Holding your breath

[Sex_Robot]

Well if you want to get super technical and game mechanics with it, holding your breath or inhaling deeply during decompression would cause the gas in your lungs to expand almost a hundred fold, and tear/rip lung tissue to shreds.

But let's assume that spacemen are trained enough that they have a space sixth sense, and can detect a hull breach right before it happens, giving them enough time to completely expel their lungs.

An average human being in said condition would be able to last about 15 seconds without passing out, and about 2-3.5 minutes without taking brain damage. A professional deep diver with time to oxygenate their blood can do around 30 seconds without passing out.

My suggestion would be to somewhat agree with the above post, but also still add the emote/verb/whatever.

Specifically, mechanics wise: Two parts.

Part 1: the verb:

You would have a verb, that would only work in 60% to 300% of 1 atm worth of pressure. Call it 'hold breath'. Push it and you hold your breath, until you pass out or press the verb again. It would allow you to attempt to avoid inhaling poisonous gasses or the like, but wouldn't do much vs chemicals that work on contact with skin or mucus membranes or such. The amount of time you could do it without starting to pass out would be based on a ratio of your ideal atmosphere vs the current atmosphere, with an absolute values limiter so it's the same both ways.

The downside of using said verb is that it would make entering a depressurized area much more damaging than usual.

Part 2: the automated system.

Making assumptions that the spacemen get ideal circumstances and training during a hullbreach, unprotected spacemen will automatically expel all their breath before a hull breach/entering a depressurized area. They can last between 12-30 seconds before blacking out. (Possibly downgraded to 2-13 IRL seconds to preserve ss13's increased pace, if necessary for balance)

After about 2 or 3 minutes (Or maybe 1 minute in spaceman time, if necessary for balance), they would then start taking oxygen deprivation to the brain.

Stuffing an oxygen mask on them and restarting their breath before this time will avert the damage, but will still leave them incredibly numb and woozy. Like a crazy charly horse for the entire body.


This sounds powerful, but you must realize that oxygen deprivation is the least of a spaceman's problems during a hull breach. Space is full of cosmic radiation and all sorts of nasty electromagnetic influences, on top of the lack of pressure causing instant evaporation and evapo-freezing of any porous surface.

Stop that.

You are playing a game where you fart on a bible to explode and reattach limbs with a staple gun.