----------| Am 07.05.2010 11:06 schrieb Troy Guffey: |---------- > On 5/7/10, Roger Burton West <[email protected]> wrote: > >> It's not as simple as that even in the small spacecraft we have now. >> (For example, there may be a non-atmospheric oxidiser present; even if >> there isn't, things cool very slowly without atmosphere to provide >> conduction and convection, so they may just flare up as soon as you let >> the air back in.) >> > OK, make it a 3 stage process: > 1. Vent to vacuum. > 2. Repressurisze with pure nitrogen, or an inert gas to cool. > 3. Restore normal atmosphere. > "Vent to vacuum" may be not that easy. A structure housing 100 Million people is huge, so the distance to the next outer wall may be great. Evacuating (from people) of large sections of the habitat are a challenge in its own right, than evacuating it (from air) may cause additional problems. Just to create some figures: if we assume that each inhabitant has an average living space of 40 squaremeters (all over all) with a headroom of 3 meters, we will end up with a sphere of about 7000 m diameter. Add space for offices, storage, more spacious leisure areas, agriculture space and you will end up with even a larger ball. As David talked about a "set of habitats" it will likely have another shape or consists of multiple elements, but the required volume remains the same, and the probability that the fire location is far from vacuum remains fairly high. Therefore I fear, fire fighting has to be done the traditional way in most cases, vacuuming a place of fire is only a last resort - when a fire has got that big, it may have already killed hundreds.
-- Thomas Thrien Geo 51° 28' 12" N 7° 32' 17" E _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
