Bang!

[davywavy]

So...if you were thrown out of a spaceship into vacuum, your internal pressure would blow you apart as your blood boiled and killed you instantly, right?
Wrong.

Comments

Well, you'd be freezing at the same time...

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

...but otherwise I don't see the problem.

[raggedyman.livejournal.com]

you know about the only way to conclusivly prove these idea is to shove someone out into space...

I wonder what would happen if we did it with a tortoise??

Re:

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Well, pressure gradients can have an astonishing effect; This film shows what happens to a crab when it encounters a 3mm hole in a 0 PSI pipeline at a pressure depth of 2700PSI.

It's not quite a tortoise, but it's fairly crunchy...
http://crustacea.nhm.org/~dean2/crab.html

[puddingcat.livejournal.com]

Ick.
Poor crab.

Now now

[applez.livejournal.com]

why get in the way of truly imaginative gory visions? :-)

In any event, in a true vaccuum experience, there'd be the radiation exposure to worry about as well. Even a short time could guarantee sterility or worse.

Re: Now now

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

It's a question that I've always wondered about, as depictions of the effects of vacuum vary.

Re: Now now

[souldier-blue.livejournal.com]

Having read the description, I've decided I didn't really want to know :-/

Re: Now now

[omentide.livejournal.com]

Depends if you're wearing a pressure suit or not.

There's rules for it in Transhuman Space. Almost as good as the rules for hydrostatic shock in Blue Planet. I will never forget the look on the face of one particular player just after he said 'I bet this game doesn't have rules for Hydrostatic shock!'

And I had to fudge round it in some fiction of my own, because I wanted lots of explody gore at that point.

Not a physicist or anything, but I like my SF HARD.

Re: Now now

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Well, this is the only example that I've ever heard of a person being exposed to vaccuum, and so I'll be sticking to that from now on.