Creative decompression

[DemiBenson]

Originally Posted by shawnhcorey

Sliding doors are harder to seal. Also, they use swinging hatches on submarines to seal off a compartment if there's flooding and those hatches have to withstand more than one atmosphere.

Submarines have special circumstances:

• access is not via airlock (they only open doors on the surface, so no pressure differential)
• very limited space and non-mechanized doors (neither of which are typical of generic sci-fi spaceships)
• no regularly-traversed internal airlocks, only compartmentalization for damage control purposes
• flooded compartments are always at higher pressure than non-flooded
• an emergency doctrine that amounts to "seal off damaged compartments from the core, and rescues will be at zero pressure differential"