Look, I hate to destroy anyone’s suspension of disbelief, so stop reading now if you want… but even if someone pushed the ‘keep filling chamber with air’ button, where is the airlock mechanism getting all that air from? And what kind of pump does it have that can create hurricane force winds?
Well, obviously the ship will have huge high-pressure tanks of air (several cubic kilometres worth at normal pressure)*. And since it’s all stored at high pressure, it doesn’t need pumps, it can just be vented into the relevant airlock through high-pressure pipes (probably laid parallel to the plasma ducts). Duh!
[*] A design requirement, since on average space ships experience severe depressurisation events every other episode.
A point worth noting is that the airlock specified in the OP contains approximately 15 kg of air - not an enormous mass. If the victim will take care to position himself near the back wall, most of that air will not be acting to propel him outward; if he can flatten himself against the wall, the force on him should be very small. If there’s something to grab onto I’d say there’s a good chance he could avoid being flung into space.
Don’t need a pump. Just boil off the spare liquid oxygen in the LOX tanks. Duh.
Well, I ran the program at work today, using parameters put together from a few posts. (250cm)^3, 15 kg of air, 14.7 psi, 6’x6’ opening. (yes, I know I’m mixing my units, the program is written in lbf/ft^2, though, so I did the conversions). I set the time step to be one second, and the variable of interest was P(t). The pressure drop was to an extremely quick drop to 5 psi within the room in the first second, and depleted to ambient within the first 4 seconds. I’m not really sure what we can gather from that, other than knowing the air isn’t going to be moving for very long.
These ships are designed to be fairly simple and user friendly, plus they’re all running proprietary software created by the lowest bidder. So, there is no “keep filling chamber with air” button, that is default mode because 99.99% of the time, the ship is just traveling through space, and very seldom needs to open the doors. There is only an “open/close” door button and an “equalize pressure” button which equalizes pressure with whatever is outside. The “open/close” door button doesn’t work unless the “equalize pressure” button has been pushed and the equalization process complete. But to kill our traitor, the “equalize pressure” button is bypassed, or else the person will suffer a slower, less dramatic, death.
Of course you realize that I’m just coming up with BS to defend lame movies because it’s fun.
Excellence. So what we have is 15 kg of air leaving the room within 4 seconds; nowhere near enough to blast me helplessly into space. I can just grab something and hold on.
I still have the pesky “no oxygen or pressure” to deal with, but you need to prioritize, you know?
I’d exhale and then enjoy the view for a few seconds
You have the rest of your life to work out a solution to that.