[ericthered]

Thanks for the suggestions folks. You are really helping me to work through my ideas and giving good ideas for clever architecture with this setup.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

It's the other way around in my experience. Absolute speed determines whether you can force engagement but once you're in range changing direction is largely pointless. You should have entered range with all your weapons bearing and your opponets would ahve to be scattered over a _very_ large area of space for much effort to be required to change point of aim.

I was thinking about evasive action. Accelerating your ship towards your foe doesn't through off their range very much, while moving to the side does. That doesn't let you chase them very effectively though. Though if you're chasing them, you presumably have a fire power advantage and can afford to increase the size of the target presented.

On the other hand, I'm not sure if turning/twisting the entire ship for evasive maneuvers is actually an effective dodge. It certainly is for projectile fire. With beams you need to be dodging the tracking, not the shot, so that could be very dps intensive.

If you are going to maneuver this is exactly where naval orientation does not work. A crew can not operate with 1 G towards their feet and even 0.1 Gs behind or to the side of them. You could perhaps strap everyone in and turn off the artifical gravity but you'd still have problems for anyone not strapped in like damage control parties.

I think that's overstated: that effectively makes it so they're standing on a 5 degree slope, and sailors have been dealing with pitching decks for a long time.

That said, I do think I'm convinced I need to either line up the ship's gravity with the primary thrust or use a rather slow drive. I'm not convinced that the ship needs to be a long thin cylinder with the engines at one end.

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

One exception: does your ship ever enter atmospheres, land, or otherwise operate very near planetary surfaces? If so, the 'wet navy' arrangement can make landing and near-surface operations more convenient.

No, its a space-only craft

Originally Posted by Anthony

It is worth considering whether the entire interior of the ship will even have the same alignment. You could, for example, replace stairwells with passageways that have gravity flipped 90 degrees.

The symmetric effect of the disks make doing that sort of thing rather tricky. I thought about the specific stairwell situation, and it is possible, but only if the stairwells are on the outside of the ship or if you split the passage into two halves, each with opposite gravity. The key to the trick is to cancel the main gravity with second, much smaller disk quite close to the main one, but with an opposite gravity. That gives a cylinder of neutral gravity, and you can either leave it or set up a second set of plates in the new direction.

Originally Posted by johndallman

Take the rocket/skyscraper orientation. Gravity is normally generated by an attractive disc at the lowest deck, but there are backup attractive discs on higher decks. Your final reserve gravity is a repulsive disk at the highest deck, with only weapons above it. It is normally switched off.

It means gravity is subject to inversion from battle damage on the lower decks, so you mostly put big heavy things, like engines, on those decks, and design them to work with either direction of gravity. The weapons in the nose are also subject to inversion, so you need to design them the same way.

People and all the clutter they generate are on the middle higher decks, so that the gravity won't go out there unless the ship is catastrophically damaged.

That's a neat trick. Thanks for the suggestion.

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Is there a utility in having main personnel and control spaces in gimbals? You could put the gravity plates inside the gimballed room, and they would freely rotate to be normal to whatever thrust vector or external gravity well you have.

It would give the ship a collection-of-spheres-and-domes aesthetic.

The other thing to consider is having spherical shells of gravity plate for each crew space, so that they could cancel out acceleration vectors that skew from the normal.

I think both ideas are possible. I'm not so sure that they fit the scenario though. Both systems seem rather delicate, and do unpredictable things to the gravity just outside of the "safe zones". They would be nice if you keep the humans in there all the time and your ship is mostly machinery that doesn't need to be accessed by humans, but both I and the admiralty very much planning to send PC's all over this ship among its guts, and I'd like for gravity to be present there.

The ideas might have some merit in high performance fighters.