Coriolis force and predicted effects?

snip Interplanetary ships will need be
smaller and spin faster to get the same amount of gravity. I forget my
star trek lore as to how the manage to get their magical gravity to
work. That stuff may never be around. Personally I think that what will limit ships speed in the first few centuries is the maximum acceleration the human body canendure. This means a ship will probably spend half of the journey constantly accelerating and the other half slowing down, rather then a one-off initial push and a long 0-G travel which would require gravity simulation systems. The ships can easily obtain their gravity by acceleration (and by deceleration) and will be in 0-G only for very short period of time, like at the turning point midway. Probably no more than a few hours if that. Incidentally this means that spaceships will be tower-like structures, travelling toward their "top" and with the engines at the "bottom", this regardless if they are accelerating or decelerating, for most of the time. People will be standing with their heads pointing toward the direction of travel and their bodies parallel to it.The horizontal ships that travels like an ocean liner with people standing perpendicular to it (star trek style) will probably never exist, since you get a free simulatedgravitational pull along one axis would be totally daft spend what will necessarily be a lot of energy to turn that axis, as one or the other matters very little. It was done like that on TV just because it was less disorientating for the audience IIRC... Of course, speaking of "real" space ship here, the kind that could maintain a regular service within the solar system. Exploration, experimental and pioneer's crafts of the kind we are likely to see this century may not work that way, but then they will be only manned by trained specialists who would adapt to whatever conditions are required by the equipment available at the time. As soon as the conditions for a regular inter-system traffic will exist and space travel will become a matter of business rather than scientific exploration ships will travel as above, because the max acceleration the human body can endure is much lower than the max acceleration even existing engines can produce. It is of course possible that special craft will be designed to travel faster than that, with the crew protected by special dumping equipment (amniotic fluid type of cells would allow a considerably higher acceleration for instance) but then the last thing they'll need is more gravity! :) Cheers, Claudio