At the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) back in May, I sat in on a panel discussion on Worldbuilding. The moderator, who had selected a few pages from the comic to project on the screen for the audience, asked me if, in my efforts designing this spaceship, I knew the function of all the odd structures and globes and whatnot I’d drawn in the engine room (he may have been referencing this page in particular). I told him I had no idea, but I was confident one of my readers with a much greater understanding of engineering and space-based propulsion than I would eventually tell me. The audience laughed. I went on to say that I gave up long ago trying to do maintain any kind of so-called hard science in my fiction, because in another twenty years everything we know about the universe right now is going to change anyway, and today’s latest science will be tomorrow’s Pluto.
I mention this because I’m looking at all that flexible tubing and I want to tell you I have no idea what it’s for. Or how the anti-grav gurney works. 
Tara, I love your worldbuilding. And not the least, your science and engineering.
Frankly, I don’t give a s…, pardon, what I meant to say is, I favour authenticity over accuracy any time. And your science and engineering, and particularly your scientists and engineers, feel very authentic to me.
Pardon the pun, but you are giving me that quantum vibe that Quantum Vibe doesn’t: The great inventors of the past and present were and are larger-than-life characters, but not in the way Dr. O’ Murchada is. (Please note: I love Quantum Vibe.)
You use instead what I call Smart Stereotypes: Your characters are identifyable by certain traits typical for their profession, but they are not reduced to conform to them.
Magic, of course.
Since they’re floating in space somewhere on that ship any gravity is artificially created. So all the anti-gravity gurney has to do is interrupt the primary gravity field that’s been generated. It could dampen that field, or shield an area from it, or operate at a 180 degree phase difference to produce zero. But you already knew that. You were just being modest.
If I were going to build an artificial gravity system I would use superconductors to create a levitation system similar to this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPqEEZa2Gis Note how the idea is to ‘lock’ the superconductor into a specific position relative to the magnetic track. So suppose we have tiny room-temperature superconducting nodules, right? Totally plausible. They would ‘lock’ into position in a magnetic field. The smaller the superconductor, the weaker the ‘locking’ effect; so I’m imagining some fairly small superconducting beads used specifically for a slight effect. So let’s then have the magnetic field itself move ‘downward’ across the space we want to provide gravity in. We then continuously provide more magnetic field, like a treadmill.
This would allow objects which contain regularly spaced superconducting beads to feel the pull of gravity. You’d stick them in clothes and other convenient objects. Or I don’t know, maybe you’d stick them in the air and food. Antigrav stuff would just lack the superconductor; or maybe it would insulate things from the magnetic field.
BUT the more iportant question is, what are those wiggly tubes, and what is hard sci fi?
I take it ‘hard’ science fiction wouldn’t have wiggly tubes if the author didn’t know what they were? That seems rather contrary to the goal of portraying a realistic future. Some science fiction does sort of have the problem of revealing all the weird mysteries… if the author put a lot of time into figuring something out, they’re likely to make it into a puzzle for the characters. Which means it eventually gets explained. Realistically, there will be some things which are mysterious, which seem unrealistic to the main characters or from a scientific point of view. And there will be technologies which seem impossible from our scientific standpoint.
And there will be tubing inside of big, complicated machines. That’s just a thing that happens sometimes. It would be unrealistic for it not to be there just because the author hasn’t planned the big machine’s details.
Making a future that’s as realistic as possible, if that really were your goal, should still involve reasoning on many different levels. A more or less physical, technologically understood line of reasoning says there will be space travel. (The economics and politics of it, however, are fluffy speculation in anyone’s hands.) A more abstract sort of reasoning says there will be new technologies which we currently have no grasp of how to create. A genuinely rational/realistic/well-reasoned picture has to take all sorts of arguments into account.
A story, on the other hand, is if anything just trying to meet some preferred level of realism and also have a consistent, understandable universe. Arguments at all different levels still are relevant.
The good part is the billions of dollars that you’ll have to spend in testing that idea, and all of those happy scientists, technicians and admin people who will be gainfully employed!
But the wiggly tubes have to be the wiggly tubes, because that’s what they are!!!! I know this for a fact because I am an expert in the field of wiggly tubes! These are the best wiggly tubes I’ve ever seen and I’m sure they must do something important!
I figure the Galaxion must be using a water powered computer like this:
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/N/number-crunching.html
The flexible tubing is reminiscent of TIM, the computer in the original Tomorrow People television series:
http://www.thevervoid.com/media/tomorrow/3.1/3.1_15.jpg
She sure did toss that big chunk of metal out of the way pretty easily.
The wiggly tubes are probably just conduits for cables, so they don’t get damaged or tangled. If they have any electrical cables going through them, then they might also be an extra layer of shielding against EM interference, though something tells me the rich guy who used to own this ship probably sprang for fiber optics, or whatever has replaced fiber optics in the intervening years. On the other hand, copper is easier to splice if it does break.
For that matter, it’s possible that IP and/or TerSA has some kind of Wiggly Tube Quota, such that it doesn’t matter what they do but you still have to have them. Probably a leftover rule from decades ago when the wiggly tubes actually did something important.
As for the anti-grav gurney, I’m sure it works very well, thank you very much.