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Why Gravity in Jefferies Tube

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Plutodawn

Lieutenant
Newbie
Why are engineers crawling through Jeffereries tubes with gravity plating on, not just on, but at full gravity?

You can't tell me gliding down those things wouldn't be faster, easier on the knees.

And its a easy fix for cameras. Tie some fishing line on a tool, make it float. Harness on a actor, zip him down a line- tilt him upside down or wear a hat for hair issues. Floating ponytails can't be that hard.

Seriously, just no excuse why elderly Scotty had to crawl. That's inhumane. Just float and push off. I saw they made Archer float a few times on a TV show, it's technologically feasible for a modern film crew on the cheap to do. I don't want to see another starship on the verge of destruction as a engineer crawls, leap headfirst into that tube and zoom fast. Adds to the drama.
 
Depicting the Jefferies tube as micro-gravity would be a cool effect, but likely an expensive one too.

Showing the actors in realistic free fall would be difficult, especially the actresses hair. Maybe they could (for a movie) build a jefferies tube in a aircraft and dive the plane during shooting like they did in Apollo Thirteen.
 
That's always been a vague thing in Trek - is the artificial gravity "regional", or does the AG cover the entire ship?
 
We have verbal confirnation in pretty much every show that specific decks at least can have their gravity altered. Explicit visuals don't appear in every Trek incarnation, but we see specific zones of zero gee in TAS, DS9 and ENT at least. In the latter two, zero gee can be found in a single room; in ENT, it can be the size of a shower stall, or a spot in midair.

There's also lots and lots of evidence of gravity being found in places where it does no good, generally various vertical shafts. But those by definition are narrow holes inside wide areas of gravity-impregnated deck, and the bleedover effect is a good explanation there.

Timo Saloniemi
 
If you're in a Jefferies tube to fix something, you really don't want your tools and/or toolbox to float off in random directions. Plus it's a lot more difficult to do things in zero gee than in a gravity field. Try torquing a bolt, for example, and you'll find yourself turning instead if you don't find some way of bracing yourself.
 
Ultimately, whatever creates the gravity might also be responsible for damping out the inertia of course changes or enemy hits or divine hands grasping and shaking the ship. Gravity might well be the most important element of life support aboard a working starship, and never allowed to fail or falter, certainly not merely for making heavy duty work lighter. (As pointed out, they have antigrav tools for that.)

Timo Saloniemi
 
B.J. said:
If you're in a Jefferies tube to fix something, you really don't want your tools and/or toolbox to float off in random directions. Plus it's a lot more difficult to do things in zero gee than in a gravity field. Try torquing a bolt, for example, and you'll find yourself turning instead if you don't find some way of bracing yourself.
Click to expand...
Humans are accustomed to working in a gravity environment- the Trek crew has had training in zero G but if you want the work to be done quickly and effectively keep things as normal as possible. I could see the gravity in the Jefferies Tubes to be functionally variable though. I think it would be useful to have it shift 'down' as needed for a particular repair or be turned off if it would make a certain repair easier.
I wonder why they have gravity in the turbolift tubes- the moving cars (which have their own gravity and initial dampeners) would need to fight against that tube field when moving and anybody side with no car have to climb up the walls with the ladders.
 
Easier to work in an environment with some gravity. My impression is those tubes are too full of equipment to have room for their own grav plates. Spillover between decks could also be a problem. Maybe I. The 24th century not that big a problem ?
 
Tenacity said:
Depicting the Jefferies tube as micro-gravity would be a cool effect, but likely an expensive one too.

Showing the actors in realistic free fall would be difficult, especially the actresses hair. Maybe they could (for a movie) build a jefferies tube in a aircraft and dive the plane during shooting like they did in Apollo Thirteen.
Click to expand...

^^ This. Making actors and objects appear weightless has always been a difficult effect to do convincingly -- even more so within the time and budget constraints of television production. So a space vessel can be wrecked, completely without power, adrift in the void -- and yet somehow the gravity still works!
 
There's also lots and lots of evidence of gravity being found in places where it does no good, generally various vertical shafts. But those by definition are narrow holes inside wide areas of gravity-impregnated deck, and the bleedover effect is a good explanation there.
Click to expand...

Never even thought about that, feel stupid about never questioning this.

Yeah, screw the ladders, turn the gravity off, shoot straight up. Workplace accidents help a lot too.

Andromeda did have Anti-Grav Harnesses (built into the uniform somewhere, and it was implied the ship could catch people if given enough time to react) in the first episode, so I'm guessing this was a hot topic on someone's mind back then. Just zoop.....

No, Anti Grav is easier to simulate in a tube that anywhere else, like I said, some clear fishing string on a tool or two, harness around a fattie like Old Scottie, woosh his butt straight down the shaft holding something big.

Computer command for turning gravity off, turning it slowly on (don't recommend just jacking it all up at once).

As for bleeding.... I don't know. Too much bleeding on a cloaked ship and you'll see in gas clouds particles interacting with it. Federation had only one ship, but other nations not limited to just one.

So if I went into the holodeck for training involving Zero Gravity, be it simulating repairs, flight training, space walks, survival, I might not get it, cause gravity elsewhere is tugging at me?
 
http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/100500/do-we-ever-see-a-0-g-environment-on-a-holodeck

No, just checked, Holodeck can control gravity, and unlike DS9's puny holodecks, for some absurd reason Voyager and Enterprise had massive decks. I presume precise safety controls over every square inch, bleeding wouldn't be tolerated as that is a potentially lethal hazard.

True, they could have better gravity control plating (or whatever they use) over or under the holodeck than the rest of the ship for economic reasons, but I doubt it.

Someone needs to make a fat engineer fly!

Imagine a battle scene, someone, has a leg broken, still making repairs on a makeshift crutch, gets to that shaft, one minute till the ship blows, and just flies down that tube, gets to the end in 10 seconds, does a Zero G backflip, shoots up a ladder, gets into a shaft, stops the ship from exploding by switching the.... umm, the emergency do not explode switch, placed a absurdly far distance away from engineering.
 
Hmm. Tractor beams can exert relatively precise control of gravity (or at least control of a gravity-defying force), but we don't know if they are the same tech as deckplate gravity and whether that precision could be extended to other applications.

In any case, holodecks seemingly achieve more than the day-to-day working machinery of the ship: they replicate and dereplicate matter without the sparkle and whine of food replicators or transporters, they create impressive visual effects without the shimmer of cloaks, and they do tricks with physical forces that tractor beams only achieve with sparkling and whining.

Emphasis on "seeming": holodecks are entertainment, and looks are supremely important. Perhaps gravity bleed from deck AG is a price Starfleet is more than willing to pay, in a fashion analogous to armies thinking that hard suspension on tanks is a good thing even if the General's limo would warrant repairs for such a thing?

OTOH, I could see the turboshafts using active anti-AG so that the ship at large remains at one-gee pull but the turbolifts are in free fall, or being tugged towards their destination. In various emergencies and maintenance and sabotage situations (our heroes crawling in turboshafts always fall in one of the three categories), the complex and adjustable anti-AG might shut down, with the shafts reverting to normal, robust deck gravity.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Computers, ovens and forklifts are "the same tech" today, down deep. Some of them would not exist if not for electricity; others would work very differently; yet others would display no appreciable differences.

Whether all the magic in Star Trek stems from a single all-new law of nature, or from several, we have no official word. Supposedly, all future tech hinges on the transtator, but we haven't heard yet that it would hinge on the graviton or the verteron.

We could argue that there's a quantum leap from primitiveness to the "Star Trek level" of technology, and we see it happen in the 2050s-2150s time brackets for mankind. Anything before that or after that is just plateauing. We could attribute such a leap to the discovery of a single key technology or phenomenon, and gravity control is a nice candidate. Or we could attribute it to contact with the galactic community, another singular event that instantaneously brings all the goodies of the universe to within the reach of the primitives, even if said goodies involve great numbers of scientific breakthroughs, all-new particles and fields and laws and realms, etc.

Timo Saloniemi
 
It is not the same tech, even if they use gravitons for tractors and plating. Tractors beams are just that, a beam cylinder/cone, etc which has a variable strength and gradient. Gravity plates are designed to have uniform gravity fields with minimal gradients.
 
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So the same tech, just applied differently. To claim otherwise would be to call a steel bridge a different technology from a steel crane.

Although a deck gravity plate apparently has immense gradients, so that pull from Deck 3 abruptly truncates and creates zero pull on Deck 4...

Timo Saloniemi
 
Because they don't want amorous singles, couple, triples or groups sneaking off to 'sweet spots' every minute.
 
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