In Space Seed, Khan decides to kill Kirk slowly making use of the very handy decompression chamber.N
In Space Seed, Khan decides to kill Kirk slowly making use of the very handy decompression chamber.Now, back in The Galileo Seven, I queried McCoy’s use of millimeters of mercury (mm Hg) to measure atmospheric pressure. So I have to roll my eyes at the decompression chamber on the Enterprise which appears to use inches of mercury (in Hg) as its unit of pressure. It’s a valid unit of pressure, at least, albeit an odd one to use in space. However, I would really hope Starfleet would have settled on either metric or imperial units (preferably the former, but at least be consistent). Mixing them up can be catastrophic, as the Mars Climate Orbiter team helpfully demonstrated.Standard atmospheric pressure is around 30 in Hg, and around half of this is the lowest survivable limit. We’re at less than 10 in Hg here, so Kirk’s actually doing pretty well to still be conscious; since he visits lots of planets I assume he’s done a fair amount of high altitude (= low pressure) training.Another problem here is how quickly that pressure dropped: this is extremely dangerous and likely to cause decompression sickness (aka the bends). Lt McGivers doesn’t help matters at all when she whips it straight back up while “rescuing” him. -- source link
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