I get that they use centrifugal force to exert outward "gravity." But how would that work? Would the inside of the ships be cylinders, and people would be above, and to the side of you? Also, would you get a massive headache from all of the spinning, or is the actual inside of the spaceship not spinning? Lastly, if you had, say, a pilot with a mounted steering wheel, would the pilot be spinning rapidly with the ship, making space travel in a straight line nearly impossible?
If you're going to write science fiction, I'd advise learning at least high-school level college-track physics. If you knew HS level physics, you wouldn't have asked any of those questions.
Well, I'll be hand-waving away a ton of stuff (making a mockery of the genre on purpose), but want a few things to be accurate. If I was making true sci-fi, I'd definitely learn it all, but it'll be satire. I mean, hell, my ships are going to be powered by AA batteries.
If you hand-wave away routine physics like Newtons' three laws, well, a lot of readers will close the book right there. Yes, you can have inertia-less space drives and other such magic, but you can't have ordinary objects violate old Newton's laws by authorial oversight. Learn a little physics. It's fun, and will enrich your life. Find out what's so special about a car that can pull 2Gs in a turn on a skid pad, and other cool stuff.
They start spinning, maybe with rockets firing for a few seconds/minutes. And then they keep spinning because nothing's slowing them down
The title says space stations, but you mention "ships" in the OP. Which is it? Because there are going to be different answers based on what you mean. The Stanford torus is a pretty straightforward concept, but it's designed as a space station orbiting another body, not a ship in its own right. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_torus The artist's depiction in this article does a good job of illustrating what the concept would look like in practice.
Depends on what you want the design to have and how many moving parts, really. Launch and thrusters would require the centrifugal part of the ship to remain locked and at low gravity while achieving desired velocity. Any acceleration changes (i.e. from thrusters, planets, gravity generators, stars) would throw off the centrifugal acceleration and send your characters crashing around. After achieving desired forward velocity and calculated gravitational pull from objects which would be passed or in the area, then the centrifugal core of the ship could be enabled. Basically, part of the station needs to be accelerated to a velocity around a central point. The outer rim of the circular vessel needs to be moving at a specific velocity in respect to the desired negative outward acceleration. If you wanted the Earth average, it would need to be around -9.81m/s^2. Motor for central core would have computers and sensors to maintain structural integrity and upkeep velocity spin of core to allow for proper centrifugal acceleration. Needs proper power source to move that much material initially, but upkeep would require little power due to the vacuum of most areas of space being in the 1e^-008 mbar range. Upkeep of centrifugal force would be difficult if for some reason your ship passed through a semi gaseous cloud placing vacuum in the 1e^-003 mbar range due to external resistance. Computers would monitor for this and adjust required propulsion accordingly, but you would definitely need some electrical and propulsion engineers to deal with just these systems. In all likelihood, a ship of this magnitude would require a rather large crew to maintain. Much of it being monitoring systems, I would say a lot of electrical and mechanical engineers. Outer ring structure needs to have proper support to hold in place and keep an exact circular frame in place around central core. Ring structure can't have any semi-circular variations or strain would be caused in the supports and motor. Any additional antenna, or large weight variation on any side of the ring structure would cause degradation and eventual collapse. Must be planar and evenly weighted and balanced. All other compartments that would throw weight and balance off (i.e. a hold, weapons storage) need to be placed in another area of the ship. The larger the centrifugal design, the more tolerance for weight variation. Just some basic stuff though. Mostly simple logic issues. Do you have any more specific questions? What kind of mission is this ship for? The type of mission will dictate the required design of the ship, therefore allowing you to understand what segments of your ship need to be in place.
Space ships = No need to make artificial gravity. They are ships, not houses. Space stations = You make them wheel-like and put them to spin. "Up" is in the origo. "Down" is 180° of that. And that is all the snacks I'll use to feed this thread. Except that while making parody you need more knowledge than in making fiction unless you are making parody of yourself. Clueless parody maker usually becomes parody of his/her writings at some level. I suppose it is not funny. Sometimes it is better to google first if the intention is not to troll.
I don't know why you would want to go on a voyage that could take years in a ship without some sort of gravity. That's like saying an ocean going ship doesn't need beds. This is a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gravity The primary limitation is how fast you can spin the wheel and not get major inner ear problems. The limitations are based on RPM, but the actual amount of downward force is a product of RPM and diameter. That's why a big slow wheel is more comfortable than a small fast wheel for the same amount of force. In 2001 the big space station spins slowly and probably has a reasonable amount of artificial gravity, while the inner drum on the Discovery spacecraft spins more quickly, but probably produces less 'gravity' so it isn't too sickening. Ships are often depicted as having rotating drums or spinning external flyweights, but there is no practical reason a ship with a tubular interior couldn't just be spun along its long axis when in transit and then stopped when it gets somewhere and needs to do other things dock with another ship. 2001 and 2010 are really good movies for depicting this stuff.
Or you could simply keep the engines running, and not only have gravity (without the inconveniences of angular momentum and Coriolis forces) but also get where you're going faster. Just give me a fusion reactor and an ion drive, and we've got fractional G's for the whole trip, except maybe at turn-around.
An ion drive might be enough to keep juice in a glass, but probably not. We don't have any idea how to make a space ship that could produce constant, reasonable gravity like acceleration for days, weeks or months on end. Even a probable fusion drive would quickly run out of fuel in too short a period to get anywhere. Constant acceleration ship designs, like in Alastair Reynolds books, rely on reactionless drives to produce that much force for years at a time.
You mean you don't have any idea. And I did say fusion reactor, not fusion drive, and "fractional Gs." Ion drives are very reaction-mass efficient. That's why I mentioned them.
No, you just didn't read what I wrote. Your ion drive powered by a fusion reactor would produce so little acceleration you would have a hard time feeling it. Hence the "juice in the glass" reference - the thrust would barely make things settle toward tail of the craft. They work only because they produce that tiny acceleration over very long periods. Then I mentioned a fusion engine that directly converts fuel to thrust at higher G, but even with higher thrust you would fail to have enough fuel to sustain it.
How many ion thrusters do you think I can put on one spaceship? What's the theoretical limit on thrust each ion thruster can produce. I think you're confusing what has been done with what can be done.
You'll have the same problem that chemical rockets have. In order to get more thrust out of a rocket, you have to put more fuel in it, which requires more thrust for the extra fuel. Ion engines would be the same way, in order to add more engines to produce more thrust, you'll need further engines to push those new engines. Of course, there has to be a break-even point, but the scale would be huge. It would certainly take more than a hundred of them, and probably more like a thousand. I could do the math, but I'm estimating. Dawn's engines produced about 1newton of force from 25kW of power (and it doesn't grow linearly so 2 Newtons does not take 50kW, it's more like 100.) We'd have to have some serious advances in power generation to run these things. Nuclear sub engines make about 2000 megawatts, that's not even close to what you'd need, but within the possibility for small fusion engines. The biggest obstacle for all of this would just be practicality. Why? Why build a huge ship just to produce a constant medium acceleration when a short high acceleration followed by coasting is so much easier.
Except existing ion engines already have specific impulse of over 10,0000 (20,000+ for VASIMR), and chemicals rockets max out around 450. That 20-40X difference in ISP makes a huge difference.
Because you eventually get much higher potential top speeds, making ion engines unsuitable for orbital interplanetary missions, but exceptional for interstellar
Specific impulse is the efficiency of the engine, not the maximum output per second. Ion engines are very low thrust, but are good for space because they are so fuel efficient that they can be used for very long periods to produce more change in delta vee than a high thrust engine run for short periods.
One ion engine (given the tech we have now) is low thrust. But it's also small, and low mass: both the engine and it's fuel. So there's no reason to have only one ion engine, or even only one hundred. The key thing is the engine specific impulse. After that, the issues are just engineering and business.
And, as @newjerseyrunner runner already explained, more engines or bigger engines means more mass which means more fuel which is more mass which limits total thrust. Ion engines are low thrust compared to other engine types - it doesn't matter how big you make them. They are a trade off, as are all engine types.
