Inertial Dampening System

An essential safety feature of any interstellar or even interplanetary vessel. The speed at which spacecraft move has serious implications for the safety of the crew. Without some form of protection, the Human body (and that of almost every other race) would be incapable of resisting the forces generated by the impulse drive, and would be pulverized. Starships prevent this from happening by using a series of variable-symmetry forcefields which absorb the inertial forces. This network of forcefields is known as the inertial damping system (IDF), and without it even the most basic interstellar journey would be impossible.

The inertial dampers operate in all the habitable areas of a vessel. In most craft, they generate a low-level forcefield of around 75 millicochranes. In order to maintain an inertia-free environment as the forces acting on the ship change, the IDF attempts to predict the amount of force that will be generated by each starship manoeuvre. The computers then adjust the strength of the forcefields to absorb the appropriate amount of inertial force. The computers on most ships can cope with the majority of manoeuvres if they are programmed into its data banks, hence the use of standardized attack and evasive patterns in most military craft. In a well-maintained ship, the crew should be mostly unaware of acceleration. There is a time-lag, but at impulse speeds this is only in the region of 300 milliseconds. The inertial dampers are less effective when the ship is hit by weapons fire, or if the flight controller initiates extremely sudden or sharp manoeuvres, as well as particularly innovative ones.

On a Galaxy-class starship, power for the inertial dampers is provided by six generators, two in the engineering hull on deck 33, and four in the primary hull on deck 11. A further six generators provide an emergency backup: three in each hull. Each of the generators has a cluster of twelve 500 kilowatt graviton polarity sources, which feed a pair of 150 millicochrane subspace field-distortion amplifiers. Under normal circumstances, the primary generators operate in 48-hour shifts with a 12-hour rest period for maintenance and degaussing. The graviton polarity sources are rated for 2,500 hours of operation before the superconductive elements require routine servicing. The inertial damping system uses its own network of molybdenum-jacketed waveguides, which are parallel with those used by the structural integrity field. The inertial dampers are conducted by synthetic gravity plates.