It is a tough call, whenever they needed to they could stop the transporter, but at the same time that does wear rather thin. ("Oh look, here's a problem, what do you want to bet the transporter fails.") I don't suppose I would've cared which way the went with it, both have their pros and cons (Why not just have the ship land and save them? You'd have to stop it or make the danger very immediate so that they don't have enough time to make it work, it's essentially the same problem as with the transporter.)

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I suppose it could be interpreted that way, but the explainations have varied a little bit.

IIRC, though, the Minbari propulsion systems were gravity-based, and that's part of the reason their ships had gravity. We weren't given a good description of that, but it's a start of an explanation.

The biggest mistake that writers make when dealing with artificial gravity is the apparent fact that the effect stops right outside the ship. In fact talking to people about this topic shows there is a general misconception that atmosphere=gravity. (Not generally shared by members of this forum, I hasten to add).
Keep the atmosphere in, and you keep the arti-grav in as well.

In fact if you generate a gravity field by any method, its effects would extend far ouside the ship; this is even true of gravity caused by rotation or acceleration (try stepping out of an airlock in an accelerating or rotating ship).

If you had a graviton generator, it would act like a magnet to anything in the vicinity of the ship; the top of the ship would become covered in a layer of space junk.

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Unless, of course, you had some kind of anti-grav technology in the top layer of the ship that neutralized the gravity coming from underneath it.

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Right, maybe a hull made out of Nongravitonium

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As I wrote earlier, understanding the nature of gravity might lead to both technologies: one that amplifies and one that diminishes. You'd want to diminish the gravity effect outside the ship so that debris is not accelerated towards a collision with the vessel. It may also be important to stealth.

I'm not sure what eburacum means that the effect of linear and rotational arti-grav systems. If you step outside a linear accelerating vehicle you suddenly coast weightlessly as you watch the vessel disappear into the distance. If you step outside of a rotating craft you become weightless as your momentum take you away from the vessel. In neither case is artificial gravity maintained outside the structure.

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True, you would retain the momentum you have when you step out of the ship. But the experience would be identical to falling, in your reference frame.
From your own point of view, you would fall down the length of the ship as it accelerates past you and disappears off into the distance. Just hope there are no antennae or radiator fins sticking out as you 'fall' past.
Once again, in your reference frame, you would see the craft moving away from you, getting ever more distant. If you fell through a trapdoor in a rotating craft it would be exactly like falling under gravity in the first instant, although after that you wouldn't accelerate.

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But once you are out the door you are no longer in that reference frame. And in a rotating structure you would not float directly out but tangentally.

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Indeed. But you are in freefall. And imagine stepping out of an airlock at the front end of a ship a mile long which is accelerating at one gee- the ship wiill pass you exactly as if you were in a gravity field, and if you hit any part of the ship as you go past you would experience the same impact as if you were falling from the top to the bottom of a mille high building. Well, centrifugal gravity is quite different to the gravity produced by mass, or by uniform acceleration. Imagine falling through a trapdoor in a rotating habitat, or in a ringworld. Certainly your path would be tangental, but if you compare your position with the trapdoor above your head, it will be something like falling out of a trapdoor in a gravity field. The trapdoor would move with you at first, then curve away as the habitat rotates.
In several other ways the experience would be quite different to falling- but the end result would be the same. Your trajectory takes you away from the rotating habitat and you would need to accelerate to get back.

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Alistair Reynolds uses this phenomenon in one of his books, IIRC; a character falls down a liftshaft in a ship which is accelerating at about one gee; the ship's pilot stops accelerating, and thrusts in reverse until the falling person is stationary with respect to the ship.

And then starts accelerating again...

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Hmmm... Artificial gravity. I guess you could mount a really powerful magnet in the roof, though that could be a somewhat problematic solution. You would have to concider the magnetic properties of every object you bring; some things would fall up, some would fly down, and the acceleration might be rather unintuitive...

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Still, linear acceleration has a limit. You can stay on a planet all your life and still experience 1 gee, but linear acceleration of 1 gee would get you close to lightspeed in a couple days. Rotational arti-grav also has mitigable vector oddities. The point is that acceleration and gravity havesimilar effects but not similar causes.

At least it's better than so-called "utility fog" which is about as useful as velco floors for maintaining bone density while in space.

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Iain M. Banks had a nice twist in the 1st of his Culture Sci-fi books Consider Phlebas. Some characters had a type of anti-grav backpack that somehow worked with the normal 'mass' gravity of ordinary planets, but wouldn't work with the centripetally induced gravity of the constructed orbitals (ie ringworlds).
There was a nice bit where one of the rookies of the party forgot this small fact IIRC! (must re-read those books!).

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Utility fog and smart glue would only be useful if the bone-density problem and other medical symptoms could be fixed by advanced medicine. If humans are going to live in space and on the various worlds of the Solar System and elsewhere, they will need to be medicated to compensate for low gravity and weightlessness. Every planet and moon with a solid surface in the Solar System has lower gravity than our own planet.
And measures will be necessary to counteract radiation damage as well, as far as that is possible.
It is not a very welcoming environment in space; advanced medicine could help to make it a little more welcoming.

The idea of advanced medicine (perhaps including genetic modification, either inheritable or otherwise) seems more likely to me than the prospect of artificial gravity as shown on Star Trek.

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This could do the trick:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamagnetism

But you'ld better not have any body piercings.

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It might play havoc with your hard drive and other magnetic storage media too.

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True, it would probably be more useful for those pods they had on Event Horizons - just something you climb into naked to prevent terminal squishiness whilst your ship is accelerating.

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Centrifuge?

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I was thinking about this and was thinking that a technology able to diminish or amplify gravity (gravitons) would not only be useful for "artificial" or synthetic gravity but would be useful as a star-drive. Use a gravity damper on the bottom and a gravity attractant on the top and point it at the moon and it should be able to pull a vehicle off the earth's surface. Once in space, the vehicle could accelerate by "latching" onto a distant planet or star and accelerate to a significant fraction of c. Dampening (if possible) without attracting would also be very useful in reaction rockets, in the event that gravity amplification is not feasible or possible.

Of course we may need to be careful about developing actual anti-gravity (anti-gravitons). One might want to consider the ramifications of an "Ice-9" scenario where anti-gravity progresses through a mass resulting in the cancellation of gravity or even generating a repulsive force. If this happened to the earth it might end up vaporized as the molten core mechanically explodes when gravity stops compressing it. Perhaps this type of anti-gravity cascade might even reach the sun, resulting in a type of nova. Even one antigraviton reaching a blackhole could be disastrous.

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