Look, ma! No decompression!
A common piece of fictional technology in Science Fiction works, especially those set in space, is a force field that keeps air from passing through while letting solid matter pass through freely. The most common applications of such force fields are hangar bays on space stations and larger spaceships which provide a shirt-sleeve environment for maintenance even as smaller spacecraft enter and leave frequently. Such hangars are certainly a lot more convenient than the docking mechanisms connecting airlocks together, especially since many fictional spaceships don't have airlocks in shapes that would facilitate that. However, don't expect anyone to acknowledge what should be tremendous energy costs of upholding these force fields, or any doors to close the bay when not in use.
Such force fields may also be installed inside hulls to prevent depressurization caused by breaches. In such cases, they will often provide very visible distortions in order to show they're working, unlike the hangar ones that often are simply invisible. In other cases, such technology might be miniaturized enough to be worn on a person, forming an air bubble that supplements spacesuits or outright replaces them, serving as a Space Mask.
There's an existing technology called a plasma window
— invented already in 1995 — that superheats a gas to create a volume of viscous plasma used in separating gases from vacuum. However, the amount of kilowatts needed to generate just a square centimeter of a plasma window limits the technology to small-scale and/or high-budget applications like particle accelerators and precision welding.
Compare Containment Field, whose function is to keep dangerous power sources and such from obliterating everything in the vicinity; No-Flow Portal, a portal that is similarly selective about what matter it sends to distant places; and Force-Field Door, which is specifically for keeping solid matter from passing through.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Martian Successor Nadesico: Uribitake had the foresight to install distortion fields at regular intervals through the Nadesico, so that if a rupture or hull breach is detected, force fields immediately come up to compartmentalize the damage and prevent the air from escaping if the ship is in space. He refers to them as "distortion blocks", and they save the Nadesico from the enemy using teleported bombs.
Films — Live-Action
- Galaxy Quest: When the actors from the eponymous show end up loading onto a shuttle to search for a Beryllium Sphere, the hangar door opens while everyone is still milling about the shuttle, but there is no indication of air escaping the ship.
- Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: The back of the protagonists' ship is blown open by the Sovereign's drones but a force field closes it off before too much blows out. Then Drax puts on a force field spacesuit and decides to hang out the back shooting at the drones. Then at the end Yondu gives Peter Quil the last force field spacesuit before they jet into space, letting himself suffocate despite Peter's attempts to deactivate the field and give it to him.
- Star Trek:
- Star Trek: Generations: The U.S.S. Enterprise-B is a modified Excelsior-Class ship, with elongated protrusions alongside the deflector dish. When the Nexus breeches the hull, and Captain Kirk is blown outnote , a force field snaps up to patch the hull when Scotty, Chekov, and Capt. Herriman come to see what became of Kirk.
- Star Trek: First Contact: Picard demonstrates to Lily that she's in space by lowering a hatch on the Enterprise-E's hull. Lily notes that there's no glass, asking how the air doesn't get out. Picard gently taps the force field to demonstrate. Presumably the hatch is for maintenance, as one would hope Starfleet wouldn't simply forgo transparent aluminum in a window and hope that an enemy attack or the results of a Negative Space Wedgie didn't short out the force field at the worst possible time.
- Star Wars:
- A New Hope: The Millennium Falcon is hauled into the Death Star via tractor beam. We're shown a row of open bays, with the technicians hauling in the ship even stating that they're opening the magnetic seal on the specific bay they're bringing the Falcon into. Presumably the crew that handles the bay exit the area until the ship is brought in and the magnetic seal restored.
- The Phantom Menace: The Underwater City of Otoh Gunga is built within "hydrostatic force field" bubbles that repel the water but can be freely passed through by people and vehicles. There's no mention of how many fish fall in.
- Revenge of the Sith: Anakin blasts the force field generator over a Separatist battleship's hangar bay and air rushes out until a physical door closes over it.
- The Rise of Skywalker: Rey is able to leave Kylo Ren's Star Destroyer through one of the docking bays, by stepping through the magnetic field and onto the Millennium Falcon which is hovering just outside.
Literature
- In the Book of the New Sun novel Urth of the New Sun, Severian travels on a spaceship whose crew uses pendants that provide an air bubble for use in vacuum in lieu of spacesuits.
- In Chindi, Priscilla Hutchins is at risk of drowning when she throws up in her spacesuit while Dramatic Space Drifting. Her spacesuit is just a personal forcefield, so her rescuer turns it off for a moment (causing the air to erupt out of her lungs, clearing her airways) then switches it back on again.
- Cradle Series: The Ghostwater facility uses these in its pocket universe to create bubbles of land and air in an otherwise endless ocean. Lindon and his friends just have to swim down to the bubbles they want and fall through the barrier, without any need for a specific entrance.
- The Jenkinsverse: Most of the galaxy uses these with only slightly less ubiquity than bulkheads on a spaceship. They've been doing this so long that they look down on humans as primitive for not trusting the technology. Humans point out that yes, apparently this technology has been reliable for centuries, but having backups in the form of solid airlocks is probably still a good idea.
- Old Kingdom: It's a simple feat of Utility Magic to create a permeable bubble with a reserve of fresh air. When Lirael and Nick need to venture into an airless world in Goldenhand, they scale it up to an eight-metre bubble that moves with them.
- Starsight: Such things are so simple and commonplace that the titular space station is little more than a metal plate floating in space, with buildings on top of it.
Live-Action TV
- Doctor Who: The TARDIS is capable of generating a force field allowing the Doctor to open the TARDIS doors even if the ship is in flight. He can even extend the shell around the ship exterior.
- In "The Beast Below", the Doctor opens the doors and holds Amy by her foot as she experiences weightlessness and a superb view of the cosmos around them. The Doctor explains that he's extended an air shell around the TARDIS.
- In "The Time of the Angels", River leaves a message for the Doctor in a museum, knowing he'll eventually show up there, with time and spatial coordinates, as well as a request for "an air corridor". She escapes capture from the security on a Galaxy-class starliner by blowing out the airlock and floating into the materializing TARDIS, presumably kept safe by the aforementioned air corridor.
- In "Amy's Choice", the Doctor opens the TARDIS doors in deep space to blow out the psychic pollen that had given birth to the Dream Lord.
- In "The Doctor's Wife", the Doctor opens the doors to the vacuum of space to receive a hypercube, a sort of Time Lord distress signal.
- In "Oxygen", the space suit the Doctor wears has a weak field around the head area, but without a helmet it keeps the Doctor from suffocating, but doesn't protect him from the other ravages of a vacuum, causing him to go blind as the liquid around his eyes boils in space.
- In the Star Trek series, force fields are used for semi-permeable doors in shuttlebays, keeping air in while allowing the shuttles to pass through. They're also sensible enough to have a physical door which is kept closed until the shuttles need to be deployed.
Tabletop Games
- In the Faster Than Light: Nomad supplement Spacecraft Go!, ships equipped with Plasma Shields or Force Fields can use them as airlocks, holding air in but letting ships or personnel pass through. There are also Air Skeins made from advanced polymers that allow solid objects to pass through and seal themselves.
Video Games
- Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! includes the containment on the outside of buildings, and also in a circle surrounding the oxygen generators. Characters also have a personal field for their oxygen supply.
- Dead Space 1 has a room aboard the spaceship Ishimura which is pressurized despite a large opening leading out into vacuum, with a rock suspended halfway through it. You can walk on that rock with your Sticky Shoes and see your Oxygen Meter kick in the moment you pass through that opening. Curiously, there are many airlocks aboard this ship that don't use such force fields, instead becoming hard vacuum the moment you open the outer hatch.
- Elite Dangerous has shimmering, light blue energy fields that retain an atmosphere in the following places:
- The entrance to non-outpost orbital stations.
- The landing pads of outposts and surface stations.
- The external doors of buildings in Odyssey settlements.
- Halo: The Covenant make extensive use of energy barriers in the hangar bays of all their ships. These barriers maintain the atmosphere inside the ships while also allowing smaller dropships and shuttles to enter. The barrier settings can even be changed to prevent dropships from entering. These barriers can be seen onboard multiple ship classes in several games including the Cruiser, Truth and Reconciliation, in Halo: Combat Evolved and the Corvette, Ardent Prayer, in Halo: Reach.
- Heat Signature: All ships automatically engage atmospheric retention whenever there's an atmosphere breach, directly covering the hole (whether it's a shattered window or an outright hull breach) with a shimmering blue force field. However, these barriers are very permeable to physical objects to the point you can just walk into the void; it's useful both as an escape route and a easy to dispose of guards if you have the knockback for it.
- Mass Effect features force fields used to keep air from leaking out into space.
- The codex entry about the Citadel states that the station's wards have force fields providing atmosphere in outdoor areas up to the height of 7 metres; any building taller than that must be airtight.
- Mass Effect 2 demonstrates that the starship Normandy has emergency force fields used to keep air from leaking through hull breaches, both in the intro — where a wall of energy (alongside a breathing mask) is the only thing keeping Joker breathing in the cockpit as Normandy gets completely wrecked around around him — and in the first stage of the final mission where Normandy passing through the Omega Relay takes multiple nasty hull breaches, each glowing with energy keeping the ship airtight.
- In MDK2, the protagonists' space station/ship Jim Dandy has emergency force fields that activate in case of a hull breach, as seen in Max's second level where he rams into it using a shuttle stolen from the alien invaders' orbiter. However, Rule of Funny dictates that when Fluke Hawkins has to open an airlock for an emergency spacewalk, it must let air out with enough force to yank the doctor off his feet, necessitating MacGyvering some Sticky Shoes.
- No Man's Sky:
- Space stations see a lot of traffic entering and leaving through long, large flight corridors separated from the vacuum by some sort of force field. Even dilapidated stations found in abandoned systems have those force fields in working order.
- The hangar bays in freighters have three doors which close down when there's no ship traffic and open up when there is, projecting a wall of blue energy that emits smoke.
- A "holo-door" is a component for player bases which provides an entrance that explicitly projects an energy wall to filter out adverse exterior conditions. The difference between holo-doors and standard doors is purely cosmetic however, as passing through standard ones into an interior will similarly stop environmental hazards in an instant.
- The Outer Worlds: One of the game's locations is an asteroid which was being mined. So the workers didn't have to be in suits all the time, and to allow the operation to be more self-sufficient with food, a "UDL Terraformer" was installed, which creates a dome of air enclosed in a force field across the surface of the asteroid. It's possible for the PC to walk through the force field; outside it, the PC rapidly takes damage from exposure to vacuum. (Why there are no pressure suits aboard the Unreliable and no opportunity to acquire any is not explained.)
- Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Outcast: One mission starts with Kyle Katarn infiltrating a Remnant base through the docking bays. There are a lot of stormtroopers patrolling the bays; while Kyle has a good chance of success against them, it's still pretty risky to fight them. It's safer to sneak around into the nearby control room and switch off the magnetic field on the docking bays, decompressing the bays and sending the troopers flying out into space.
- In Subnautica, your own bases use normal airlocks and/or pressure-based Moonpools, but the high tech Alien Ruins have force fields at their entrances that keep water out and air in.
- Unreal Tournament: Thanks to Magnetic Anti-Vacuum Resonance technology, combatants are able to battle outside of Xan’s ‘HyperBlast’ ArenaShip for an extended period of time.
- In Warframe, energy fields preventing depressurization are commonplace and used in anything spaceborne such as hangars, airlocks, hull breaches (as seen on Grineer crewships) or archwings; the codex page for Mag Prime has a debrief excerpt where the narrator recounts their lungs filling with air as Mag equipped with "golden wings" rescued them from getting spaced by their spaceship's destruction.
Webcomics
- Unsounded: Several underwater installations have magical barriers that block the water but let people through. Justified by the Functional Magic system: spells can be designed to affect only specific types of matter in the area of effect.
