system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Star Trek] Why are the inertial dampers and artificial gravity so reliable?

Everything else is up for grabs. Shields, transporters, phasers, and everything else has been made to fail sometimes. Artificial gravity and inertial dampers work on a severely damaged starship, but (excluding Undiscovered Country) gravity works. In no episode or movie do inertial dampers fail despite the damage to the ship. Unless you include Sulu's mistake in ST:2009.
gpt
We see some rare failures like on the Klingon ship in Star Trek VI.

I think an educated guess would be that (on reliable Starfleet ships as of the TOS and TNG eras) they developed a passive system for gravity. So the flooring may have an exotic plate of material that exerts a gravity field, and can only be turned off by applying energy (maybe a force field that blocks gravitons or something).


And then maybe it is a directional field so that’s why you can’t jump and end up walking on the ceiling.


In this scenario then a rare gravity failure could be due to an unlucky or exotic energy weapon or accident that somehow renders this “gravity plate” inert. Or it could happen on a more primitive or cheaply design vessel. Perhaps the Klingon ship in Star Trek VI was more spartan in design than Starfleet vessels. And failures seen in the days of Enterprise would be attributed to earlier and more temperamental artificial gravity systems.


Whatever technology is used could be extremely robust, because we see in TNG: Booby Trap a ship from an ancient civilization that was adrift for 1000 years has working artificial gravity.


It’s possible these robust artificial gravity systems do use nominal amounts of power, similar to life support, and are considered critical systems. So, if life support is on, gravity is probably on too. But we’ve seen a few instances of near total power failures without any interruption in gravity or even concerns for those systems failing.


It seems likely (at least after the days of ENT) these are passive “always on” systems for sufficiently advanced vessels.