Atmosphere and pressure mechanics – how to survive in spaceships, submarines, and other enclosed spaces!
Pressure
All credit goes to krail !
The stormworker is quite a beast, so can survive pressures between 0.12atm and 4.00atm.
Barotrauma status effect damages the player outside this range, if damage is enabled
Gases
Composition of gases is important for being able to breathe in an enclosed space.
The system is not very realistic… but thankfully, it is very easy to understand and work with:
Oxygen
- The only rule for being able to breathe is that the atmosphere contains at least 15% oxygen
- This does not vary based on the atmospheric pressure, unlike in real life – whether the room is at 0.1atm or 10atm – greater than 15% oxygen is all that is required.
- There is no maximum value either – 100% oxygen is perfectly breathable at all pressures
Other Gases
CO₂ and Nitrogen are not harmful in any quantity. This means a mix of (80% CO₂, 20% O₂) is perfectly safe to breathe
- Need to test other contaminants such as steam and exhaust
Breathing
Non-breathable atmosphere does not directly damage the player – instead the player’s breath meter is drained, as if underwater – damage occurs only when the meter is empty
- A player in an enclosed space converts Oxygen into CO₂ at a rate of 2.5L/minute
Although the CO₂ build up is not harmful, remember that it is reducing the oxygen% as you breathe. If you want to stay a long time in an enclosed room, you will need to figure out some way to top up the oxygen.
Life Support in Space
Add all this together and you start to get a picture for how to deal with atmosphere in space, remember just two simple rules:
- Pressure must be between 0.12 and 4.0atm
- Oxygen greater than 15%
The player can survive in a wide range of environments so it’s up to you how to design your life support system.
A simple method
Here is a very simple way to keep the air healthy in any kind of environment.
- Connect a pressurised oxygen tank to your cabin via any sort of valve.
- Use the composite output of a gas sensor to monitor the amount of CO₂ in the cabin, and open the valve to the oxygen tank if it goes below a threshold (say 20% for safety).
- This will keep the oxygen level healthy, but over time the pressure will slowly increase to unsafe levels – to fix that, add another valve which allows air from the cabin to vent to space – activate this valve if the pressure goes above your desired using another threshold control.
A funny side effect of this system is that over time, the % of CO₂ in the cabin will slowly increase until there is no nitrogen left! But remember, CO₂ is harmless to us, as long as it doesn’t displace all the oxygen!
A small oxygen tank spawned in at 100atm has over 4600L of oxygen. With this system a single small tank will support 1 person’s oxygen needs for over 30 hours!
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