So, as with The Sims, we know that someone's going to "experiment" with disasters.
Who will be first to develop a thriving station full of a wonderful society only to remove the docking facilities and then shut down the O2 and power systems?
Funny you should say that — our focus for version 0.23 is going to be on disasters & crisis response!
Kevin and I were talking about it this morning. He pointed out that in Mobile Suit Gundam, episode 2 I think, they had a hull breach on a space colony, and released some big pink bubble things that glommed onto the hole, hardened, and sealed it off. But I just did a bit of Googling hoping to find an image or video of this, and came up empty-handed. Anybody have google-fu stronger than mine?
My google-fu is weak, history however~~~~ WWII self sealing fuel tanks in fighter planes might help.
Don't forget micro meteor strikes. You get a really slow air leak that is very hard to pin point unless you put something really light yet highly recognizable in the air that you can follow to the leak. Otherwise its a slow terrible death. I still say it would be good to be able to place defenses against meteors, space junk, etc upon your structures. Even if that just means equipping them with an ion or plasma engine to be able to move out of the way provided you detect the danger. Could even be a spacecraft losing the ability to maneuver and thus becoming an impact hazard. Or it could be that due to an impact your orbital city is now losing its orbit or rather de-orbiting which would be terminal without the ability to re-establish orbit.
I don't think I buy the de-orbiting scenario... something the size of a space colony has a
lot of momentum, and it would take a huge amount of energy (much more than even an impactor carries) to alter its orbit significantly.
The slow-leak scenario is a legitimate one, though I don't think it leads to slow death... it leads to increased resupply expenses. Even without micro impactors, you can't get any structure 100% airtight. The ISS, for example, loses about 230 g of air per day (
reference). It's not a huge deal; you just top it off from the tanks. But obviously you'd prefer to keep that loss rate as low as possible.
(EDIT: And don't forget about
self-healing materials... a real space colony will probably have a layer or two of these, which will automatically seal any small cracks or holes.)
Sounds like I put those idea's out to quick. But getting hit by something big could really ruin day I still think. The day all of this becomes a reality will be more interesting than we can imagine I do believe though. Hopefully when that day arrives we won't take the evils we experience in everyday life with us.