The Spin Stops Here

Because I'm not going with rotational gravity after all. (And because Bill O'Reilly's lawyers need some exercise.)

In the paper I got the idea of metric-patching from, objects inside a ship with a metric-patching engine are described as accelerating with it, "in a weightless state of free fall", which presumably means that they retain their ordinary inertia relative to the ship's frame (basically, the ship has become the sole "geodesic" reference frame with any meaning directly relevant to its occupants). It might be possible to induce a topology, within the spherical frame of the ship, that causes directional acceleration for the occupants—true artificial gravity—even while the metric-patching is active. Presumably it uses a very different topology than a non-metric patching ship's artificial gravity; it'd probably also not be a function of the metric-patching, but an independently created effect.

Still, the speculation was useful, in that it got me thinking about zled ships' layout and dimensions. It made me figure out how much volume it takes to hold a given collection of missiles and parasite craft...and large predators. Eventually I get a ship with a diameter of 61.49 meters, which sounds tiny till you crunch the numbers and notice that means a volume of 121,723.57 m³. It masses about 8,100 megagrams. Its parasite-craft are 7.12 meters in diameter, while its entry vehicles are 8.21. I get the volume numbers and masses by comparing the mass and volume (usually fudged a bit) of real-world craft, compared to the volume of my ships; I'm keeping some of 'em close to the chest but I will say the entry vehicle is approximately the volume of Virgin Galactic's "Spaceship Two"—since it's an 8-seater space-plane.