Broadsword Class Mercenary Cruiser

[Valarian]

Just looking at the design of the ship, it looks like when it's in a planet's atmosphere and the gravity pull is significant it can only really travel up or down (give or take a little lateral movement with retros) given the location of the thrusters. If it tried to fly horizontally, everything would slide down the decks and make an awful mess!

If the ship were reliant on reaction thrusters (like in BattleTech) this would be correct. With reaction drives, you'd also only get gravity when in space while the ship was under acceleration. In Traveller, there's the handwavium of the grav plating on the decks to avoid this. Traveller manoeuvre drives generate artificial gravity.

[ravells]

Cheers Ian, I sort of vaguely knew that but how does the artificial gravity work when there's real gravity as well? e.g. if you are hovering 500 feet over a large planet. Presumably the handwavium cancels out effects of external gravity?