Quote:
Originally Posted by Varyon
The real problem with artificial gravity are the other types of things that seem to follow from such tech - if you don't want antigravity (which has a huge number of planetary applications that would drastically influence the setting), inertial compensators, and gravitic weapons (tractor beams, grav guns, etc), it's hard to fit artificial gravity in without raising some eyebrows.
For my Harpyias setting, I happened to want the aesthetics of fighters that look like they'd be home in atmosphere and transports/capital ships that look like they could serve as naval vessels (using the Hydrodynamic Hull design switch from SS7, although such vessels generally aren't meant to go planetside), naturally with appropriate technobabble explanations as to why these designs are used. This would lend itself to having artificial gravity, but because I didn't want the add-on effects of that (and the setting already rather strains the number of applications of a single miracle material), I decided most of the larger vessels either accept that they'll be spending some time on the float or pair up and use spin tethers (smaller vessels are typically relatively short-ranged, so their crew accept they'll be without gravity at least until they return to their mothership). Space habitats typically use more traditional spin gravity.
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Well, in my setting, AG is harder to get than it looks while Inertia Dampening is easier (similar to Babylon 5, where Earth has been working on AG tech for
decades and didn't get AG until the Interstellar Alliance
gave them the tech). All ships and orbital stations require spin-gravity but planetoid/planetary installations (i.e. significantly large asteroids, various moons in the solar system, Mars, the like) have a very inefficient form of AG tech that simply outdoes the energy budget of pretty much anything in the solar system.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
An option I considered for proper space opera travel was something like: - All long-distance travel is via warp drives. Warp drives don't function very near planets (say, 10 diameters or so), and their speed depends on local gravity, so it's fast sublight travel in the inner system, becomes ftl between stars.
- Ships in warp are surrounded by a warp bubble (10x ship diameter or something), which significantly protects from long range fire. Warp bubbles can merge, resulting in short range exchanges of fire or even boarding actions.
- Warp bubbles cause localized adjustments in the laws of physics that prevent inconvenient technology from working, such as nuclear weapons.
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Well, Interplanetary Drives and large gravity wells don't like each other. Current idea is that the 'limit' for IP drives is over 1.2 times the distance between Earth and the Earth-Luna L2 Lagrange point...
So, 'cinematic' rules are basically arbitrary then?