Artificial Gravity (fiction) - Rotational Gravity

Rotational Gravity

In the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, a rotating centrifuge in the Discovery spacecraft provides artificial gravity. The people would be walking inside the circle; their feet toward the exterior and their head toward the center, the floor and ceiling would curve upwards. A rotating circular set was used in at least one instance to make this effect with the actors always at the bottom; as they walked, the set would be turned to keep the actors at the bottom and prevent them from falling over as they walked up the curved floor. The movie also features a rotating space station.

Larry Niven's novel Ringworld featured a gigantic habitat encircling a star, which created artificial gravity through rotation. Niven also makes a reference to the Coriolis effect when the protagonists see what looks like a giant eye above the horizon. When they get closer, they realise that it is in fact a hurricane, but rotating about an axis parallel to the ground rather than perpendicular to it. Large hurricanes on Earth rotate the way they do due to the Coriolis effect. A number of early Known Space and Man-Kzin Wars stories also make use of rotational gravity, prior to the adoption of "gravity polarizer" technology which generates artificial gravity fields.

In the Gundam universe, gigantic space habitats similar to O'Neill cylinders, called Colonies, are an important aspect to the plot. They spin to generate artificial gravity.

In the anime Cowboy Bebop, the Bebop possesses a ringed area that generates artificial gravity and is often seen being used (with the rest of the ship not rotating).

The book Rendezvous with Rama and the sequels featured an alien construct similar to an O'Neill habitat which was able to generate approximately 0.6g on the intentionally habitable ground section. The plot employed significant use of the difference in strength of artificial gravity as an object approaches the center of the rotating cylinder.

In the television series Babylon 5, the Earth Alliance made extensive use of rotational gravity in its space stations and some larger military vessels, as well as civilian cruise ships. It has been suggested that the cruise ships would alter their rate of spin gradually en route to match the destination, helping to acclimate the passengers to the new gravity they would find upon arrival.

In the stories based on Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, the Unity provided artificial gravity by spinning, though the game made allusions to less conventional technologies developed later on.

In John Varley's Gaian trilogy (Titan, Wizard, and Demon), the title world Gaia, being a torus with a diameter of 1300 kilometers, spins at a rate of one revolution per sixty-one minutes, producing an apparent gravity of one-quarter g.

In Iain M. Banks's Culture series, Orbitals are made ten million kilometres in circumference so that they spin with a rate that gives a natural day/night cycle while the center is in orbit around a star.

In the game Halo: Combat Evolved, the main location of the story is an artificial ringworld that creates artificial gravity by computer-controlled rotational spin (inspired by the aforementioned Larry Niven's novel Ringworld but also uses some form of field or other artificially generated gravity as it is stated in Halo: The Flood, the ring world does not spin nearly fast enough to create the amount of gravity it possesses. "Halo" (or "Installation 04") is approximately 10,000 km in diameter and is eventually destroyed by the same forces keeping it in operation. A fusion explosion weakens part of the ringworld, and centrifugal forces tear the ring apart.