse series really highlights how much cooler mag boots are when compared to AG a la Star Wars or Star Trek