Breathing

Introduction

You can survive a few weeks without food, or just a few days without water but you won't last long without air. Breathing is even more important than water for life. Space doesn't have any of those but air should be your first order of priority.

General principles

When you're on earth, air is plentiful. Not all planets are like this and for sure, space isn't friendly at all for that matter. To overcome this, you can go personal or area based breathing.

Personal breathing

Personal breathing is achieved through specific equipments like the Warp helmet or most advanced armor, as seen through their tooltips.

Those equipments require air stored in either an Air Canister or IndustrialCraft 2 Compressed air (when available) in your main inventory. When they're all empty, your Warp armor may refill them using ice and energy (RF or EU) from your inventory. Otherwise, you'll have to use an Air Generator to refill your Air Canisters.

Wearing a breathing helmet is crucial but your body goes further than your head. It's vital to wear a full armor to protect from depressurization. Thanks to the Interchangeable Space Suit regulation, armor parts are interchangeable and you can mix them up to your liking.

Area breathing

Breathing equipment can be fairly limiting for your daily work aboard a space station. To save you from carrying a lot of Air Canisters around, most ships are equipped with an Air Generator. They need a bit of energy and a sealed area to work efficiently. When a leak happens, you want to close it as soon as possible. Larger volume take more time to fill up with air, and it's more susceptible to decompression; consequently, the Wyom Weapons Megacorp engineering team strongly advised to segment your ship in smaller rooms.

Sealing is pretty obvious and can be split in several categories:

• air: leaves, torches, ladders, crops, iron bars, open doors will all let air go through them.
• sealer: dirt, stone, hull, and pretty much any full blocks will seal air, preventing it to pass through them.
• horizontal leaker: an horizontal slab will only stop air flowing vertically. Air will flow through it horizontally.
• vertical leaker: a glass panel or a vertical slab will only stop air flowing horizontally. Air will flow through it vertically.

Airlocks are used to move in and out of a pressurized area. When space exploration was still young, a small confined space was used with 2 consecutive doors. While this is still a valid technique, nowadays, most ships are equipped with Energy Air Shield.

Last but not least, due to the Ship hull decoration act, all stairs are equipped with integrated Air sealing technology and will stop air flow in all directions. Thanks to the LDV foundation, this technology is delivered free of charge to all legacy and newly crafted stairs.