The Doctor's mobile emitter

Post by **Mikey** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 3:45 pm

Thorin's got the right of it. The AG on a starship obviously doesn't follow what we know of as laws of gravitation, and seems to be very capable of targetting specific areas or spots; as well as having a VERY selective area of effect, far different than the square of the inverse of the distance from the source.

In other words, turn it up to 100g in one spot on the floor, and it doesn't seem like it would affect the ceiling above it or the folks standing around it. That's not the way we understand gravity to work, but that's what's happened on the show.

Post by **Teaos** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 11:07 pm

It doesnt pull down the people next to it but I think it would pull down the roof. After all we see stuff fall from the roof when the ship gets damaged.

Thorin · Post by **Thorin** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 12:30 am

Teaos wrote:It doesnt pull down the people next to it but I think it would pull down the roof. After all we see stuff fall from the roof when the ship gets damaged.

Due to overloads and stretching/contraction, hardly due to g's.

Blackstar the Chakat · Wed Dec 19, 2007 3:19 am

Thorin wrote:
Teaos wrote:It doesnt pull down the people next to it but I think it would pull down the roof. After all we see stuff fall from the roof when the ship gets damaged.
Due to overloads and stretching/contraction, hardly due to g's.

Actually g's are a big part of it, otherwise debris would be floating around the corridors in a demented version of 3D pong.

Captain Picard's Hair · Wed Dec 19, 2007 4:15 am

For that matter, whenever they wanted to capture a person alive, they could simply beam him into the brig, rather than go through the whole dramatic, and unnecessary, procedure of a shipwide manhunt and putting up forcefields all over the place. But, if they did that (or just beam guys in to space or do any of the other "smart" things discussed here), they'd have nothing to make an episode out of. The realities of television production themselves occasionally demand things that don't make as much sense in-universe.

Of course, this logically leads to the limitations of shipboard internal sensors in Trek, being compromised in it's ability to track a person not wearing a commbadge. Since we've seen ("Remember Me," TNG) that the internal sensors can track a person's vital signs from afar, there should be no reason the computer couldn't detect crewman not wearing a badge and follow those heat signatures and other signals around the ship - but here again we have the demands of the plot ramming headlong into common sense.

Post by **Teaos** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 4:37 am

From what we've seen the gravity plating or what ever it is pulls stuff directly down onto it and not from every direction. So there would be no reason why it wouldnt pull the roof down to.

Now if you made parts of the ship have higher gravity and some lower you may in a way make one part of the ship heavier. Now since the impulse engines work by reducing the mass of the ship it could become pretty screwy if one part wieghed a lot more than another. Ships need to be pretty balanced.

Captain Picard's Hair · Wed Dec 19, 2007 4:52 am

Also, objects "above" the ship should be attracted to it due to gravity "leaking" through the hull!

Post by **Teaos** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 4:59 am

That could possibly be explained away by the fact that the gravity plating in the floor above stops the gravity from the floor below bleeding through.

Sionnach Glic · Post by **Sionnach Glic** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 12:06 pm

Of course, this logically leads to the limitations of shipboard internal sensors in Trek, being compromised in it's ability to track a person not wearing a commbadge. Since we've seen ("Remember Me," TNG) that the internal sensors can track a person's vital signs from afar, there should be no reason the computer couldn't detect crewman not wearing a badge and follow those heat signatures and other signals around the ship - but here again we have the demands of the plot ramming headlong into common sense.

Actually, it's possible that the internal sensors on a ship would be far less powerful and effective than the external ones. The external sensors would be needed for all sorts of things, where the only thing the internal ones ever get used for is locating crewmen.

Post by **Teaos** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 12:42 pm

Can they even do that? I though people were found via com badges. I'm sure I remeber them trying to find someone and went to their location only to find the combadge on the table and the person gone.

Post by **Captain Seafort** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 12:53 pm

In Reunion, after Worf removed his badge and went after Duras, the computer told Picard that he wasn't aboard the Enterprise. That may be due to a record of him beaming out however.

Captain Picard's Hair · Wed Dec 19, 2007 5:20 pm

As I said, the computer did track Picard's vital signs from the internal sensors in "Remember Me." It was in Crusher's bubble universe, but she asked the computer do do so (before she realized that she had fallen into Wesley's warp bubble), implying that she expected the computer do be able to do so in the real universe.

Post by **Captain Seafort** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 5:26 pm

That is not, however, evidence that the computer can locate a specific individual - merely that having identified a target it can analyse their vital signs. Take "Court Martial" for example - the computer was unable to locate Finney, but it could track the heartbeat of everyone on the ship and then isolate all but Finney. There's also the fact that Picard was wearing his commbadge, which may have played a role in the computer's analysis.

Post by **Mikey** » Thu Dec 20, 2007 12:10 pm

Captain Picard's Hair wrote:Also, objects "above" the ship should be attracted to it due to gravity "leaking" through the hull!

Even "normal" gravity decreases exponentially with distance - as the square of the inverse of the distance. Anyhting outside the ship would more likely be affected by the ship's own gravity rather than any AG from inside.

As far as pulling down the roof - well, we're assuming that the AG is continuously variable. There is a whole range of "settings" for AG which would be more than enough to trap, hurt, or kill a biped woithout being strong wnough to do structural damage to "Trek materials. Nobody said that local AG would have to be turned to the max - just enough to squish someone.

Thorin · Post by **Thorin** » Thu Dec 20, 2007 5:01 pm

Teaos wrote:From what we've seen the gravity plating or what ever it is pulls stuff directly down onto it and not from every direction. So there would be no reason why it wouldnt pull the roof down to.

Because the strength, distance, and direction can be - and clearly is, otherwise the roof above you would pull you upwards - controlled fully.

Now if you made parts of the ship have higher gravity and some lower you may in a way make one part of the ship heavier. Now since the impulse engines work by reducing the mass of the ship it could become pretty screwy if one part wieghed a lot more than another. Ships need to be pretty balanced.

No... In fact miles off. Gravity has no effect on the mass of a ship. Weight is not mass - increasing gravity increases weight. Mass is a constant throughout the universe that gravity has no effect it. It is the amount of matter in a body. Weight is the product of your mass and the gravity - in space you have no weight; thus are neither heavy nor light.

As Mikey said, putting the gravity up to maximum would probably crush the ship - as the gravity plating can go up to (literally) a billion gs (when it counters lightspeed acceleration). But 20 gs is enough to kill someone and have absolutely no effect on anything. As I said, 10,000 gs can be withstood by modern materials.