>>>>Interesting "personal tour" of the ISS: http://www.wimp.com/orbitaltour/
>>>
>>>Thanks - I was looking for something like this for years. Couldn't stop watching. Amazing, how Hollywood got it all wrong all the time.
>>
>>the fact that hair in no gravity will look more like hair under water would have been hard to show without introducing other problems ;-)
>
>Which is why the last thing that stops working on a spaceship wreck is artificial gravity. Air runs out, lights are reduced to emergency, comms are down, pieces of the ship float away... but gravity still works.
>
>What could be done (and daughter says was close to done in "Space cowboys") was the look of the insides - far from the polished car salon look, in all grey or bluish metallic shades, but with all the dangling cables, bags, zippers, pieces of the walls in different colors, equipment just attached to the walls, ordinary laptops everywhere...

In Hollywood it's more exciting if spacecraft actually do something rather than just sit there. That means accelerating to go somewhere else, preferably at as many Gs as dramatically possible. That requires a shipshape interior :)

OTOH the ISS only ever sees microgees. I thought it very interesting that the exercise bike is decoupled ( as much as possible ) from the ISS, so as not to resonate/shake the solar arrays. That's a serious concern - in vacuum there's none of the vibrational damping you could rely on in an atmosphere. It would be non-trivial to model vibrational modes of the ISS even with a good FEM program; they're probably better off just isolating the bike so the problem doesn't arise.

I thought the ISS was never subjected to any accelerations at all but that's not quite true. Apparently there are periodic burns by either the station's built in correction thrusters in the Zvezda module, or by attached spacecraft. According to http://weebau.com/iss/zvezda.htm there are two thrusters with a "thrust" of 315kg ( x 9.81 = 3090N ). Doesn't say if that's total thrust, or thrust per motor. So, could be as much as 6180N.

The ESA Automated Transfer Vehicle has also been used, its thrust is 4x 490N = 1960N

"Worst case" scenario looks like 6180N, and station mass is about 450,000kg, so acceleration would be

A = F / M = 6180 / 450000 = 0.014 m / s^2

One gee is about 9.81 m / s^2 so the ISS's acceleration during orbital boosts is about 0.0014g, or 1.4 milligees.