#airlocks

From "Doom from the Sun!" in Sub-Mariner Comics #30, February 1949. Bill Everett script (?), pencils (?), inks (?) & letters.

Okay, I can’t not talk about how great the expanse uses the reality of their ship design and the airlocks anymore. It’s just too fantastic.

In the Expanse universe all the space-ships are powered by extremely efficient fusion propulsion, which means by necessity they are built more or less like giant skyscrapers with a rocket attached to the bottom of them. The show keeps this remarkably consistent across their designs, but where it really shines through is on the interior consideration of the ship layout. On the Rocinante (the main characters’ ship) we see them ascending and descending a ladder regularly as they move about the ship, everything is tightly packed or bolted down, there’s no loose edges, all things you would want to consider if you were designing a ship that relied on high acceleration burns.

 I mean look at that, the layout for the craft is pretty clearly shown just from that one image, there's a series of ‘floors’ for the crew to ascend and descend to, that are relatively tightly packed with all storage spaces able to lock and fold away so that loose cargo doesn’t begin to become an issue during 0 g periods. nd I think where this methodical layout of design shines through the most is in the way the show uses the airlocks in the ship.

Now, in a lot of sci-fi, we will see airlocks like this:

and we see someone get thrown out an airlock, it looks like this:

from our perspective it looks more like we are throwing the person out a door or a window, with the airlock window/door orthogonal to the floor. 

This is a fairly well established trope in Sci-Fi of throwing someone out the airlock or ‘spacing’ them. But it’s always bothered me for the following reasons:

An airlock would be in your craft for one of four main reasons-

1: Docking with other things, whether that’s docking on a planet or another ship.

2: Dumping Material you no longer wish to carry.

3: Having a place for a smaller vessel to dock within it.

4: Making sure you can create a seal in your vessel if one of your bays start to have a breach.

In The Expanse universe option 4 is not required due to the widespread use of emergency airlock blister packs, so the whenever we see an airlock in a craft in the expanse it is for one of those other three reasons.

Item one it would be built into the side of the craft, but to dock with something you’d have to be not moving relative to that craft. This generally means not accelerating, so if you are standing in the airlock or moving through it the opening would be orthogonal to your feet, and if your craft is accelerating it would be orthogonal to your feet but if you are entering it while your craft is not accelerating it would be parallel to your feet.  

Item two, it has to be built into the ‘floors’ of the craft.

Let me explain:

Let’s say this is your rocket

and you want to dump something from your craft, because you don’t want it anymore or you need to dispose of it.  Well if you chuck it out the side while your craft is accelerating at high speeds, then this is what would happen:

At best, you’d do damage to your hull exterior and at worst, you’d blow up your ship. Generally not ideal.

The expanse recognized this in their layout of their ships, and adjusted the airlocks accordingly. Which they should be commended for.

But the best part, is despite not following visual convention, because visual convention is wrong, they still manage to use the airlocks entirely thematically to showcase exactly who has what control and when, and they use the layout of the result of the physical design to demonstrate it.

(The Expanse, S4E2)

The above is a scene from the Trial of Marco Inaros. Essentially, they’ve captured the greatest threat to the Belt (one of the three main factions in the show) and they are deciding whether or not they are going to execute him. Now in this scene all the power has finally been stripped from Inaros (he’ll get it back). So we see the other leaders of the belt standing over Inaros, literally placed in a position of physical authority over him, representing how they have more control of the belt than he does, and more importantly that all these people are looking down on him, both physically and within the storyline. And this play on physical position over the airlock having power over the person in the airlock is very common in the expanse. In this critical story scene it is the first moment that control of the belt starts to actually go to Inaros, but many of the other leaders of the belt tribes, don’t think Inaros is actually capable of pulling off what he says he wants to do. They are looking down on his capabilities. This is not the only time we see this. We see Detective Miller caught in an airlock where all the air is beginning to be drained out, with his would be killer once again standing above the airlock looking down on him.

And later when we see the murder of Ashford, one of the leaders who wanted Inaros to be murdered the most, we have the same imagery but in reverse:

No. I’d love to throw her out the airlock. I tried that once and the next day she returned to pee in my bed. *growls in frustration*