Single Tile Airlock

[jackfractal]

Would this be a good idea?

Tile has two states and a direction. You can only walk into it from the 'open' direction. You walk onto the tile, click the airlock, and it cycles. Cycling blocks both directions, hides the person inside it, and takes an arbitrary amount of time, say... ten seconds. Once it's finished cycling it shifts to the opposite state, opening the way forward and leaving the way behind you closed. It could have it's own internal airtank, so it would hold the air from itself inside itself when cycling to space, and then refill it's own tile when transferring to inside again.

It would be faster then the large multi-tile airlocks, but wouldn't let you bring draggables like crates, ore boxes, or nuclear weapons through them. I see them mostly for emergency access airlocks. You'd have one in engineering near the singularity (and you'd also have one large one), and the airlocks near the solars would also get replaced with this thing. The advantage is that they are much faster and have a smaller station design footprint, the negatives are that they are only people sized.

Make them buildable and it becomes significantly easier to build working space bolt-holes that don't depressurize immediately.

[Kiwidaninja]

I mentioned something like this a long time ago for cyborgs, but for everyone would be really, really nice. Would it be possible to Emag or hack, and force it to be half-open (Open both sides, depressurize), or not work at all?

[jackfractal]

Yeah, though emagging it to break would be less fun then emagging it to cycle properly once, and then break. That would let you out and then force your pursuers to find another way to follow.