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[Matariki Rain]

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.

[Ulphus]

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.

[Lyn Farel]

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.

[Ghost Hunter]

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.



^ Tides of Change

[Casiella]

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.

[Ghost Hunter]

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.

[Ember Vykos]

- 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.

[Matariki Rain]

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?

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?

* Matariki Rain 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.

[Saede Riordan]

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 practically exists today, so its not too far fetched to be honest.

[Z.Sinraali]

[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 powered by an actual oxidation reaction...

Hopefully the immersion project will do something about this silliness.

[Matariki Rain]

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 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?

[Matariki Rain]

Of course, then you have spoke bombs, which are allegedly 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.

[Saede Riordan]

- 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?

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.

[Matariki Rain]

- What do you think would be the likely effect of pushing a ship through a field at plasma 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.

[orange]

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.