“Left” vs. “top” shouldn’t actually matter at all, for a spacecraft.
Yebbut - this is Star Wars. For some reason, everyone flies in the same plane, and spaceships bank.
And go “whoosh” in space.
Even today, we add fake “haptic feedback” and sound effects in things like cars and planes. Adding “whoosh” sounds to the cockpit, using some kind of elaborate surround-sound system would be a useful way of saying, “Hey, there’s an enemy coming from that direction”, without requiring the pilot to look at a radar screen or some such thing.
My question is: did the designer(s) in 1977 actually plan out the inside of the 'Falcon? Because it sure seems bigger on the inside than can fit in the shape seen.
Not to mention that, as an interstellar freighter, it doesn’t seem to have the cargo capacity of a current day delivery truck. It has a bigger lounge than it does a cargo hold!
Even in 1977 I thought it sure was a small freighter. The cargo space is a very small percentage of the overall ship. Not very profitable.
But now (after the millionth time!) I see it is supposed to carry containers, then it makes more sense. And if you consider it like a current day semi truck with a drom box, as the saying goes “you pay for your gas with the cargo in the trailer, but you make your profit with the (more valuable) cargo in the drom box.” And in this case the cargo bays are the “drom box”. And Solo is just pretending to be a legitimate freight hauler anyway.
I’ll never understand though why the gun bays have gravity 90 degrees to the rest of the craft. Seems like a needless gimmick. Which goes back to my first question: didn’t the designers think this through? 
The lounge probably is part of the (intended) cargo hold. Solo has converted it to make it more livable, which he can afford to do since most of his money is made smuggling, which usually means small items, that he hides underneath the floor panels (among other places).
The internal diagrams in “Wookiepedia” show the lounge as standard equipment, probably because the YT-1300P* was like a tramp steamer, in that it carried passengers as well as freight.
The 'Falcon is supposed to be a YT-1300F(-for-freight) but the floorplan on that page looks different than the movie set, so who knows.
*I’m not one of those people that knows this off the top of my head. I had to look it up. 48 years I lived without knowing the model number, and my life was not less for not knowing.
The Jupiter 2 from “Lost In Space” was notoriously too small on the outside for the interiors depicted. The bigger a plywood mockup, the more expensive it is to film and store (bigger soundstage). So the tendency is to skimp.
I’ve always liked that. It’s a nod to the fact that they have gravity control, and so can shape the gravity field to whatever they need at any spot, but it’s not in your face with it, no useless “As you know…” kind of exposition. It’s like Heinlein’s advice on how to make people realize the story isn’t set in Kansas, by casually saying something like “the door dilated”.
I think far too much about how artificial gravity would work in the Real World.
I can live with it working in one direction, or different directions. but it is the transitions and the combination effects that bother me.
Picture a cube 12 feet on a side and two sides at right angles have artificial gravity. So “down” can be in two different directions, So what happens when you stand on one? If you are standing in the middle of the cube face, the pull from the side 90 degrees away is also affecting you. So what does your head feel? Which is “down”? If you throw a ball, which way does it go? Now imagine it as a 6 foot cube.
Now walk towards the face that has gravity 90 degrees. What happens as you approach the wall? You feel like you’re walking down a wall but not falling. You’re going to confuse your inner ear.
Now step from one to the other. Do this a couple times and try not to throw up. That’s what the gun bays would be like.
Now tell me what happens when you fly a ship with artificial gravity into another ship with artificial gravity, but in a different orientation. Which one overpowers the other?
Or, if you’re Fred Astaire, you do it with style.
ETA: the stepping, not the throwing up.
Fred Astaire could make upchucking beautiful and graceful.
eta: I’d have loved to have been on the set when they filmed that referenced dance scene.
For a ship of any reasonable size, if the synthetic* gravity follows any sort of inverse-square law you’re going to rapidly run into problems with some decks having much larger or smaller gravity levels than others, or even coping with one’s feet being subject to more gravity than one’s head.
∗ because “artificial gravity” is so often used to mean rotational gravity, I prefer to use the term “synthetic gravity” to refer to the fictional gravito-magnetism common in science fiction.
Exactly!
I imagine each deck of our spaceships have their own synthetic gravity generators, and not just one in the “bottom” of the ship. And this is why:
It is even worse when you use synthetic gravity to cancel acceleration forces.
Imagine my 12 foot cube has only one “down”. Now accelerate that cube at 50g “forward”. If you don’t want to be a sack of broken bones, you now need the “aft” wall to impart a “pushing” force (or the fwd wall a pulling force) to counteract the acceleration, so you can still stand (and not die).
Now also impart another acceleration of 75g “up” and keep the 50g forward. The “ceiling” has to pull, or the floor has to push back, to counteract this 75g AND balance the 50g acceleration as well. So we have to have a delicate continually adjusting balance of “gravity” from all 6 directions just so you standing there doesn’t notice.
In the Star Trek world, for example, I think you could never fool a seasoned space traveler that he was or was not in a ship (The Mark of Gideon), because every time the ship turned or changed velocity, you’d “feel” the subtle effects as the gravity compensated. This is nothing the audience cares about, but actual people in ships would notice. Every “space dog” would begin to ignore it after a while when they got their “space legs”.
And this actually explains why the poor crewmembers keep falling out of their chairs and crashing into corridor walls: when a weapon hits the ship, it accelerates it in an unpredictable direction with several multiples of g. The system compensates, but the unpredictable nature of weapons impact means it doesn’t always keep up. It can’t anticipate like a normal non-emergency maneuver. So every photon torpedo hit that rocks the ship with 100g gets imprecisely compensated to 99g and you still fall out of your seat.
If only they had the technology to compensate for that… I envision something like a belt, only it secures you against the seat… It could be called something like “Crewmember - seat attachment”
Hey! Let’s not get into fantasy land here!
Yeah I went too far with my technobabble.
Look, we’re trying to stay in the realm of plausibility, here.
Really, the issue is how fine your control over the various fields are. A uniform up-and-down field will probably always be the easiest to make, but if you can tailor it around the edges, you could make a cube where no matter how you walk on it, you feel a “down” that lets you just walk normally.
With the example of the Falcon’s gun turrets, it’s clear that Star Wars does have something close to that degree of control. If a tramp freighter has this installed, the fancy ships owned by governments and rich people probably have even better systems.
Certainly, we know that countergrav is cheap and well-developed enough to be ubiquitous in the Star Wars universe.
Well, it’ll all be a lot easier once gravitrons are harnessed (no one’s surprised any more when we rangle electrons…).