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firefly - How does gravity work on Serenity?


When the good ship Serenity is traveling in deep space, the crew experiences what looks like an Earth-normal (or Earth That Was-normal) level of gravity. Is it ever explained how the ship is able to generate artificial gravity? The ship doesn't spin, so rotation is out. Linear acceleration is a possibility, but I think the gravity in the ship pulls in a direction that is perpendicular to the direction the ship is usually traveling in, not opposite, like this method would require.


So: how does she pull it off?


Extra credit: how does she pull it off in the episode "Out of Gas"? Serenity's engine is totally dead, to the extent where not even life support systems are online. Yet Mal still has to valiantly haul himself around on the floor to replace the compression coil, so whatever creates the artificial gravity on Serenity is clearly still going. How?



Answer



Perhaps the answer is found in the following two references:


In the companion volume "Firefly: Still Flying", there is a short story by series writer Jane Espenson called "What Holds Us Down" that describes the various aspects of the gravity rotor and the Honecutt Capacitors that are a part of the system for generating a relative gravity and inertia damping effects throughout the ship.


In the story, Kaylee and Wash are trapped inside a dead Series 1 Firefly in a junkyard, and she uses the capacitors to charge the grav rotor back up. Obviously the capacitors have some residual gravitational "charge".


Also, a careful examination of the "Serenity Blueprints" from QMX show various gravity amplifiers on the ventral side of Serenity that feed the output of the grav rotor around the ship to provide a "down force" relative to the floor of Serenity.



Since both these references were made/created with the blessing/authorization of Joss Whedon, perhaps they should be considered canonical?


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