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[Horatius Caul]

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.

[Julianus Soter]

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?

[lallara zhuul]

No wonder my ship flies like a brick.

It's mostly made out of concrete.

[Horatius Caul]

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.

[Orthic]

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.

[Alain Colcer]

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.

[Kybernetes Moros]

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.

[Orthic]

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.

[Z.Sinraali]

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]

[Saede Riordan]

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.

[Kybernetes Moros]

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

[Ammentio Oinkelmar]

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 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.

[Esna Pitoojee]

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.

[Matariki Rain]

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?

[Ammentio Oinkelmar]

It's interesting guesswork. How does it deal with spoke bombs?

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.