False Prophet said:
How come on whatever Sci-fi show/movie e.g. Startrek, Star Wars, Stargate SG-1, star.*, etc. you never see people struggling to pick up their feet or bouncing around freely on whatever random planet they visit, as though whatever planet happens to have exactly the same as Earth's mass, isn't that one big coincidence?
COST, moolah, production budgets, that's why.
Faking micro-gee on film is ALWAYS, always and without any exceptions whatsoever, MUCH more expensive than adding "artificial gravity" to the list of new toys people have to play with in the future.
The cheapest way to do it, and (if you like "coincidences" how 'bout this one), also the most common way it's done, is through the use of wires that suspend the actors in mid air to either make them look like they're flying, or weightless.
It's such a common method (the use of wires), that it even has a name, "wire work".
"Wire work" is always dangerous. People have been very badly hurt by accidents that occur during a "wire work shot".
The most common injury is to a leg. The actor suspended bends his knee for just a second. Bending his knee makes the wire to the lower part of his leg go slack. The slack wire gets looped around the shin. When the actor panics, and tries to straighten his leg, the wire that's now looped around his shin goes tight, and pivots him head over heels. The momentum built up during the spin YANKS the wire looped around his shin tight and can come very close to severing the lower half of the actor's leg, often cutting clear down to the bone.
This is why insurance companies absolutely HATE actors doing their own wire work, and often simply refuse to insure them. Which means filming comes to a dead stop, because - by law - that actor has to be insured while working on the set.
Wire work generally requires special (and very VERY expensive insurance) to be procured before the start of principal.
There are union laws that apply to wire work that restrict the amount of time anyone can spend in the wires, the presence of a stunt coordinator and stunt crew that have been rated for wire work is required, along with the presence of an ambulance and paramedics before the cameras are allowed to roll.
Forget putting kids in a wire harness. Not only is it a stupid thing to do, there are so many restrictions on doing it that no one in their right mind would.
All of which boils down to money.
It costs a LOT of money to fake zero-gee on film, it's dangerous, and THAT'S the "real" reason that everything from "Buck Rodgers" sparkling space ships to the "Nostromo" to "Darth Vader's Star Destroyer" all have "artificial gravity".
It's not that it never occurred to anyone in Hollywood that "gravity" on another world might be something other than 1.0 gee. It's just that it's too expensive to show that on film. Thus all space ships in the future have artificial gravity, and on all planets visited in the future people weigh the same as they do on Earth.
(And before you ask, at the moment, doing it with pure CGI is still more expensive than using wires, which is why wire work is more common than pure CGI for this kind of thing).
