How about instead of pars and forcefields, they turn off the gravity and leave the prisoner suspended in mid air out of reach of anything they could push against to get free?

strike that. If the inmate hit his or herself on the head or something, they could drift in that direction.

still, there's something to it, methinks.

I think something similar to this was done in "Outland".

That's assuming, of course, that the artificial gravity field on a starship can be "zoned" like lighting or air conditioning. . . . If the inmate hit his or herself on the head or something, they could drift in that direction.If you push against a fixed object like a wall, you'll tend to go off in the opposite direction due to the action-reaction principle. That happens whether there is or isn't gravity. It's just that, under the influence of gravity, there's more resistance because of friction (with the floor or ground, usually). But if you "hit yourself on the head," that doesn't propel you anywhere. There's no outside force acting to change your velocity. Am I missing something?

like if you were to interweave your fingers above your head and struck yourself in a downward motion, I think you'd move down in the absence of gravity. Maybe there's something with Newtonian physics that I'm not getting but it seems to me that if you were suspended and struck by anything, you'd drift in the direction of the trajectory of the object hitting you. Like if you were suspended in zero-g and someone threw you a football and caught it or were struck by it, The football's kinetic energy would be transferred to you would move much more slowly than the football because you have more mass than the football and would take more energy to move you.

^The force of pulling your arms down to smack yourself in the head will act on the rest of your body to pull you up, and the two motions will mostly cancel each other out.

They say most astronauts barf sooner or later. So who's gonna clean it up?

Then there's the Space Rights of Space Prisoners.

Actually, in a weightless or low-gravity environment, you could propel yourself through the air in much the same way birds fly, if you had wings with a large enough surface area strapped to your body. When large orbiting commercial space stations and permanent moonbases become a reality, zero-g or low-g flying with strap-on wings might well become a popular sport. The idea was presented in very plausible detail in Robert Heinlein's short story "The Menace From Earth."

Of course, space prisoners wouldn't be given wings.

They say most astronauts barf sooner or later. So who's gonna clean it up?

Then there's the Space Rights of Space Prisoners.

they're prisoners of the Imperial Galactic Regime. They have no rights.

So, if you're in the depths of space, nowhere near the gravitational influence of a planetary body, you could feasibly use the air to "swim" around? Oh, you're talking about micro-gravity (eg, Earth orbit, moonwalking etc.)

So, if you're in the depths of space, nowhere near the gravitational influence of a planetary body, you could feasibly use the air to "swim" around? Oh, you're talking about micro-gravity (eg, Earth orbit, moonwalking etc.)In the moon's one-sixth gravity, human muscle power should be sufficient for flying with a properly engineered pair of wings. In the Heinlein story I mentioned, Moon tourists fly inside a huge natural volcanic cavern that's been sealed airtight and pressurized to Earth-normal atmosphere.

And I assume today's astronauts are issued airsickness bags with some kind of adhesive mouth seal. You don't want floating vomit getting into the machinery. Besides, it's REALLY gross.

Just have your brig on the other side of the external airlock. No problem of prisoners attempting to escape that way.....

Barf bags AND diapers will be required! :eek:

they'd have to be naked.

ANY item of clothing could be used to impart motion. Second law of motion, right?

For that matter, I think simply puffing might be enough to make one drift to a wall. Might take time, but...

Now, a FOCUSED zero-g field, that might be something.

And yes, there was something like this in Outland, IIRC they were kept in suits and near vacuum. I recall the guy killed in lockup made quite a mess...

I think it was the Aurthur C. Clarke book "The Sands Of Mars" where one character mentioned that if you didn't make it form one handhold to another, you could always 'spit' you way to a handhold. Kinda' messy, but it should work. :lol:

David.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, didn't Stargate SG1 have an episode where the baddie of the week had a jail cell that consisted of a corridor aprox 30 feet long, and the wall at the end of the corridor became the floor at the bottom of a 30 ft shaft when they turned on the gravity.

You could do nasty things to prisoners by ramping up the gravity. ie turn the gravity up to about 5Gs under their bed so they can't fight when you enter the cell.

Or install gravity in the ceiling as well and randomly changing which surface became the floor......

I can't remember if it was Arthur C. Clarke or Jerry Pournelle/Larry Niven that had a character that found himself stuck in the middle of a room and had to strip and throw his clothes to get to a wall. I'm thinking this may have been an anecdotal comment by a character in "Rendezvous With Rama" or something from "The Mote in God's Eye"?

Of course, all these imaginative artificial-gravity scenarios assume a priori that future technology will enable us to switch gravity on and off and control it as easily as we use a light dimmer.

Except that gravity doesn't work like that. It's a fundamental force of the universe, but it isn't a form of energy. We probably all remember those stretched-rubber-sheet models illustrating how a star or planet creates a "gravity well" around itself. Gravity is a function of mass, a bending or warping of space-time around an object. It's not something you can switch on and off, or block the way lead shielding blocks X-rays. (Sorry, Professor Cavor!)

What a starship would need is some sort of man-made energy field that has the same effect as gravity. I suppose it's a case of "to-may-to, to-mah-to."