#artificial gravity

The Schwilca-4 rocket from my Star Trek Lower Decks fic Surviving Schwil. It shares a propulsion bus in common with the several cargo rockets which travelled in constellation with it, but it's the only one that also has to be able to return to the Ocean after the mission is done.

If we lighten up the scene a bit, you can see more of the Slave I cockpit space.

Here’s another view of how artificial gravity affects the trajectory of objects.

This demo features a particle emitter standing in artificial gravity. It shoots particles in many directions. The astronaut is floating in static space. 

When we share the astronaut’s point of view we see the trajectory of the particles moves in straight lines. As we switch to rotate with the artificial gravity floor we can see the particles are no longer moving in a straight path but curving along an arc.

Well I learned a pretty important scifi lesson the hard way:

Make sure you decide how a ship's gravity is set up BEFORE you start writing scenes inside it. Is it a linear field from a wide pair of dipoles? Well then you better decide how far from the ship that field extends, because it's gonna mess up docking and EVA work something awful. Does the gravity all point toward a central point? The floors would have to be curved to feel straight, and the decks will be laid out in weird ways, straightness or no. Does the habitation section spin? If it does, then any scene in the cargo bay or engineering will be weightless. Does the whole ship spin? Have fun spinning the whole thing down every time you need to dock, you lunatics.

When writing Afterland, I made the mistake of designing the main ship after I started writing; it was a colonial ferry scrapped together out of older hardware, and I realized it would make more economical sense for them to just strap an old O'Neil cylinder (that spins) to its belly instead of going to all the trouble of building decks strong enough to handle linear gravity. And now I'm gonna have to redo a bunch of it because a few things just don't work the same.

Based on a NASA concept from the 1960s.