[crazydoggers]

Without looking out the window how would you tell the difference between acceleration or deceleration? You can’t.

And if you say “well one way I fly to the back of the tram and the other the front” You’re arbitrarily associating “front” with decelerate and “back” with accelerate.

300gs is 300gs regardless of the direction vector of the component.

> So for sure a system's design must consider more than just the magnitude of acceleration.

What else would you need to consider? Acceleration up? Down? Left? 20%x,30%y,40%z? There’s an infinite number of directions.

[anyfoo]

Well to be fair, the person you reply to has a point. There’s a continuous range of directions, but even though I’m no spaceship engineer, I suspect they’re probably engineered to withstand acceleration better in some directions than others, given that pretty much only their thrust method, as well as gravity at source and destination, will actually be able to apply any acceleration.

[saagarjha]

You can tell because they typically accelerate faster than they decelerate.

[ryandrake]

“The enemy's gate is down.”