Backstage - OOC Forums
EVE-Online RP Discussion and Resources => CCP Public Library => Topic started by: Matariki Rain on 18 Apr 2011, 16:21
-
Is there air in your ship hangar?
I'd long assumed "No" -- except for times when you're dry-docking a ship for major maintenance and repair work -- but the open balconies overlooking the captains' quarters and an earlier walking-in-stations clip have both suggested "Yes".
Which raises a number of perplexing questions for me:
- Where, on a station, are the "normal" barriers for vacuum seal?
- Do stations vent a hangar-load of breathable air each time a ship undocks?
- How do stations produce or acquire their oxygen and other gases that go into breathable air?
There are other questions as well, but these will do for starters.
-
I rather expected that hangars are in vacuum, at least partially due to them being made out of tritanium which has stability problems in warm atmosphere.
I also expect that there's magical forcefields that hold the air in and stop it escaping, so you can stand on your balcony and not need a pressure window between you and the vacuum.
So, no stations don't vent air when ships undock.
I'm pretty sure that stations have large plant growy bits - if you look at some of them closely you can see what look like gardens or parks with windows on them. That might be enough for oxygen replacement, or it might be suplemented with extracted oxygen from various icebelt minerals, or more industrial hydroponics sections.
-
I suppose they also have to be ressuplied with oxygen as much as with a lot of other commodities.
As for the hangars, maybe it is just starwars-ish with a magnetic forcefield retaining the air but not the heavier particules.
-
I am under the impression that shields are used for wide expanses that glass is not practical for.
Or for the obviously special snowflakes that get their balcony covered in a little energizer bubble.
But there is also this chronicle to offer a counter point.
(http://www.eveonline.com/bitmaps/img/weekly/tides_of_change.jpg)
^ Tides of Change
-
A wizard did it?
But yeah, TBL makes it clear that hangars aren't in vacuum. I'm not entirely sure they thought this through or just did it for storytelling purposes when a ship gets stolen.
-
I suppose they also have to be ressuplied with oxygen as much as with a lot of other commodities.
As for the hangars, maybe it is just starwars-ish with a magnetic forcefield retaining the air but not the heavier particules.
This may be the case, as it is the only way possible to explain how something the size of a dreadnought could dock and the hanger remain at an atmosphere.
Also, point of interest for Ulphus - Tritanium by itself has instability at atmospheric pressure. Tritanium alloys or compounds with other materials, however, may not have that weakness.
-
- Do stations vent a hangar-load of breathable air each time a ship undocks?
I would hope they suck it back in to somewhere to be recycled. Otherwise it seems like such a waste.
- Where, on a station, are the "normal" barriers for vacuum seal?
- How do stations produce or acquire their oxygen and other gases that go into breathable air?
These are probably handwavey things we aren't really supposed to worry much about. Id say shields of some sort probably serve as a barrier, and there's probably some sort of recycling going on with the air circulated through a station. I doubt they would have to resupply on oxygen. I figured they either scrubbed and recycled the air we would exhale back into breathable oxygen or there is a lot of plant life on stations to do it for us. Maybe both.
-
I rather expected that hangars are in vacuum, at least partially due to them being made out of tritanium which has stability problems in warm atmosphere.
Good point.
(I've confirmed with Ulf that the "them" here refers to the ships rather than the hangars. I've also confirmed that when you build a player-owned station it's tritanium-based, which raises the prospects of either trit-walled hangars or a lot of non-trit-based internal fit-out.)
I think the original metagame reason for trit being unstable at atmospheric temperatures[1] was to explain why our spaceships stayed in space and didn't do planetary stuff. With the increasing addition of planetary stuff to the player portfolio, there hasn't really been a reckoning with this ancient piece of information. Maybe alloys or annealing or surface treatments are improving to the point where trit can now be used in ways that don't rust/burn/explode/do-whatever-it-did. *shrug*
(I note that metallic alumin(i)um is highly reactive: so reactive that it oxidises almost immediately, which usually means it makes itself a nice, stable oxide coating and we think of it as benignly inert. But if it were that easy to stabilise tritanium, why would you mention its instability?)
I do get the sense that CCP's in-house view of hangars involves air. I'm trying to work out ways to connect the dots here that make sense, since my first impression of the proposed architecture would have the air and blankets from my CQ blowing out the hangar door when I undock a ship. ;)
I also expect that there's magical forcefields that hold the air in and stop it escaping, so you can stand on your balcony and not need a pressure window between you and the vacuum.
So, no stations don't vent air when ships undock.
You may be right, but you're asserting rather than describing a possible mechanism and I'd like a mechanism here. Can we come up with a way this might work that doesn't require (too) liberal applications of handwavium? :P
I'm pretty sure that stations have large plant growy bits - if you look at some of them closely you can see what look like gardens or parks with windows on them. That might be enough for oxygen replacement, or it might be suplemented with extracted oxygen from various icebelt minerals, or more industrial hydroponics sections.
I'm not quite interested enough to start doing some crunchy stuff here, but if I were I'd look at calculations from modern closed biospheres as a baseline for what it takes to support the needs of each person and process on a station, and from that I'd project the amounts of gasses that need to be generated, recycled or imported to support the stations we know and love.
What blend of gasses do submarines use? It's just ordinary liquid nitrogen/oxgen "air", isn't it? Are there good reasons you might use something different? Where might you source lots of nitrogen? Mining the traces in some planetary atmospheres?
/me wanders off with visions of the lives of a nitro miner and a station manager dancing in her head...
[1] Note to Ghost: Temperatures, not pressures. Pressure or water-vapour or whatever would have made a lot more sense than temperature, which could be expected to shift through the unstable zone fairly often in our spaceflight.
-
If you reread Jita 4-4, you'd note that large parts of the stations, at least Caldari ones, actually appear to be made of concrete. Also, the technology to make pressure curtains (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_window) practically exists today, so its not too far fetched to be honest.
-
[1] Note to Ghost: Temperatures, not pressures. Pressure or water-vapour or whatever would have made a lot more sense than temperature, which could be expected to shift through the unstable zone fairly often in our spaceflight.
Of course, then you have spoke bombs, which are allegedly (http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/The_Canvas_%28Chronicle%29) powered by an actual oxidation reaction...
Hopefully the immersion project will do something about this silliness.
-
If you reread Jita 4-4, you'd note that large parts of the stations, at least Caldari ones, actually appear to be made of concrete.
Well spotted. I'm going to leave aside the questions about making and curing concrete in space for now, since my head is hurting. :)
Also, the technology to make pressure curtains (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_window) practically exists today, so its not too far fetched to be honest.
Neat.
- Do you think you could push a ship through something with the viscosity to resist up to nine atmospheres?
- What do you think would be the likely effect of pushing a ship through a field at plasma temperatures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_%28physics%29#Temperatures)?
-
Of course, then you have spoke bombs, which are allegedly (http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/The_Canvas_%28Chronicle%29) powered by an actual oxidation reaction...
His team, which was unquestioning in their obedience, immediately set up a Spoke bomb. Spokes were supercompressed constructs of interconnected tritanium pins encased in an isolated chamber, with a small discharger set at their center. When a Spoke ruptured and the tritanium came into contact with air, it would expand violently, blowing away anything in its immediate vicinity.
Thank you! I'd wondered about the nature of tritanium's instability. It's going to be a bit tricky to work around explosiveness.
That does also seem to suggest the issue is "air" rather than "atmospheric temperatures": sounds like we need a refactoring one way or the other.
Hopefully the immersion project will do something about this silliness.
Yep. :)
-
- Do you think you could push a ship through something with the viscosity to resist up to nine atmospheres?
Yeah, I don't think that would be too terribly much of a stretch, air has push, but its a different sort of push from the driving kinetic force of a half mile long spacecraft.
- What do you think would be the likely effect of pushing a ship through a field at plasma temperatures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_%28physics%29#Temperatures)?
This, I'm unsure of, but it stands to reason that the ship can handle it well enough, whether by heat exchangers or some other system. Keep in mind that being in direct sunlight in space would be enough to set you on fire without proper shielding, and ships would be designed to take this into account.
-
- What do you think would be the likely effect of pushing a ship through a field at plasma temperatures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_%28physics%29#Temperatures)?
This, I'm unsure of, but it stands to reason that the ship can handle it well enough, whether by heat exchangers or some other system. Keep in mind that being in direct sunlight in space would be enough to set you on fire without proper shielding, and ships would be designed to take this into account.
Plasma is what stars are. I'm not quite keen enough just now to work out the maths on what would be involved in passing a fragmented lump of metal through a thin slice of sun-stuff held in place by magnetic fields, but setting up something that would work seems challenging. (And make really, really sure you don't have power outages affecting your magnetic fields.)
- How you you think we forge tritanium, and at what temperatures?
Edited to trim the quotation.
-
Ships have shields. Shields that fit the description of pressure curtains in many ways (and even provide next to 0 EM protection without modifications).
Whether an object surrounded by a plasma pressure curtain can pass through a plasma pressure curtain is likely not tested to date, but seems like a viable explanation.
-
I rather expected that hangars are in vacuum, at least partially due to them being made out of tritanium which has stability problems in warm atmosphere.
If Tritanium is so sensitive, why don't ships spontaneously combust from the internal atmosphere which surely must be pressurized and oxygenated to allow a crew to operate?
The "ohh noooo the trit will expload!" argument just makes no sense at all.
-
Could not the 'concrete' be some kind of compactified regolith torn up from the surface of the countless moons? Why bother forging steel when a clump of dirt holds air just as well, when properly shaped?
-
No wonder my ship flies like a brick.
It's mostly made out of concrete.
-
And if the insides of the ship can be protected from the internal atmosphere, I'm pretty sure that the hull, armour and shields can be made atmosphere-resistant as well.
-
And if the insides of the ship can be protected from the internal atmosphere, I'm pretty sure that the hull, armour and shields can be made atmosphere-resistant as well.
From an engineering standpoint, that begs the question: Why? Sure, we can make the inside and outside of a ship safe for contact with air, but given that ships spend most of their time in vacuum, is it worth it? Sealing the crew section may be expensive, so sealing that outside of the ship would be wasteful if not absolutely necessary.
-
I rather expected that hangars are in vacuum, at least partially due to them being made out of tritanium which has stability problems in warm atmosphere.
The above has been the smallest yet most problematic piece of prime fiction ever....the main ingredient to build anything in space, is reactive to oxygen......way to go.
-
Regarding the whole 'ships are made of tritanium' thing, I was always under the impression that the hulls of the ships would be some flavour of alloy. Pure metals are relatively soft, so to alloy it with whatever seems pretty logical for the the purposes of armour plating and (probably?) handles the issue of it destabilising at normal temperatures / pressures / whatever it is that sets it off.
Bear in mind that structural engineering isn't necessarily a strong point of mine.
-
Regarding the whole 'ships are made of tritanium' thing, I was always under the impression that the hulls of the ships would be some flavour of alloy. Pure metals are relatively soft, so to alloy it with whatever seems pretty logical for the the purposes of armour plating and (probably?) handles the issue of it destabilising at normal temperatures / pressures / whatever it is that sets it off.
Bear in mind that structural engineering isn't necessarily a strong point of mine.
While allows have different physical properties like hardness relative to pure metals, their reactive qualities don't change a great deal - steel rusts just like iron, for example. Now, if you're reacting the trit with something else to make a different chemical compound, then maybe it won't react with air. Remember, allow != compound. When dealing when metals, you're usually working with alloys.
-
From an engineering standpoint, that begs the question: Why? Sure, we can make the inside and outside of a ship safe for contact with air, but given that ships spend most of their time in vacuum, is it worth it? Sealing the crew section may be expensive, so sealing that outside of the ship would be wasteful if not absolutely necessary.
[philosophymajorrage]That is not what begging the question means! That is just raising the question![/rage]
-
Regarding the whole 'ships are made of tritanium' thing, I was always under the impression that the hulls of the ships would be some flavour of alloy. Pure metals are relatively soft, so to alloy it with whatever seems pretty logical for the the purposes of armour plating and (probably?) handles the issue of it destabilising at normal temperatures / pressures / whatever it is that sets it off.
Yeah, I gotta agree with this. Just because the raw mineral has oxidation issues doesn't mean alloyed versions of it would (alloyed trit bars derp) especially since plenty of metals in our worlds are just as useless in their raw forms as trit is in its.
-
While allows have different physical properties like hardness relative to pure metals, their reactive qualities don't change a great deal - steel rusts just like iron, for example. Now, if you're reacting the trit with something else to make a different chemical compound, then maybe it won't react with air. Remember, allow != compound. When dealing when metals, you're usually working with alloys.
Ah, valid; probably should have realised that myself, but long day at work was long. >> /feebleexcuse
It could be that the outer hull and innermost structure (i.e. the bit you see in space and the bits you walk around in) are something quite markedly not-tritanium, if we want to try and handwave the instability at 'atmospheric temperatures', whatever the hell they actually are. Assuming that it's just room temperature with a mild margin of error, I guess it sorta works, though conduction and so on could quickly become a problem.
That having been said, :science: and :EVE:. As much as I really want to try and apply my knowledge of physics to explain some of the less hideous mechanics when I'm not busy with work, I tend to just turn a blind eye to things like cloaking or warp drives. I'm unsure if there's another course of action in tritanium's case -- although could it be that it's not necessarily used for the hulls of (at least sub-capital) ships? That'd neatly sidestep the issue, since whether or not ships are space 'structures' as such is debatable.
inb4 I've missed some piece of PF, since I've only really been going off the item description for tritanium
-
The instability of tritanium is probably a phase instability and does not cause explosions but aging, cracks and loss of desirable material properties. Assuming that feldspar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feldspar) is the real life inspiration for veldspar, "Only limited solid solution occurs between K-feldspar and anorthite, and in the two other solid solutions, immiscibility occurs at temperatures common in the crust of the earth."
So this kind of minerals are likely to change their properties with temperature and pressure. From the name one could guess that tritanium has a triclinic crystal structure (no straight angles, repeats itself with different period in all spatial dimensions) and might for instance adopt a monoclinic structure or decompose into grains of varying composition after a long period of waiting.
All this is of course guesswork, but I think it's plausible that the ships can be kept under atmospheric conditions for some time without significant amounts of degradation.
-
Worth noting that the Amarr outpost has a visible forcefield over both major hangar entrances, and that claw-like armatures seem to easily travel in and out of the forcefield. While it's entirely possible that this forcefield has to do with protection from external threats (say, keeping micrometeorites and/or stray fire from sailing into your hangar and chewing up something delicate - or even worse, detonating something volatile that wasn't armored), other stations and our ships seem to get by with invisble forcefields to do the same thing.
It may also be worth noting that this might explain some of the damage-dealing capability of penatrative munitions such as Titanium Sabot - if the structure, or even external armor layers, are pierced straight through, we could see secondary explosions from tritanium being exposed to venting internal atmosphere.
-
All this is of course guesswork, but I think it's plausible that the ships can be kept under atmospheric conditions for some time without significant amounts of degradation.
It's interesting guesswork. How does it deal with spoke bombs (http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/The_Canvas_%28Chronicle%29)?
-
It's interesting guesswork. How does it deal with spoke bombs (http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/The_Canvas_%28Chronicle%29)?
Thank you for the informative link. It's hard to estimate whether an oxygen-allergic explosive material could be fused with silicon oxide to create something like a feldspar mineral. What is worse, this reasoning would not offer any clues to the original puzzle. I'm giving up for now. Often the answers to these kinds of questions tend to be of the sort which no one could have expected in advance.
-
I'm giving up for now. Often the answers to these kinds of questions tend to be of the sort which no one could have expected in advance.
Mmm. I'm currently thinking that the input data needs some rectifying.
(I assume that it's actually a series of continuity glitches, but I do like to see if I can link those together to make something that works.)
-
Disclaimer: I do not have a Ph.D in chemistry, physics, or anything of the like.
With that said - volatile substances are only volatile when there is potential for a reaction to occur. Once a reaction has occured, or the potential otherwise removed, the substances are no longer volatile and are quite stable.
This is the reason Chlorine can be a poison gas used in warfare (unreacted, volatile elemental state) and food staple in the human diet (in the reacted, molecular form of Sodium Chloride). There really isn't a reason why ships wouldn't be coated in a layer of pre-reacted tritanium or something considerably less reactive than elemental tritanium to prevent explosions while in dock. Of course, ship damage would have to covered up before you dock, but given that nanites seem to be common as dirt in the EVE universe, it wouldn't surprise me if processes similar to armor- or hull-repair processes could be used to "paper over" the damage until a more permanent fix can be arranged.
-
well technically aluminium in its raw form is toxic and highly reactive, but a thin layer of aluminium oxide forms on the outside of it making it safe to handle and stable. A similar process might occur with Tritanium.
-
Some common explosives (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/cg0340704) seem to be monoclinic crystals and I guess it's not completely out of question that they might become more stable with a silicon oxide mixer. Here again the curious prefix "tri" makes an appearance.
-
well... in TEA, during the elder assault on the ammarian empire, they describe a station, specifically that the hangar is 'open to space' or some exceedingly simillar term..
the basic description says that ships dock up and airlocks deploy from the walls to ensure safe passage for crew & stuff...
As for we capsuleers... we don't technically undock at the same place, our pods are removed from the ship when we wish to leave and taken to the 'pod gantry'.
i figure it is from there that we would get an internal shuttle or some such item from the hangar to our own quarters.
-
Speaking as an engineer, with some background in metallurgy and materials science...
Screw Tritanium. The properties listed for it are contradictory, and written by someone who did not have any background in materials science. I hope to hell someone retcons that at some point. Either that, or maybe a new weapon for Gallente ships so they deal massive damage in close... air-cannons.
-
EVE needs more hard science in it's science fiction and less Trek science.
Case in point: Tritanium (http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Tritanium) vs. Tritanium (http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Tritanium). See any similarities?
'Nuff said.
Oh, and don't even get me started on "Impulse Engines". :bash:
-
Speaking as an engineer, with some background in metallurgy and materials science...
Screw Tritanium. The properties listed for it are contradictory, and written by someone who did not have any background in materials science. I hope to hell someone retcons that at some point. Either that, or maybe a new weapon for Gallente ships so they deal massive damage in close... air-cannons.
The original descriptions of the New Eden minerals seem to be based on RL mineralogical references and this makes me believe that original instability of tritanium must have been some kind of martensitic transformation between two slightly different the crystal structures. Many metals have these transformations and it would kind of make sense that this phase with uber-properties takes a long time to form, is only stable under low temperature and pressure and therefore it might be economically more sensible to mine it directly from the asteroid belts, rather than mix it up in a factory, and be mainly used to build up structures in space.
Later, some other writer probably spotted this unexplained stability problem and thought that wouldn't it be funny if all the ships were actually made out of inherently explosive stuff and came up with these spoke bombs. As this has far-reaching consequences which are hard to explain and severely restrict the utility of material, it's curious why and how the writing team could ever agree to take it in this direction? It's true that everything that tritanium is now, seems quite contradictory and even cumbersome.
-
Its funny, look at something as simple as the raw construction material used in ships, and you unfold this whole ridiculous layer of inconsistency. its no wonder the more complex plot points don't sink up. CCP can't even manage to make their rocks make sense.
-
Oh, and don't even get me started on "Impulse Engines". :bash:
Don't get me started on "Subspace comms." :bash:
-
another TEA reference found...
When the 'Retford' is docked at lorado (sp?) station and has to undock in a hurry, Jonas forgets to un-seal the airlock, and tears a section of the hangar interior from the wall, along with the airlock he was attached to.
the next line describes unfortunate people being sucked out into the cold vacuum of space...
so i guess hangars are very much open...
as i mentioned earlier, i figure the debarkation point for the pod gantry is on the other hand held behind either a mag-con flield, or some form of uber airlock.
-
From the "Did You Know?" that's at the top of the page as I read this thread:
debris from starship combat near planets sometimes survives re-entry, as when a relay station on Yong III was destroyed by debris after a fierce fight in low orbit on 27.08YC105.
And then, Tovil-Toba's carrier broke apart into three big sections over Luminaire and crashed into the ground; it didn't become an instant firecracker in the sky from exposure to atmosphere and extreme heat.
And... I really have no point other than mentioning some of the bigger inconsistencies on CCP's part about the matter. <.<
-
This is what happens when you let liberal arts majors try to extrapolate science.
-
This is what happens when you let liberal arts majors try to extrapolate science.
As a former cultural anthropology major, I resemble that remark.
Oh. And, I should add the part of the Elder Fleet that Jamyl kerboomed to my list. If I remember correctly, the ISD news reports only mentioned concerns about the radioactivity of the parts raining down on Mekhios (and the possibility of a piece landing on someone); they never touched on the possibility of the massive amounts of trit being a huge timebomb. But, I guess CCP could just say lolISD about that.
-
I guess that one way around that would be to say that it's not a reaction comparable to, say, an alkali metal and water but more a slow degradation of tensile strength or something.
Even so, the description is vague as all hell; 'atmospheric temperatures' could be any selection of a wide, wide range of values depending on the atmosphere in question. Earth against Venus, for example.
-
I hit the "Sorry, I can't manage to string these datapoints together into a coherent whole" point a while ago.
If I were redeveloping it I'd say something like:
- pure metallic tritanium reacts explosively with oxygen, including in the percentages found in breathable air (ditch anything to do with temperature)
- the tritanium alloys used in starship construction are basically stable.
-
I hit the "Sorry, I can't manage to string these datapoints together into a coherent whole" point a while ago.
I highly recommend that approach.