A Question About Star Trek and Gravity

[Ironclad Alibi]

In all of the Star Trek epsiodes I and Mrs. IA have watched over the years, whether it be the Original Series, the Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Enterprise, Voyager or any of the movies, the Enterprise and other ships have taken all sorts of damage. The engines are disabled, life support goes down, shields fail, computers go crazy, and so on. Mrs. IA posed a particular question about the integrity of these starships. Why does the gravity generator onboard these ships never fail?

Even on a derelict ship that has been floating dead in space for centuries, the gravity still works. Why are the caracters never free floating in a weightless environment? Or the dead bodies on the ships that suffered some disaster? Inquiring minds want to know.

Whatever technology was used to make the artificial gravity fields fail proof on these spaceship should have been used on all the other starship systems as well.

[evilfarmer]

The anti-gravity was powered by plot as Mr. Evil loves to say when he cant explain it to me.

[Chanlin]

Agreed, gravity is always a plot device in the series.

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Artificial_gravity

This has a list of all the episodes where gravity fails or comes into play.

Artificial gravity was one of the technological concepts invented for the original series. This allowed for actors to stand up and walk around normally instead of being flown on wires or anything else that would be costly to do on a weekly television series. It was rationalized that even if everything else had failed on the ship, it would be one of the last systems to go.

There are episodes of enterprise that use environmental suits with magnetic boots due to their being low/no gravity on abandoned ships they are exploring.

[Chromatix]

The *real* reason is of course that zero-G environments are hellishly difficult to come by for filming. When movies do it, it usually involves wire work.

[Dave1982]

There were a couple of instances where the artificial gravity on Trek failed. Most notably Chancellor Gorkon's ship lost gravity in Star Trek 6. I know in one episode of TNG they stated that a deck had lost gravity but they didn't show it.

[Seshat]

According to a 'Who Confidential', the most expensive shot of an entire season was about five seconds of a character's body floating in zero-G.

It was done by shooting her in a swimming pool, then pasting that against a CGI background. Scuba divers - plural - were present to keep giving the actress puffs of air; but any shot which contained bubbles that couldn't be easily CGI'd out had to be discarded.

My guess? Trek ships had amazing gravity generators because the alternative is too expensive to film. :P

[lordlundar]

Yeah it's pretty much the ships gravity is essentially granted impregnable plot armor because zero-G filming is prohibitively expensive, especially for Star Trek(where the warp core goes critical on a regular basis) and to a lesser degree Stargate when ship battles were getting spotlighted. It's really expensive to film zero-g effects and most TV shows just don't have the budget for it. So it's either explained with some complex explanation which boils down to the sci-fi version of "a wizard did it" or is handwaved away outright as it breaks up the scene flow (when you're in combat getting hammered you don't really CARE why you can still walk or fall).

Movies have a much larger budget however so they can put in effects like Zero-G without breaking the bank.

[PepperElf]

They explained it in one of the novels - I think it was one where Kirk's father took the Enterprise on a secret mission. It was just completed but not yet commissioned so the adventure was completely "off the books" (which explains why the Romulan encounter didn't count as the "first" etc).

Anyway IIRC the gravity was what made the engines function. I forget how exactly, but it was explained that without gravity the engines themselves would pretty much get fucked up.


Or, in a nutshell, they used the book to explain why there's gravity... and the real reason was pretty much "We have no money for fancy things like that". Cos back then there was little financing. From the books I've read about the series, many of the weird looking set pieces were really there to disguise microphones. Oh and they were always raiding Mission Impossible's back lot for stuff to use.

[Moirae]

Wish I could give a thumbs up to lordlundar. That was a great explanation lol.

Basically... it's a tv show so we don't ask why, we just accept. Much of whats on these shows doesn't make any sense anyway, but it is entertaining.

[MoonCat]

They explained it in one of the novels - I think it was one where Kirk's father took the Enterprise on a secret mission. It was just completed but not yet commissioned so the adventure was completely "off the books" (which explains why the Romulan encounter didn't count as the "first" etc).

Anyway IIRC the gravity was what made the engines function. I forget how exactly, but it was explained that without gravity the engines themselves would pretty much get fucked up.


Or, in a nutshell, they used the book to explain why there's gravity... and the real reason was pretty much "We have no money for fancy things like that". Cos back then there was little financing. From the books I've read about the series, many of the weird looking set pieces were really there to disguise microphones. Oh and they were always raiding Mission Impossible's back lot for stuff to use.

In the original series, some of McCoy's medical instruments were actually odd-looking salt & pepper shakers from the studio commissary.

Never mind the gravity, what always puzzled me was that no matter where Kirk, Spock & Co. went, everybody could always understand everyone else's language. You only saw a few examples of alien language being used (like on Vulcan). I believe this was explained in one of the novels (my brother had some) but I haven't read most of them.

[Sapphire Silk]

I don't think any TOS episode actually showed zero g, or TNG, DSN, STV for that matter.

Star Trek the Movie did in the EVA scene with Spock. Last Frontier has the best zero g scene, when you can see the balls of Klingon blood morphing around and into each other, which is how liquids in zero g behave.

Don't know about ENT; haven't seen the whole series.

[Chanlin]

Enterprise had a few 0 G scenes in it, one of the better special effect scenes has the gravity fail while Captain Archer is in the shower and you see the water start floating.

DS9 had at least one scene with 0 G where you see objects floating but not people. The Episode "Empok Nor" has a scene where the gravity on a Cardassian station is offline when the main characters board it. Garak fixes it though and you see several object fall to the floor.

The DS9 episode "Melora" is all about a species that can't live in Eath Standard gravity without help. There is a scene where the title character is floating around her quarters due to lower gravity.

[smileyeagle1021]

Everyone understanding each other has been explained by universal translators, in Enterprise they show the progression of the universal translator and how it slowly got more and more efficient, so it isn't inconceivable that the translators got fast enough to be unnoticeable.
As far as the gravity being the last thing to fail, that does make sense. The warp drive is gravity based, so it is possible that the artificial gravity is a byproduct of the creation of the warp field, and it is possible that the gravity effects don't immediately dissipate after the field collapses (this would not explain how the Kilngon bird of prey loses gravity so quickly in Undiscovered Country, but it is already established that Klingons use different technology for generating the warp field, so their warp field may have very different properties).

[Chromatix]

Another lampshade I remember from Enterprise is that there were obscure parts of the ship where the gravity did strange things, so you could in theory walk around them like an Escher painting.

At other times, magnetic boots have been used to allow relatively normal walking (and to make it much easier to film) in a zero-G setting. That was how the assassins moved around in the disabled Bird of Prey in Undiscovered Country, for example. Meanwhile, floating objects (and to a lesser extent dead bodies) are easily done using CGI and traditional model-composition work. It's live actors that can't be done properly without serious effort and expense.

All of this is in the same category as the explanation for why 90% of aliens in Star Trek are humanoids with funny skull attachments.

[Gizmo]

I have to post this even though its only partially relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsGWdGhYKtY (NSFW - minor swearing)

It basically does cover it - anything inconvient gets covered by making stuff up!

I think remember a few trek episodes where they were all managing to walk by grabbing on to stuff in Zero gravity and just sliding around a lot.

And the universal translator is the cure all evil subtitles/difficult languages too - as long as the language was 'lingustic enough and not completely and the brain of the alien was dropping out the right signals it would work. They did play to the 'too alien' card a few times I believe.