Gravity in the Re-imagined Series

An article from Science in the Re-imagined Series

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(Much of this topic is derived from information in an article on the subject on Wikipedia. Not all of Battlestar Wiki's contributors are rocket scientists.)

Of course, it's very practical for humans, who evolved in gravity, to have it aboard their ships.

Cinematically, it also makes it much easier for The Powers that Be to keep production costs down by not having to simulate weightlessness in the Re-imagined Series.

That doesn't mean we can let the Colonial Fleet get away with just having artificial gravity without some explanation, especially given Ron D. Moore's realistic science fiction principles of his show. From a science fiction perspective, this has always been the hardest "technology" to explain away in a show. Most shows don't even bother unless the temporary loss of artificial gravity would make a good plot complication.

Throwaway graphics in the upper right corner of this computer display shows terms relating to the artificial gravity in a Raptor.

So far, the only information acknowledging the use of artificial gravity in the series comes from a few close-ups of computer displays, where the terms "Gravity control" and "synthetic gravity" are shown (look to the upper right of the picture shown).

From what our scientists have theorized here on the real-world Earth, you can generate gravity from several ideas:

• Rotation of the spacecraft to generate centrifugal forces within a spacecraft.

Remember the playground merry-go-rounds of your youth? Same principle. In fact, one of the Fleet's ships uses this form of artificial gravity when it feels like it: the Space Park. Viewers can get a good view of this ship in motion when the Fleet leaves Ragnar Anchorage in the Miniseries.

• Keeping the ship at constant acceleration, with the crew standing in the opposite direction of acceleration.

Same principle that every astronaut experiences as their rocket launches into space and accelerates. In this principle, you won't take your hands off the throttle, keeping the ship's engines on at all times.

• Place something with a lot of mass within your ship.

This isn't artificial gravity, but the real thing. But there is the matter of the energies required to move your ship, the large gravity well that wants to attract other objects into your ship's general direction, and the shape of your ship. Gravity just works, pulling from every direction, so you would need a round ship to keep from strange changes in gravity aboard a ship. Worst of all, the amount of fuel needed to move a ship with a local mass concentration would be really, really high.

• Use tidal forces.

Stretch a tether with a small mass between a large gravity source and the ship you want. Cheap, fuel-free, and reliable. There's the matter of actually being able to travel somewhere besides planetary orbit without losing gravity, however.

• Fake gravity by using another classic force, magnetism.

The big term for this is diamagnetism, or, more specificially for this application, diamagnetic levitation. Based on the technologies we've seen in the Re-imagined Series (such as their use of magnetism for landing and launching Vipers), this principle has the most viability, but it also fraught with huge problems in application.

Everything has a magnetic attraction, but most objects (a human body included) has so little magnetism that we don't really think about it. This principle could be used to force everything in a particular direction. But, first off, using magnets together usually makes objects float between them, not drop, so you have to figure out how to angle things for the proper effect. However, high magnetic field concentrations are probably not very healthy] in the long term.

If the writers have to dive back into the old fictionalized bag of tricks, you could consider these fanciful notions for keeping your deck crews on the deck:

• Use rotational gravity.

This variation of centrifugal gravity generation has been done in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (the crew compartment inside the Discovery spun) and the venerable TV show "Babylon 5" (the cylindrical space station spun on its longitudinal axis).

• Simulate gravity with force fields.

The central spaceship in the TV show "Andromeda" uses "gravity generators". The "Star Trek" saga has a similar idea. This concept seems also to be a slap in the face of realistic SF concepts since it's a completely fanciful concept with no basis in scientific plausibilty at present.

• Spacetime manipulation.

The ability to do Faster Than Light travel indicates the Colonials have the advanced technology to manipulate the fabric of spacetime. This same ability might be harnessed to provide artificial gravitation. However, the connection between the use of Galactica's FTL drives (which are inactive until "spun up") makes this idea inconsistent with story elements where the FTL drives must be prepped before using. Also, this idea is also fanciful in its basis in known scientific fact or theory.

So, there are no definitive answers to the issue of what comes up and must come down in Battlestar, and the concept of artificial gravity in the show has yet to be explained anytime soon by the writers. Maybe a Raptor will lose their gravity on a mission one day in an episode, and the writers will have to have the characters curse about the issue.

What about the flight pods on Pegasus?

Unlike Galactica's, each flight pod on the advanced battlestar Pegasus are divided along its length into two landing bays. In "The Captain's Hand," viewers see Vipers inverting (relative to the battlestar) and landing on the bays "upside down." Is artificial gravity to be credited with this?

The answer is more likely magnetism. Vipers are launched with a magnetic catapult, and (as seen in "The Hand of God") can magnetically mate using their landing skids to a metal surface (in this case, the interior of a freighter). Like gravity, magnetism works in any direction, and takes little to maintain. Confirming this idea is a scene from the miniseries. As Colonial Heavy 798 lands in Galactica's port flight pod to offload passengers for the decommissioning ceremony, we see two spacesuited figures working on the deck. The two crewmembers are floating, suggesting that artificial gravity is not in use. Reinforcing this are the combat landings done by Vipers. The fighters bounce very noticeably at high speeds but, unlike a rock skipping across a pond, the Viper bounces less ballistically, suggesting that magnetism, a weaker force than gravity, is at work. How the Vipers get from the upside-down flight deck to the right-side-up hangar deck, however, has yet to be seen.