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Inspired by the question How does the Death Star gravity work?, how does gravity work on the Millennium Falcon and other ships its size? The passengers are not strapped in and regularly move around just easily as they would on a planet with Earth's gravity.

The answer for the Death Star refers to gravity often being "coreward" (presumably taking advantage of the natural gravity an object of such substantial mass would have), but that doesn't apply for a small ship. So how is gravity accomplished?

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  • On your reference to the other question: I don't believe that there would often be much "natural" gravity to take advantage of... Size has nothing to do with gravity. Mass does. A large percentage of the DS is open/empty space (virtually no mass). Especially if you were in one of the inner portions of the station, your gravity would have to be largely caused by the gravity boosters. I want to say the science/discovery channel has something interesting on this years ago... Commented Jan 15, 2016 at 21:36
  • @DangerZone You're correct; I just changed it to mass instead of size. As Yoda put it, “Size matters not.” Commented Jan 15, 2016 at 21:47
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    Any time you see people walking around in a spaceship in any science fiction universe and you know they aren't in a centrifuge, you can assume the ship has gravity generators.
    – user45623
    Commented Jan 16, 2016 at 0:31

1 Answer 1

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The following information about gravity generation is offered by the Force Awakens: Incredible Cross-Sections factbook

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Gravity on the Millenium Falcon seems to be generated by the ship's "Acceleration Compensator" (not shown) and "Auxiliary acceleration compensator" (seen below in the image from Star Wars: Incredible Cross-Sections).

It's worth noting that given that both the top and bottom gun turret sit back-to-back, it stands to reason that their gravity runs in a different direction to the rest of the ship, top-to-bottom rather than parallel to the lower plane.

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Escape pods have built-in gravity field generators and use tractor technology to hold occupants in place. We simply assume that gravity goes where it's needed, even if it's not obvious.

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It's also important to note that in the Star Wars universe (as in Star Trek), gravity generation and manipulation is such a mature technology that it doesn't really bear much examination.

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