I think a lot of people don't realize how confined Grace would be during the trip to Erid. This is important to me because I want Grace to be inconvenienced. Nothing should be easy for this guy!
When the Hail Mary is in thrust configuration:
The gravity is 1.5 g, just enough to make moving around the ship a bit more tiring than usual
The ship is basically a giant tower! Grace has to climb VERY tall ladders to go up to the next room. Climbing those in 1.5 g sounds exhausting. I'm sure he'd build up some good endurance doing that, but anyone who lives in a townhome can tell you how annoying it is to walk down three flights of stairs and then realize you forgot your phone upstairs. I imagine he would probably not wander around the ship a ton when he has to climb ladders to do it.
Related to the ladders, if Grace is in the dormitory and wants to go watch TV in the Don't Go Crazy room, he has to climb up 3 rooms of long ladders to get there
The usable floor space is pretty limited! All the rooms were designed to be used in centrifugal gravity, so in all the rooms the centrifugal floor is now a very, very tall wall. What would be the shorter centrifugal wall is now a tiny floor in thrust config (I'll put pictures at the end to illustrate)
Basically zero lab access! At the very beginning of the movie you can see Grace look up the wall at the lab equipment. It is all at least 10 ft up, totally out of reach and bolted sideways to the wall. The only real things he can use in lab are the white board, some screens, and the chair 4ft off the floor (that says "Not for use in thrust configuration" lol). The lab just straight up is NOT meant to be used AT ALL in thrust config. That's the whole point of having the centrifuge!
