THE EXPANSE
GO WATCH IT!
No stupid gimmicky "artificial gravity" horseshit, the "gravity" is caused by acceleration and deceleration.
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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That's why I prefer hard SciFi like The Expanse books, where science is a main driver to life and motivations to drive the story.
I find not many things are destroyed unless integral to the plot but there are times where it does because the story wanted it to. I think its more incommon with video games though as it makes a nice alternate gameplay thing to have in.
In Star Trek IV, The Undiscovered Country, exactly that happened. It is kind of a unique scene, because it had to be a bitch to film.
The Undiscovered Country is VI. Star Trek IV is The Voyage Home. Both are great, anyways.
Gravity is a very dense liquid. Generator makes it in big batches at a time and it just stays there for long even after the generator is gone. After the battle is done and everything is repaired, they just top up the pool and all is good.
Adrian Tchaikovsky has some sci-fi books that make use of this idea.
Even when the life support systems have completely lost power, everyone is dying, etc. Gravity is the one system too critical to reroute.
Admit it, you wanted to ask which movies and shows have done it. Instead of asking for people to tell you what the correct answer is, it’s far more effective to post the wrong answer, and wait for the flood of answers to arrive.
Ah, Murphy's Law in action.
Someone has spent a lot of time on Linux forums
Production costs!
The expanse did this well because they used acceleration not artificial gravity.
Expanse did it amazingly imo, it also adds some realism into a otherwise very fictional story, which makes it somewhat easier to vibe with it.
Gawwwd, the scene where mid fight there are unsecured wrenches floating around was so beautifully tense.
"Captain, we were hit by a Class IV Photon torpedo in the aft. The production budget exploded!"
And magnetic shoes.
That was such a nice touch and just cost some red leds. I'm the books they spend a lot of time on the float (to expensive to burn all the time). The way the TV show got around it all was great
Don't forget the sound, that clunk with every step is what sold it as real.
Just flip around halfway and start slowing down! Free acceleration / deceleration gravity.
They actually do that in The Expanse.
That would be why I brought it up, yes.
Oh ok, got you
Who else is thinking of that one scene near the start of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country?
Or Star Trek: First Contact, when Picard, Worf, and redshirt Neil McDonough testt out their zero G combat training, further cementing the fact that Star Trek only remembers that space has no gravity when it's relevant to the plot.
They do throw things out the airlock an awful lot. Though, somehow, Borg don’t have the strength to stop it but Beverly Crusher does.
Beverly Crusher fucked a ghost. She can do anything.
Good ol' Blazin Bev
My wife abused star trek of being a soap opera at some point. At first I thought, maybe she's just showing up at the worst possible time?
No. It's all of the time. Every episode has some weird soapy bullshit. Beverly fucking a ghost, LaForge fucking a hologram, Riker fucking anything with genitals INCLUDING a hologram. Everybody be fuckin. That's not even the soapiest thing. Voyager is basically Soaps in space.
I love classic trek, but guys I think it's a soap opera.
That was my first thought and I am having trouble thinking of additional examples.
Doylist explanation: it would be too expensive for the FX department.
As it happens, the same worldbuilding project I mentioned in another post here sort of addresses this. The same aliens mentioned there don’t use artificial gravity at all. Being arboreal creatures they’re well suited to microgravity and can happily live permanently in zero G. Upon meeting humans and learning that we want artificial gravity (specifically centrifugal gravity), they wonder why we spent all the effort to get away from gravity only to spend even more effort to bring it back.
Since human orbital colonies take the form of O’Neil cylinders, you can cut off the gravity by halting the cylinder’s rotation. If stopped abruptly enough this would cause a lot of damage initially as objects go flying. It would also put the terrestrial, bipedal humans at a disadvantage compared to the aliens with five prehensile extremities.
Gravity is on a separate subsystem & power supply, because without gravity people couldn’t reasonably move and fix the rest of the ship, so even when compared to general life support, it’s the most critical function and the most isolated.
And production cost.
"Gravity plating!" As long as there is floor, you're good.
Magnetic shoes?
I’m glad somebody else caught this, it always irritated me in Enterprise when they insisted that it was a gravity generator and not just plating.
On a space station more than a space battle, but Titan AE had a scene that made good use of this. The station is old, and early in the scene the gravity generator goes on the fritz, causing everyone to float until some percussive maintenance gets it working again. When bad guys show up Matt Damon shoots the generator to cause some confusion and let him escape faster by pushing off toward the exit.
Cough, Undiscovered Country.
They did in the first episode of Transformers Animated. Granted, that was a cartoon, which made it infinitely easier to have them float in zero gravity than a live action movie.
That's the episode where for some reason the Deception jets turn into triangles and after sleeping for 6 million years Optimus wakes and just says "thanks" and throws Teletran-1 a thumbs up and also Casey Kasem is there right
If it were expected to be more than a 1 in 1000 risk, they would probably have handles on the walls and ceilings to help move about during an emergency.
Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country did it, even making it a point during the Trial ;-)