The thing about it, is it all depends on what the anti-gravity really is.

You have a stationary object in a gravity well. Said object is being affected by gravity and being pulled 'down'. 

In a conventional scenario (no handwavium gravatics or the like) you need to counteract that constant gravity force in order to maintain a constant position. You can maintain that position using conventional landing gear (which will use the ground to anchor against and impart a potential energy on the object, down through the landing gear, to the ground). Using magnetics or the like doesn't change this. If you embed magnets/etc in the landing pad you are simply replacing the landing gear with magnet pads, but those magnet pads still must support the mass of the ship (all you're doing is replacing landing gear with magnetic force, but the net result is the same; the ground must support the vehicle).

The same thing effectively with thrusters or the like. A thruster works by shooting out mass at a velocity (aka 'energy') to counteract the effects of gravity. Said energy must be dissipated somehow. either directly on the ground (by the energy hitting it) or indirectly (by the energy hitting the atmosphere/etc and *it* pushing downwards ultimately to the surface (the higher up you are, the more diffused this effect is, but it's still there).

Now, if you want to start doing handwavium and have magic gravity-reducing or gravity-removing 'physics' that changes things. :)

Ken

On Wed, Aug 23, 2017 at 10:09 AM, (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
On 18 Aug 2017 at 11:46, C. Berry wrote:

> 1. CG, which "shields" or "cancels" some fraction between 0 and 1 of
> the gravitational attraction felt by the ship. A ship with its CG at
> 100% is effectively weightless, and might e.g. drift upward off the
> ground if a strong wind pushed it that way. But you can't control ship
> movement with CG alone, other than modulating your acceleration
> straight downward.

[snip]

> So e.g. to hover in a dirtside docking bay, you'd crank the CG to 1.0,
> and set the thrusters to cancel out all ship accelerations relative to
> the local ground (you do want to follow that patch of ground as it
> rotates around the axis of the planet. :) )

I strongly suspect that the amount of power required to "float"
depends on the local gravity. If it's 1/6th g like on Luna, it'd take
a lot less than on some massive hunk of rock with a 3 g surface
gravity.

If your power isn't high enough to counter the local gravity, you
sink as if subject to the local gravity minus your neutralization
setting.

So If you can only go to 2 g with your CG, you'd sink as if in a 1 g
field on that 3 g world.

Likewise, if your field is stronger than local gravity, you'd float
up at a rate determined by the distance.
--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com


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