Re: Ok, major problem: staircases are major headaches!

>From: Steven <steven.james.1@??????????.??.uk>
>Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2006 20:33:57 +0100
>
>Well I've come up with another issue about this..
>
>Ok, a SJ ship, made purely for Space travel and thus designed for gravity
>planes...
>Say the lower "upside down" deck was your galley, below the gravity plane.
>
>Think what happens when it docks at say, the Rock of Bral...or
>Waterdeep...BAM! all your upside down furniture/goods...pile drives THROUGH
>your hull...or at least goes SPLAT on the hull.

Firstly the Rock of Bral is nothing like Waterdeep, so we need to look at 
them both separately.

You may well not realise that the gravity on the Rock of Bral works in a 
plane - exactly like the gravity on any spelljamming spaceship. Instead of 
coming at the Rock from above and landing on top of it (which I'm pretty 
sure is illegal or at least viewed as hostile) ships approach Bral along its 
gravity plane. So the helmsman makes his gravity plane line up with that of 
Bral and then slowly comes in along the Rocks gravity plane. No problem for 
any Spelljamming ship.

Waterdeep on the other hand is a port city on a groundling world. Not only 
do you have to make sure everything on a reverse gravity deck is secure, you 
also have to worry about weather during the landing (storms don't usually 
exist on places like Bral) and after you get into the sea (I believe that 
local law requires you to land out at sea and approach Waterdeep on the 
surface).

A ship with reverse gravity decks could spend all of its time trading at 
places like Bral and avoid all large worlds where they have to fight gravity 
and the weather during landing. I think it is part of the reason that 
grounding-worlds are not part of the spacefaring community - they are harder 
to get to.

Finally the idea of a chair or table "pile driving" through the bottom of a 
ships hull is a bit daft. Ships are designed to be *much* stronger than 
normal furniture.

I previously mentioned that doors on reverse gravity decks could be extended 
upwards to the ceiling (so they worked upside down). The same sort of 
concept could be applied to other fixtures and fittings. All lockers could 
be attached to walls (so they could be accessed upside down) and could be 
subdivided with lots of ropes to tie things in. Tables could have legs that 
extend out of the top of the table and go up to the ceiling (so that they 
fix the table to the ceiling as well as the floor). Benches could be tied to 
the walls when not in use (and could be untied from either way up and placed 
on the floor or ceiling). Sailors can sleep in hammocks - these can be taken 
down and stored in lockers (when not in use) and also work both ways up.

What you have to remember is that spacefarers have been living with this for 
centuaries and that they don't use the same sort of stuff as groundlings. It 
is *us* real-life people that are confused about reverse-gravity decks - 
spacefarers don't give it a seconds thought - they know exactly what to do.

Goods and equipment might be damaged if they were fragile, but hey - here is 
a solution - store the fragile things on the normal gravity decks and store 
non-breakable things on the lower (reverse gravity) decks. If those things 
are strapped in securely they should be OK. Different types of goods would 
be secured using straps nets bags and other devices.

>TO me it seems this is an issue that needs sorting, it's inherently screwy
>and makes Spelljamming not very practical.

If you had a caravan or camper van, you would get used to securing equipment 
to stop it bouncing about. I already mentioned this earlier. As for people - 
all you have to do is bring them up to the non-reverse gravity decks. And if 
you are about to land, your captain should have ordered all hands on deck 
anyway! Take a camper van on a stock car racing track and things might 
bounce about too much, but drive on a normal road under normal conditions 
and you should find that your equipment storage devices can take the strain. 
The same sort of logic should apply to a spelljamming ship - it is designed 
to have reverse gravity decks.

>When I rebuilt the squidship I found about 2' of the main cargo hold would
>be above the gravity plane. It just wouldn't be tall enough (8' ceiling
>iirc) if I moved the floor up, and not rebuilding it all again *cry*.

Why did you move the deck away from the gravity plane? Why not leave it 
where it originally was?

If you are saying that the original plans don't work when done as a 3d model 
then why not just assume that the position of the deck *is* the location of 
the gravity plane. That way however high or low the deck needs to be, it 
will always be *exactly* in the right place (I believe that this is what the 
original SJ designers did).

>I ended up deciding that because of this a small space below the cargo hold
>would be *sealed shut*, why? Wlel it' s aballast hold, to offset weight of
>the ram...now what's the problem with a ballast hold in SJ? Gravity planes!
>So you have a hold full of sand and bricks, and the gravity reverses? Oh
>my..that's gonna hurt...so I sealed it, no hatch.

Hang on - nobody told you to put the ballast there. Ships only need ballast 
to avoid being too boyant, so if a spelljamming ship is not going to land in 
water it doesn't need balast. You don't need to offset the weight of a ram 
as the ship is not floating. The ram just needs to be designed to transer 
the force evenly backward through the structure of your ship.

You need to have hatches into the areas of the ship that are not used for 
crew or storage. Someone might need to crawl around down there to fix 
things, waterproof the hull or search for vermin.

>I'm sorry but I think really, gravity needs fixed to be "normal" when a 
>helm
>is in operation, from bottom of ship up. *scratches head, shrugs*
>This issue would totally KILL many ship designs, whale ship, lol, or
>asteroid bases of hm forget name of the very tall nautloid-like vessel.
>You encounter a bigger vessel of asteroid, and you are going to kill many
>folk and wreck the ship.
>
>I LIKE the idea of a gravity plane but the practicalities...urf?

You are thinking too much. Gravity doesn't need to be normal. You just have 
to accept that solutions to reverse gravity problems do not use real life 
physics. When you start applying "normal" logic (or should I say "groundling 
logic") and do things like giving ships ballast, you are creating your own 
problems.

Nobody ever questions the logic of a flying carpet or a genie in a bottle. 
We all know that they are impossible. We have to give spelljammer the same 
suspention of believe that other fantasy things get - it isn't science 
fiction and can't hold up under scientific scruitiny.

These things were addressed in the original boxed set. Ships approach each 
other on the same gravity plane to stop crew from either ship falling off. 
People don't fall off of the bottom of the Rock of Bral because Prince Andru 
isn't daft enough to try to land it! Etc etc etc.

David "Big Mac" Shepheard