Well a simple, if dangerous, way of doing it is to use real gravity. For this, you need a good supply of small black holes, and a reliable way of controlling them. But if you have those, then your ships and stations are spheres, with their black hole at their centre, and a number of spherical decks around them. Because the black hole has much less mass than a planet, you'll have detectably different strength of gravity on different decks.
This will mean that youyour ships have very high mass, and accelerating them to high speeds is kind of difficult, but you win a few and loose a few. If you use this, may I suggest you don't explain to the reader how the gravity works, and leave them to puzzle it out. A reveal can come at the point when something goes wrong.