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Old 01-13-2012, 05:02 PM   #71
QuantumIguana
Philosopher
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I would think that artificial gravity and inertial dampers are closely related. They are systems that you would want to have their own power. Life support, you can do without for a time, but in battle, a failure of inertial dampers would kill you. But inertial dampers may not be tital nonsense. When you accelerate in your car, you are pushed back into your seat, because the car is being accelerated, but you are only being accelerated indirectly, the seat pushes you forward. But if the whole car was accelerated, you wouldn't feel it. When we want to speed up a space probe, we can sling it around Jupiter. It picks up speed, and Jupiter rotates a very, very tiny bit slower. The thing is, every atom in that space probe is being accelerated simultaneously, so you wouldn't feel the acceleration. If there were a way to build an engine that could do that, you could have rockets that would allow you to have significant acceleration without being squished into your chair.

One funny thing is on TV, a shape ship in orbit will rapidly fall out of orbit when its engines fail. In reality, it would stay in orbit for years, the higher up, the longer it would stay.

Another funny thing is that on TV, when life support fails, people begin to die immediately. In reality, it would take a while before they even began to notice that the air was getting stuffy.
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