I just recalled a pretty good real world analogy to a big ship with an open airlock. There is a big cave near Carlbad called Lechiguilla (sp?). IIRC it has a bit over 100 miles of passageways. Large rooms connected by many walking sized passages as well as tight crawls. Consider the large rooms storage bays. The walking sized passages spaceship corridors. The tight crawls maintance access tunnels (aka Jeffries tubes?).
Anyhow, Lech has only one human sized entrance, the size of a drainage culvert. It actually IS a drainage culvert pipe. So, basically this a big bottle with only small (compared to its volume) entrance/exit. And these kind of caves “breath”, or in other words air is almost sucking in or blowing out. This because the air pressure outside the cave is constantly changing and the internal volume of the cave doesnt have time to equilize.
Now, lets assume a barometric pressure change from a good weather day to a bad weather day is 50 millibars. Thats 1/20 of an atmosphere. Lets round that up and call it a 1psi differential.
Now, when Lech is blowing or sucking good that air in the culvert can get into the 30 mph range give or take.
So, if the spaceship is pressurized at 5psi, if the airflow speed is linear with psi differential that 5 times 30 or 150 mph. If the ship is 15 psi that would be 450 mph.
If its a squared relationship, its somewhere from about 70 mph (5psi) to 120 mph (15psi).
So, it appears to me if its a VERY big ship and its not highly pressurized (which would be a waste) its highly possible that the air speeds out of the air lock are not ungodly. If its not a VERY big ship (enough that the internal pressure drops quickly, so that speed will dimish rapidly) the airflow is even more "surviveable (though the pressure dropping will of course much more quickly result in unconsiousness).
Note, the numbers mentioned about are rough. More accurate numbers could bump the airflow speed into “she’s not gonna hold on category”. Or of course an actual rocket scientist who knows how to actually calculate this stuf will tell me I am full of bat guano.
My question is why didn’t they try to save Hudson?
I mean, Ripley knew that they would be stringing him up like they were doing with Newt. So why not spend a few minutes to look for him? He’s still alive and Ripley doesn’t give it a moment’s thought.
Oh, another factor in the “its survivable” column. A 150 mph wind in a 5psi atmosphere is only going to feel like an 86 mph wind in a 15psi atmosphere. So, if the ship is low pressure, thats another favorable factor.
If I recall correctly from the novel adaptation of the movie, by Alan Dean Foster, when searching for Newt she finds a just cocooned Burke (and possibly Sgt Apone but he’s much further along in the process, but I may be misremembering that part).
But no, I don’t know why she didn’t look for Hudson.
Thanks for the answers everyone, I forgot about Ripley also apparently holding the entire weight of the Alien Queen as well as the outrush of air…she’s impressively strong, she could probably have taken the Queen in a fistfight sans loader.
But they also didn’t have a good way to track him - that equipment was mostly aboard the abandoned APC. The wrist tracker Hicks gave Ripley, who passed it on the Newt, at least offered a chance of finding her in the complex - though I suppose if Ripley had looked around a little longer, she might have found a facehugged Hudson (and Apone and Dietrich and Burke), assuming the aliens pulled all potential hosts to a central location, as was implied was done to the colonists.
Of course, there were other things she could have been doing, too, with the benefit of hindsight. I figure the logical thing would be to carry extra magazines and drop one every place she dropped one of those tracking flares, so as she got the heck outta Dodge, she could be picking up fresh ammo on her way out.
Plus there wasn’t really much of a point going all Rambo on the nest, throwing in all her grenades and such. The whole place was going to be radioactive vapour in a few minutes, anyway.
I think Ripley wasn’t quite in her right mind at that point, I viewed it as her working off all her anger, hate and frustration at a prominent target.
Logical, no, satisfying, yes.
Though it does explain why the Queen was so intent on taking revenge on Ripley, after all she did break the wordless ‘deal’ they had come to, the Queen would let Ripley and Newt go if Ripley spared her eggs.
The Aliens story universe had such potential, its a pity it was wasted in the sequels.
Just added to add a fun fact regarding the film, unlike most movies the countdown is in real time, when the facility AI states there are fifteen minutes to reach minimum safe distance, there really are fifteen minutes until the plant goes boom!
Ah, you remind me of one of my favorite stories by the Good Doctor.
I wonder, not meaning to hijack the thread, has anyone ever used that balloon idea? With the sticky sealant inside? Either in other fiction or even real life? I suppose we haven’t had many uses for that kind of thing yet. What detects leaks on the space station? For that matter, coming round about back to the OP, would you be able to open the Space Station to vacuum? Surely there’s safeguards in place?
One of the eggs opened as she was backing away. That meant at least one facehugger, and possibly a swarm of them, was about to come after her. In the nest, she would have very little chance of spotting the things well enough to keep them off her, and killing them would undoubtedly break the truce, anyway. She didn’t have much choice but to kill the one that was hatching, and at that point, all bets were off, so she took her best shot at killing everything that was left to prevent anything from pursuing them. Granted, she went overboard, and should have saved some ammo, but the general idea doesn’t seem unreasonable.
The queen wasn’t doing anything about the facehugger hatching, assuming she could, and Ripley may even have thought it was a deliberate move–hence the “You really went there?” look she gives the queen before opening fire.
Anecdote: The building where I work was initially constructed with an HVAC system that wasn’t quite sufficient for a building of that size (or something – I never really understood the technical issue), and when we first opened there were problems with the air pressure being too high inside the building. It felt fine in the building, but the difference between the internal and external air pressure was such that whenever an external door was opened there’d be a rush of air from inside to outside. For a couple of days this was powerful enough that our main entrance just stayed open all the time; you had to push the doors closed, they wouldn’t swing closed on their own. Anyone coming through the main entrance would have their hair blown back like they were walking against the wind, which was basically what was happening.
It took a couple of days to get things fixed, and I was making plenty of Alien jokes during that time.
An odd one I can think of is the original anime series Mobile Suit Gundam. A couple of times when their ship gets a hole in it someone pulls a lever and releases some floating balloons that are sucked to the opening and burst, leaving a sticky goo that seals it.
I’ve worked in several places that had this problem; it’s usually an interesting counterpoint to all the aggressive security-conscious posturing they use to get people to remember to badge in, even though the door is swinging in the breeze…
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