The tremendous accelerations involved in the kind of spaceflight 
seen on Star Trek would instantly turn the crew to chunky salsa unless there 
was some kind of heavy-duty protection. Hence, the inertial damping field. 
The reason for the Òcharacteristic lagÓ referred to above is to ÒexplainÓ why 
our crew is occasionally knocked out of their chairs during battle or other 
drastic maneuvers despite the IDF. The science of all this is admittedly a bit 
hazy, but it seems a good compromise between dramatic necessity and 
maintaining some kind of technical consistency.  Æ