History Main / InertialDampening

* ''Film/CommandoCodySkyMarshalOfTheUniverse''. In "Chapter 8: The Hydrogen Hurricane", the villains use repeated explosions to [[ColonyDrop blast the Moon towards the Earth]], protecting themselves from the shock in a "counter-inertia room". When Cody tries to stop them, they chain him up outside the room so he'll be killed in the next blast. Will our hero escape? Of course he does.

* Portrayed fairly realistically in ''Series/TheExpanse''. When ships initiate a high-g burn, the crew have to strap into crash couches that inject some sort of drugs into their necks. In one episode a [[{{Lightworlder}} Belter]] commits suicide by moving out of the way of the injectors while the ship is taking off from Earth. [[spoiler:The trope is played straight by Eros in season 2 after the [[TheVirus protomolecule]] turns the asteroid into an EldritchAbomination]].

* Creator/{{Nintendo}}'s ''Franchise/StarFox'' and ''VideoGame/FZero'' have a system called G-Diffusion that dampens the effects of gravity and powers propulsion and shields.

** When Steven and the Gems are [[spoiler:aboard the Roaming Eye using the [[FasterThanLightTravel gravity engine]] to rescue Greg from the human zoo]] this is [[DownplayedTrope downplayed]] to great effect: Steven is [[LudicrousSpeed pushed very hard into his seat and the Gems feel the inertia so much]] that their [[HardLight bodies]] ''phase out of the ship and extend a [[spoiler:few thousand lightyears]]''! Alternatively, it could be just Steven's SuperStrength and SuperToughness.

* The TimeMachine in the ''Film/BillAndTed'' franchise must have something like this as it materialises in the sky and slams into the ground without breaking the legs of its standing passengers. It's all but stated this is the case, as the booth can be seen slowing down ever so slightly and making a perfectly gentle contact with the ground wherever it lands.

* Nintendo's ''VideoGame/StarFox'' and ''VideoGame/FZero'' have a system called G-Diffusion that dampens the effects of gravity and powers propulsion and shields.

* Funnily enough, the hypothetical AlcubierreDrive, which would get around the speed-of-light limit by essentially moving spacetime instead of the ship, sounds an awful lot like ''Franchise/StarTrek'''s warp drive, but wouldn't require any inertia compensation while in use: since the ship isn't moving locally, everyone and everything on board remains in free-fall. But you might want to damp the inertia of everything that your warp bubble has run into, or it will have quite a lot of momentum when you stop...

*** An extreme example of this happened during the incident aboard [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72 Qantas Flight 72]], in which faulty data in its flight computers led to the Airbus A330 operating the flight deciding that [[KillerRobot it wanted to kill everyone on the plane,]] ''[[KillerRobot right there and then]]''. The airliner entered a steep dive, and as it had previously been at cruise in otherwise ordinary conditions, many passengers and most of the cabin crew had unfastened their seatbelts, so most injuries were the result of these people being launched upwards into the ceiling, then slammed back down. Miraculously, the flight crew were able to successfully wrestle control from the plane and fly it to a safe landing at Learmonth Airport in Western Australia, but 118 people were injured, many of them severely.

* The [=JU87=] "Stuka" dive bombers when pulling out of a dive could produce high enough G force to cause the pilot to temporarily black out. For this reason, once the bomb was released, the pull out was automatic, the pilot regaining control once the plane was climbing on full throttle. Even so, accident rate on Stukas was high and the training required for the crew was strenuous and difficult, while the plane itself, being optimized for dive bombing, was lacking in performance. This was the problem for every other World War II dive bombers too, which is why pretty much every country got out of building specialized dive bombers (and gave up on high-angle dive bombing in general) by the time World War II was coming to close.

** This is even more critical in aircraft, which are also subject to vertical forces; if the plane drops or plunges suddenly enough[[note]]see [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72 Qantas 72]] for an extreme example[[/note]], a person who isn't strapped in won't keep up and can be actually pulled off the ground and into the ceiling, and will then crash back to the ground as the forces stabilize. This is the reason it's recommended to keep your seatbelt fastened whenever you're in your seat, even if the fasten-seatbelt sign isn't turned on.

* In Peter F Hamilton's ''Literature/NightsDawnTrilogy'':

In hard ScienceFiction, especially written but occasionally not, a more realistic method is used to cushion acceleration shock. Immersion in a fluid equal in density to the body would theoretically cause buoyancy forces to act counter to any accelerations; this is sometimes coupled with [[HumanPopsicle cryonics]]. Some method to allow the subject to continue to breathe in the fluid would be required, be it oxygenated liquids or a circulatory gas-exchange system. Since people riding around in bathtubs are not interesting on-screen (except from a voyeur's point-of-view) this has only rarely trickled down to the big and small screens; the exploration ship ''Lewis and Clark'' in ''Film/EventHorizon'' and presumably the cryonics pods in the ''Franchise/{{Alien}}'' series are the exceptions.

** When Steven and the Gems are [[spoiler:aboard the Roaming Eye using the [[FasterThanLightTravel gravity engine]] to rescue Greg from the human zoo]] this is [[DownplayedTrope downplayed]] to great effect: Steven is [[LudicrousSpeed pushed very hard into his seat and the Gems feel the inertia so much]] that their [[HardLight bodies]] ''phase out of the ship and extend a [[spoiler:few thousthand years]]''! Alternatively, it could be just Steven's SuperStrength and SuperToughness.

* All ships in ''Literature/TheLostFleet'' use inertial dampers to accelerate and maneuver. The presence of inertial dampers and FTL travel are the only things keeping the setting from being a true hard sci-fi. Since ships in this 'verse maneuver like a cross between a naval warship and a jet fighter, inertial dampers are a must. Most maneuvering during battles is done at 10% of the speed of light (any faster than 20% relative speed, and the ships' targetting systems would be unable to properly calculate the paths of their targets). The narration frequently mentions the sound of inertial dampeners groaning and whining during particularly hard maneuvers. On one occasion, a new, untrained crew of a Syndic ship accelerates faster than their inertial dampers can handle fleeing Geary's fleet, and the ship shreds itself when they fail, to the horror of the watching Alliance.

** [[spoiler: Dancer]] ships [[RuleOfThree ''also'']] maneuver better than Alliance ships, but unlike the two previous examples this is just due to better engineering of inertia dampers.

* All ships in ''Literature/TheLostFleet'' use inertial dampers to accelerate and maneuver. Since ships in this 'verse maneuver like a cross between a naval warship and a jet fighter, inertial dampers are a must. Most maneuvering during battles is done at 10% of the speed of light. Any faster, and the ships' targetting systems would be unable to properly calculate the paths of their targets. The presence of inertial dampers and FTL travel are the only things keeping the setting from being a true hard sci-fi.

* In the pilot episode of ''Series/DarkMatter'' the spaceship has to dodge a couple of missiles, so does an emergency maneuver that overloads the ability of the ArtificialGravity and inertial dampeners to compensate. Cue everyone floating into the air, then getting slammed into the deck, except the woman who ordered the maneuver who manages a ThreePointLanding.

->'''Lt. Ford:''' It's strange not pulling any [=Gs.=]\\

'''Maj. Sheppard:''' Oh yeah. Without inertial dampening, we'd be hit by so many G-s, our eyes would pop, the skin would pull away from our faces, our brains would squish up to the back of our skulls, and our internal organs would be crushed into these chairs. What about that sandwich?

* Mentioned in ''LightNovel/ACertainMagicalIndex'' as being necessary for Academy City's fighters and bombers: the aircraft are capable of absolutely ''insane'' maneuvers (their top speed is in excess of Mach 7), and the pilots are cryogenically frozen to protect their bodies. They're still conscious however, and controlling the planes mentally. [[FridgeLogic Which begs the question: if they don't physically control the airplanes, why are they even required to be inside?]] Unless the enemy has extremely powerful jamming fields of course.

* In ''Anime/DragonBallZ'', Dr. Briefs tells Goku that the Capsule Corporation spaceship's ArtificialGravity machine is powered by the ship's momentum. Implying that some form of inertial dampening is in effect when the gravity machine is off. Vegeta is shown in a later version of the ship, training in high gravity while it's parked on Earth, throwing this concept out the window.[[note]]Well, the Earth is both rotating on it's axis ''and'' revolving around the Sun. And moving with the solar system along the galactic disc. To say nothing of what the galaxy as a whole may be doing. All in all, depending on the (admittedly completely unexplained) inertial dampening in effect, it's still theoretically possible that the extra [=Gs=] are all based on the ship's movement.[[/note]]
* Averted in ''LightNovel/FateZero'', when Berserker uses his ability to hijack an F-15 mid-flight and turn it into his Noble Phantasm. While Berserker is controlling the jet from the outside, the hapless human pilot is left inside; thus, when Berserker is making extremely sharp turns and magically augmenting the plane's jet engines, the pilot is almost immediately reduced to a bloody paste. Berserker himself is unharmed by all this, but that's because he's a Servant and therefore extremely superhuman.

** The WorldBuilding in series such as those set in the earlier Universal Century timeline specifically comments that the facilities for sending people into space are slower than the ones used to transport objects because humans can't tolerate that level of [=Gs=].

* Averted in ''LightNovel/StarshipOperators''. All the crews need to strap themselves in before acceleration, and acceleration ranges to at most around 10g for some ships. [[spoiler:Played a bit straight later when Amaterasu fights 5 Kingdom ships. Shinon devises a plan to quickly turn the ship to fire on enemies, and generate this effect by using its own warp drive to create gravity field that will protect its crew. It does protect its crew, but results in several decks wrecked, antimatter container being cracked, and several other massive damages on the ship. Quite a suicide tactic, actually]].

-->'''D.J.:''' When the ion drive fires, you'll be taking about 30 [=Gs=]. Without a tank, the force would liquefy your skeleton.\\

** As usual, it is one of the few SciFi settings to provide even a weak explanation. The IDF is tied in to the gravity generators, and applies a G-force opposite what the crew would feel, cancelling it out. The system takes inputs from the engines, so forces from acceleration are accounted for in real-time, but external forces can't be predicted, thus the StarTrekShake. A similar system, the structural integrity field, is a HandWave on how such wimpy-looking structures hold up to the incredible forces involved; the ship is held up mostly by forcefields. One of the technical manuals comments that if the ships didn't have inertial damping, the crew would be instantly turned into chunky salsa when the ship accelerates. Which is then demonstrated in an ExpandedUniverse novel -- a 22nd-century ship is hit with a massive force that blows the dampers and pulverizes the entire crew (and any object not welded solidly to the bulkheads) into an organic paste about 1 inch thick.