I use outdated technology just for fun, listen to crappy music, and watch a lot of horror movies. Expect posts about These Things. I talk a lot.
Check tags like Star Trek Archive and Media Piracy to find things I share for others.
favorite bit about Star Trek is how because of how television is produced on earth and not in space the writers had to decide that the artificial gravity is always 100% the last thing on a ship to ever fail, no matter how damaged the ship is. The whole ship could literally be dead, motionless, and leeching heat to the void, and the artificial gravity will still work.
Unless it's directly sabotaged like in Undiscovered Country.
And sometimes they inexplicably make it part of the plot, like Disaster, when the turbolift falls, even though that's the literal stupidest place to have gravity...
If we take this idea of always-on gravity seriously, one must assume it's some sort of independent, perpetually self-sustaining system that runs across the entire ship - I wouldn't blame them for not being able to be selective on what parts of the ship it affects.
Right, but it also gets really weird, at that point. Normally, science fiction talks about artificial gravity like it comes from the floor, but to cover the entire ship and not have weird variations from place to place, it needs to originate a fair distance "down."
And that probably means some random dude in a shuttlecraft follows the Enterprise around with a modified tractor beam aimed at it. And because the other powers seem to work the same way, they presumably use a similar system, meaning that there's either "shadow combat" of just these guys brawling whenever we see ships fighting, or they're basically a class of exploited workers who all know each other by name, because they see their "enemy" counterparts far more often than any colleagues and have nothing better to do than make friends, sort of like how the United States Navy's officers used to have a reputation for hanging out with other navies instead of Americans at international functions.
I do think that's overthinking it a touch haha, like surely engineering work is involved, but I can totally imagine it as some sort of perpetual gyroscopic mechanism that they've devised some way of evenly distributing its energy throughout a space, a system so simple and perfect that it would sooner outlive the heat death of the universe than break on its own with no external sabotage.
Would be really funny if one of the shows just went out of its way and did something goofy like "oh, that little crystal in a box there? That's the gravity crystal, yeah. It maintains the gravity. Uhhh crystalline resonance frequencies converted into gravitronic pulses via gyroscopic distributers, you know. First year in starship engineering type stuff."
and then have an episode about how everyone in the galaxy pilfers and exploits this one particular planet all the gravity crystals come from because that's what Star Trek does baybeeee
I mean, sure, you could work it like that. But my way lets you ignore the awful writing and acting in a lot of the shows, and provides ideas for shows about the international brotherhood of gravity folks, who almost certainly have strong opinions on the group that tweaks the universal translators to homogenize experiences of alien (especially enemy) cultures by choosing a flatter and more stereotypical vocabulary...
But yes, they absolutely also pillage the planet, while ignoring the civil war going on around them, because something-something Prime Directive and valuable trading partners. Which they'll do to stop the Romulans from getting in and...doing the same thing.
