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--- info:technology:doors [2026/04/10 14:30] – created Jarvis
+++ info:technology:doors [2026/04/10 16:16] (current) – Continued work Jarvis
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 ==== Common Interior Doors ====
-The most common interior door is the kind designed for people to go through. This kind of door is present practically everywhere; everyone's quarters, the door to the lounge, the door to the kitchens, etc. These interior doors are made of a metal-clad composite core; they are on the heavy side when off the track, but can be lifted and carried by your average adult albeit with some huffing and puffing.
+The most common interior door is the kind designed for people to go through. This kind of door is present practically everywhere; everyone's quarters, the door to the lounge, the door to the kitchens, etc. These interior doors are made of a metal-clad composite core; they are on the heavy side when off the track, but can be lifted and carried by your average adult albeit with some huffing and puffing. The vast majority of these doors are single-panel, however double-panel doors do exist and operate similarly. It is more common to have two single panel doors next to each-other than a double-panel door primarily for safety reasons -- they are easier to secure in emergencies, see notes about compression sealing below.
+These doors are largely soundproof but are not air tight; this avoids pressure changes within the ship and ears popping when doors are opened and closed, and makes sure that even if the ventilation to a room is clogged that there is some air getting in there. That said, an unventilated room with a closed door will get rather stale and someone in there breathing will make a rather high level of CO2, but it is better than if it is completely sealed. If an air-tight seal is needed, for example for a lab or an engineering space, the other kind of interior door is used (see the Heavy Duty Interior Door section below).
+The doors do have a compression seal on both sides of the frame; if exposed to vacuum, pressure difference between the different sides of the door will force it into the compression seal and protect the still-pressurized side. This will provide emergency protection to the occupants of the room, but it completely ruins the door which will have to be replaced.
+Each door has an inset handle, meaning you slide your fingertips into the door to use it. The handle has a biometric reader and will automatically unlock the door if you have access. Additionally, the door will automatically slide open on touch and will automatically close behind you when you step through unless you give the edge of the door a push once it's open; that will tell the door to remain open until you go and push the door again to free it.
+Additionally, most doors have a small e-ink style touch panel in the wall next to them. This touch panel will show an identification for the door, it may have some access information (is it restricted, etc.), and is used as a door chime and as an intercom for talking with the person on the other side. These panels are designed to keep displaying the identification of the door even if power is cut for an extended period.
+This is all most people need to know about doors, and probably more than most people want to know about doors. But you can continue on if you want!
+=== Even More Door Details ===
+I warned you! This section goes into the additional details of doors that most people won't care about, but engineers will probably be interested in.
+If unpowered and unlocked, a door can be slid open without the automatic function which is provided by a small motor in the wall. The inset handle provides enough leverage to push the door into the wall; it isn't that difficult to do, but it won't casually open on its own either. It requires a bit of an initial 'umf' and then it slides open the rest of the way relatively easily. Most people can do it without any issue.
+If locked, the lock itself is motorized and is a physical hook that couples the door to the wall. Doors vary in their security level; generally most doors are minimum security. They can be unlocked by using one's clawtips to pull the e-ink door plate off the wall (doors without the e-ink plate would not have locks), and then one can reach in and unlatch the door. The door is 'aware' when it has been opened in this way, and the e-ink plate will indicate it has been forced open unless someone with sufficiently high access clears it.
+This is for safety reasons; in an emergency, doors have to be openable on the ship to avoid people getting trapped. Therefore, it is fairly easy for anyone to unlock any door, but only relatively few people can clear the violation indicator to act as a deterent for casual violation of other people's privacy.
+High security doors require a special tool or basically a physical key to unlock manually. It still isn't that hard to force it open -- an engineer with a metal cutting tool could force it open as an example -- but it prevents access without a noisy and obvious amount of hassle. Usually the use of heavy duty interior doors is selected instead of a high security door, but it is worth mentioning them because they do exist.
+The E-Ink plates are networked, and doors can be remotely locked, unlocked, and their open/closed/forced status can be detected and logged. It is a common emergency practice to lock all passenger doors to keep them from wandering around and getting into trouble.
+And finally, how do we move large objects in and out of rooms? The doors have one more clever trick. Because the doors slide into the wall, it means the space next to the door is largely empty. The wall panels are bolted on, and thus can be unbolted; if the panels around the door-frame are removed, you are presented with a fairly large opening which can be used to easily move a mattress, couch, or other large furniture into a room. This is certainly a high level of effort, but a couple of engineers can open up a wall like this with about 15 minutes of work.
+Most other walls will have structural things, conduits, or other similar infrastructure bits that would block their usage for passing large things through them. But doors will always have an empty space next to them, allowing for this relatively easy way to move large objects.
+==== Heavy-Duty Interior Doors ====
+There are plenty of cases aboard the ship where an interior door needs to be air tight or even armored. Some examples of these doors are the doors that lead from the habitation to the spine, or from the engineering section to the spine. Additionally, several doors in engineering that lead into workshops use this kind of door, and the doors from the interior corridors on deck 4 to the cargo holds are this kind of door.
+These doors can range in size from "single user" sized similar to common doors on up to double garage door sized. It is more common for these to be large. They never have handles even if they are of the small variety; they are always operated by one of the e-ink touchpads described in the common door section. They will only open if the conditions are safe to open.
+As with other doors on the ship, these are all pocket doors which slide into the wall. They do not lift up; generally the ship has more "horizontal" space than "vertical" space available in any given location so sliding sideways makes more sense. The large doors are all double doors that open in the middle and slide into both walls. Unlike other doors, they don't just slide straight into the walls; when shut, the doors are tucked into a locking surface that provides an airtight seal.
+So when these doors open, they are first pulled out of the locking surface and then they slide open to the sides; from the user's perspective, it looks like the door first moves a little towards (or away) from them before sliding open. It is common for there to be a little air-pressure 'puff' when the doors are either moving into or out of this fully locked position.
+Unlike interior doors, these doors are hard-sealed against vacuum or whatever atmosphere is on either side. They are also blast-rated, protective against high heat, and protective against radiation and other hazards to varying degrees based on the expected use of the door.
+These doors both cannot be operated manually in a trivial way and close in a hard-locked state, and as such they do not require additional locking mechanisms. To open one of these doors manually, one must open up a wall panel and then use a breaker bar to first 'unlock' the door from the locking surface using one crank and then actually crank the door open using a second crank. If the pressure difference is too high (i.e. one side is exposed to vacuum and one isn't), it will be impossible for someone to muscle the door out of its locked position.
+Generally speaking, an engineer in a hurry could get one of these doors at least partially open in about 5 minutes; maybe 2 - 3 minutes with the help of power tools.