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Alpha433 t1_ja1tpvb wrote

Reply to comment by Dalakaar in Explosions in space movies? by DemonOfTheAstroWaste

There's a sci-fi book series, the ember war saga, that actually takes this into account. In the book, when entering combat conditions, they will actually suck all the oxygen in the ship into holding tanks so a hit won't cause explosive decompression and the issue of fires for damage control tapers off. Seems obvious to a point, makes you wonder the viability of the strategy irl.

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_hic-sunt-dracones_ t1_ja212ho wrote

The sheer power that those vacuum pumps must have had to evacuate a resonable part of a big ass vessel of all the gas in a very small amount of time must be incredibly high even for times with space travel technology. Let alone the power neccessary to operate these things. But this never seems to be a problem due to some new fancy energy source.

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DownAndOutInSValley t1_ja25px6 wrote

They did this in The Expanse as well. Prior to starting combat operations they’d suit up and pump air to tanks. Space being large they’d typically have plenty of time to see trouble coming or start some.

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ca_fighterace t1_ja2yt0l wrote

Don’t they just depressurize? I never heard anything about pumping air in to tanks.

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GoodbyeSkyPrime t1_ja36plt wrote

Good question. In depressurizing, you have effectively 2 options. Vent your atmosphere into space, or pump it into tanks. In The Expanse, there isn’t a technology to manufacture atmosphere. Venting atmosphere into space would make it unrecoverable and would be very bad for everyone involved. The only option would be storing it in tanks for later repressurization.

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AirierWitch1066 t1_ja2q27j wrote

Presumably the ships are compartmentalized. You only need vacuums powerful enough to vacate a single compartment, then you just need as many vacuums as compartments.

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Alpha433 t1_ja2yoef wrote

In the series, the premise is that an alien. Oalition sends an envoy to earth to help prepare them to sidestep destruction by an extrgalactic extinction event. Part of this is the sharing of advanced technology so you could go from modern day tech to gauss weapons, space navies, and 15' combat robots with human integrated controls. So they probably could easilly bullshit an excuse up for the vacuum.

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