thrustdown

Wibbly-Wobbly

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gravity tremble: The variations in experienced gravity found aboard starships making use of the thrust gravity provided by nuclear pulse drives, or other discontinuous-thrust drives. Essentially, the gravity tremble refers to that portion of the thrust variation not damped out by the thrust transfer framework, leading to a predictable variation in experienced gravity around its nominal value, from the jarring on-off transitions of the earliest undamped concussion drives to the smooth and gentle oscillation (resembling a phugoid cycle) of modern fusion-pulse sail drives.

The term is also used to refer to the distinctive gait seen in long-term pulse-drive starship crewers (or, more accurately, crewers of those starships in which the pulse rate is relatively fast). With experience in maneuvering under trembling gravity, such crewers develop the habit of attuning their stride interval to the tremble frequency, pushing off and up with the drop and descending with the rise, thus gaining the most advantage from the momentarily lighter gravity.

– A Star Traveler’s Dictionary

Drinking Problem

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“Thirty-Two Tons, this is Clajdia SysCon, we’re going to need you to abort your next maneuver, recompute for previous burn time plus twelve minutes, crossing traffic drone freighter DF-01369. Over.”

“Clajdia SysCon, Thirty-Two Tons, negative on that, we have traffic priority over drone freighters. Over.”

“Thirty-Two Tons, Clajdia SysCon, affirmative, but you don’t want to exercise priority over one-three-six-nine, over.”

“Clajdia SysCon, Thirty-Two Tons, clarify please. Over.”

“Thirty-Two Tons, Clajdia SysCon, one-three-six-nine is a three-hundred-barrel fermenter of Callaneth’s Finest Ballistic Beer with a special requirement for constant acceleration. We preempt her for you, they lose thrustdown. They lose thrustdown, they lose the batch. They lose the batch, all the belters out of Ipsy Station want your heads to decorate their candles. How badly do you want to harsh the local color? Over.”

“Clajdia SysCon, Thirty-Two Tons, recomputing as requested. Clear.”

Starships Are Not Boats

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As explained here…

(In short, down, when under thrust, is determined by the direction of your drive axis, and specifically, is the direction your engine is in – because it’s pushing you the other way.)

I feel somewhat bad, sometimes, for violating this one here and there, sometimes quite egregiously, but there’s a reason for that, and it has to do with the fiction in my science fiction. Specifically, the inertial dampers that I talked about here. See, way back in the day before those were invented, from the Phoenix stack on up, spacecraft and then starship design was indeed constrained this way; virtually all designs were tail-landers, with the decks perpendicular to the drive axis, and the only exceptions to that rule being belly-landing vehicles intended to operate in atmosphere and/or land planetside, in which case the need to deal with the planetary gravity field took precedence and those aboard pretty much had to suck it up and deal with the inconvenience when in space and under thrust.

(We omit, for the moment, the complexities of spin gravity and the combination of spin and thrust “gravity” that gave the world terms like thrustdown and spindown and realdown and lots of rather complex gimballing mechanisms.)

But then the inertial damper was invented, thus ensuring that the interiors of starships equipped with it were under microgravity all the time, even when they were under thrust, and naval architects almost immediately split three ways:

  1. The traditionalist school, who had been building tail-landers for a millennium and dammit, were going to keep on building tail-landers, because that’s how spacecraft ought to look, and for that matter, it’s kind of nice to still be able to fire up the drive if your inertial dampers break down, isn’t it?
  2. The convenientist school, who countered that people had been complaining about what a pain in the ass ladders, companionways and elevators were for getting about inside spacecraft for most of that millennium, especially if you’re not under thrust most of the time, that long corridors are much nicer, and that it’s good not to have large pieces of equipment split between a half-dozen decks, and so now that they could build starships as belly-landers, dammit, they were going to.
  3. And the spacer school, who pointed out that if there’s one thing that you could learn from modular and beehive habitat design over all that time, it’s that “down” is a strictly local phenomenon and one only useful under a few circumstances anyway, and that in a microgravity environment not only can you arrange your decks any damn way you please, but you don’t even have to be consistent in doing so, and proceeded to arrange their designs’ interiors in whatever way they felt was useful at the time and place.

In what I think of as the modern era, the spacer school has essentially won the argument, although examples of the other two schools do still show up. (After all, planet-landing craft have to be consistent one way or the other, what with that planetary field to contend with.) Among people who have the relevant technology, at least – the constraint still exists, and applies in full to anyone who doesn’t have fancy ontotechnological physics-editing tech to play with.