[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.