[Hemospectrum]

Wizards wave their hands and say something like, "Whatever, space is an ocean."

The Expanse makes the observation that accelerating your ship at a substantial fraction (or multiple) of Earth gravity gives you that same degree of artificial gravity, only, you have to orient your decks the right way. Down is towards the engine.

Of course, this in turn makes Star Trek (and Star Wars, and Firefly...) look even sillier, because flying in a direction perpendicular to your deck layout means you need two magic gravity fields — one to cancel out the engines and one more to give your crew a place to stand.

[dragonwriter]

> Of course, this in turn makes Star Trek (and Star Wars, and Firefly...) look even sillier, because flying in a direction perpendicular to your deck layout means you need two magic gravity fields — one to cancel out the engines and one more to give your crew a place to stand.

Don't you just need one that does the required net change in gravity magnitude and direction? Of course, Star Trek actually has two (though I don't think the second is explicitly a gravity system, but it has that effect), a relatively steady state one that provides environmental gravity (gravity generators), and one that reacts rapidly to changing conditions to offset them for crew and other contents of the ship (inertial dampeners), which handles not only ship's drive thrust, but other externally-induced accelerations.

Of course, Star Trek is supposed to be vastly farther from our current level of technology and understanding of physics than the Expanse.

[actionfromafar]

To be fair, in Star Trek only thrusters etc seem to generate force vectors, and the thrusters seem able to accelerate the ship in any direction. Only the warp drive seems to fling the ship just "forward". But yeah, it's wizard retcon turtles all the way down...

[dragonwriter]

Thrusters and impulse engines seem to generate force vectors, and warp drive usually doesn't but the continuity is not very strong on that point and it is sometimes implied, and at one point in Voyager fairly explicitly stated to create accelerations (in Voyager, this was in reference to requiring the inertial dampeners to be functioning to go to warp without plastering the crew into a thin paste on the wall.)

[impossiblefork]

It's a pretty sweet idea to imagine a starship where you stand on a platform and accelerate in the natural direction. If it were in a movie it would definitely give it a distinctive feel.

[mr_toad]

They wouldn’t need to stand if they had chairs with belts.