Spacekiwi wrote:cheers t2m and hvb.
I had forgotten about the ev of needing them in cic and boarding tubes.
They aren't normal wear for boarding tube personnel exchanges inside boat bays. There is
some risk of a catastrophic rupture, but it's about on a par with the chances that a 4-engine plane will lose all 4 engines simultaneously to unrelated causes --- that is, it
can happen, but the insurance actuaries don't remember the last time it actually did. Now it
is customary for yard workers to suit up when transiting the much longer (and more exposed) boarding tubes connecting a space station to a ship under construction/repair, because it's far more likely that something --- like a small craft with an engine/guidance failure, for example --- will have an opportunity to rupture the tube. In addition, such tube connections are made for larger number of people and are exposed to possible over much longer periods of time, which increases the window for catastrophic failure of one sort or another.
Perhaps the most reasonable rule-of-thumb or model would be to consider current wet-navy experience. For certain jobs, life jackets and safety lines are SOP, but the engine room snipes don't usually employ either of them. It's a matter of threat assessment versus productivity and crew comfort on a risk-benefits analysis and, as another point which really needs to be considered here, a hull breach which causes explosive decompression of any significant portion of a ship's interior is going to be incredibly rare outside actual combat conditions . . . at which point
everyone is suited, regardless of his or her station.
Only so much air can escape through a breach of a given size in a given period of time, and the provision for sealing off breached compartments is pretty darned impressive on ships designed by people who've spent 2,000 years wandering around interstellar space. I've seen this issue compared to the case of a nuclear sub which suffers a hull breach while submerged, but the cases are actually far from parallel. A sub operates in an environment which wants to
crush it and in which the compression effect of inrushing high-pressure water will literally heat the air in a compartment to levels which would have killed the personnel in it even if they hadn't been crushed themselves or drowned. The vacuum outside a star ship will cheerfully suck all the air out of it, given time and opportunity, but that offers no direct threat to the structural integrity of the ship as a whole and the threat can actually be dealt with pretty effectively unless whatever damage caused the breach was, in itself, sufficient to destroy the ship's structure. That is, it's a heck of a lot easier to seal air
into a punctured starship than it is to seal the water
out of a punctured aircraft carrier or --- far worse --- a punctured sub at 500 feet.