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Dalakaar t1_ja1jrad wrote

Babylon 5 taught me the answer to this!

When a craft explodes it has an atmosphere, or the components necessary to mix and create said atmosphere, in the craft. At the very least mixed around the pilot in some capacity.

Different species with different atmospheres may have different coloured explosions. Example, for us it'd be yellow/orange/red. The typical colours we associate with fire. An enemy might have green explosions, or blue.

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The_Solar_Oracle t1_ja1o4qp wrote

Zathras is simple man.

Zathras see Babylon 5, Zathras upvotes.

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AlexDKZ t1_ja1vvtm wrote

At least there is symmetry.

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_-Event-Horizon-_ t1_ja24as6 wrote

What do you want?

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Dalakaar t1_ja26udi wrote

>What do you want?

​Vir, "I'd like to live just long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I would look up at your lifeless eyes and wave like this."

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DemonOfTheAstroWaste OP t1_ja1kw4j wrote

Great answer. Thank you.

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free__coffee t1_ja24fvs wrote

Further - there would be sound. There is a hot ball of expanding gas coming from the explosion, moving in all directions. It wouldn't be as loud as an earth explosion would be, but certainly some air particles from the explosion are going to hit your eardrums

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ForceUser128 t1_ja29lrl wrote

Due to distances involved though, any sound would be delayed similar to a lightning strike on earth, but much worse because there is no real medium for the sound waves to propagate through but rather the atmos and molecules themselves moving through mostly empty space.

Also, at best, you might hear a thud rather than an explosion due to you being contained in a sealed, pressurised container (aka a ship). And even then, it'd more likely be from solid debri rather than from the very sparse (comparatively) atoms and molecules of an explosion.

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exceive t1_ja3crwu wrote

You might hear something at the same time you see it. That would be the sounds your ship makes when a whole bunch of electromagnetic energy hits it suddenly. Maybe a rattle or thud as your hull abruptly and unevenly expands just a little bit from heat. Maybe some weird noise if your ship is accidentally a radio receiver. A lot of things are accidentally radio receivers if the signal is strong enough.

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ForceUser128 t1_ja3jrw6 wrote

True, didnt think about other forms that 'light'(radiation) can take, like radio, xrays, etc and what effect that would have on the ship itself.

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codeedog t1_ja3000m wrote

There would be no sound in the vacuum of space unless the two ships were next to each other. The gas molecules would dissipate rapidly. The density of the gas ball would fall off at around 1/r^3. The energy of the wave front would normally expand at 1/r^2 in an atmosphere which provides a medium for energy transfer. However, in space and without a gas medium, the “sound” must travel with the gas or other materials from the explosion and they dissipate rapidly (r-cubed) or stay as chunks of broken spaceship.

So, unless a chunk of exploded spaceship hit your ship, you wouldn’t hear any sound.

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Alpha433 t1_ja1tpvb wrote

There's a sci-fi book series, the ember war saga, that actually takes this into account. In the book, when entering combat conditions, they will actually suck all the oxygen in the ship into holding tanks so a hit won't cause explosive decompression and the issue of fires for damage control tapers off. Seems obvious to a point, makes you wonder the viability of the strategy irl.

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_hic-sunt-dracones_ t1_ja212ho wrote

The sheer power that those vacuum pumps must have had to evacuate a resonable part of a big ass vessel of all the gas in a very small amount of time must be incredibly high even for times with space travel technology. Let alone the power neccessary to operate these things. But this never seems to be a problem due to some new fancy energy source.

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DownAndOutInSValley t1_ja25px6 wrote

They did this in The Expanse as well. Prior to starting combat operations they’d suit up and pump air to tanks. Space being large they’d typically have plenty of time to see trouble coming or start some.

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ca_fighterace t1_ja2yt0l wrote

Don’t they just depressurize? I never heard anything about pumping air in to tanks.

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GoodbyeSkyPrime t1_ja36plt wrote

Good question. In depressurizing, you have effectively 2 options. Vent your atmosphere into space, or pump it into tanks. In The Expanse, there isn’t a technology to manufacture atmosphere. Venting atmosphere into space would make it unrecoverable and would be very bad for everyone involved. The only option would be storing it in tanks for later repressurization.

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AirierWitch1066 t1_ja2q27j wrote

Presumably the ships are compartmentalized. You only need vacuums powerful enough to vacate a single compartment, then you just need as many vacuums as compartments.

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Alpha433 t1_ja2yoef wrote

In the series, the premise is that an alien. Oalition sends an envoy to earth to help prepare them to sidestep destruction by an extrgalactic extinction event. Part of this is the sharing of advanced technology so you could go from modern day tech to gauss weapons, space navies, and 15' combat robots with human integrated controls. So they probably could easilly bullshit an excuse up for the vacuum.

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