Thermal Door: Fill & Download for Free

I can tell you that a Prius won’t. :) I parked in the Geneva airport one day. And as I walked out of my car, I heard an engine start. I looked around. There was a Prius III parked. Doors unlocked. Nobody inside. And it had just turned on.What happened is this. Driver arrived. Parked. Put the car in “P”(ark) position. Forgot to turn it off. But since the car is hybrid, it switched to EV temporarily (parking is at average temp, so no need for heating or air-con in the car). The driver took out their luggage, and walked away. By the time the car turned on the thermal engine again, the person was too far gone to hear it. And from there on, it kept (as any Prius parked somewhere) switching from EV to thermal and back as battery level goes up and down, and as energy needs change.When I got out of my car, it was one of those times when it switched from EV to thermal.I walked to the car. Opened the door. Pressed the “ON/OFF” switch. That turned off the car. Without the key inside (I checked, it wasn’t). It was then impossible to turn it back on (reasonably). So the car was safe (again, reasonably - but this is Geneva, so very much so) until the owner came back. Given the keyless door unlock, they probably never realized that they had left the car on. They used the normal trunk key to open the trunk, put their luggage in… and then entered the car and drove away.One unknowingly happy Prius driver. :)(EDIT: Of course, I have no idea how long it was since the driver left the car, when I found it. Maybe it was only 5 minutes. Maybe the driver ran out too fast to catch their plane and didn’t notice the “you left the key in the car” beep when they closed the door. I don’t know. But the car was on. I turned it off. No key was inside.)(NEW EDIT - 20201230): I have a new car. Volvo XC40 Recharge. If I leave the contact on… it stays on. Until battery runs out, at which point it turns on the engine. But it does happen that I do that when there’s a software update to run and which takes some time. If the car is “on” then it’s impossible to plug a recharge cable. And if the car is plugged in the recharge cable, it’s impossible to turn it on. And it’s also impossible to lock the doors with the car turned on. But it definitely will stay on (and beep strongly if you open the driver door when the car is on).

They did, and they use them regularly.They are more in the shape of a lance than a saber, they are called thermal lances, and they can cut through anything if you have enough fuel and rods.Here you can buy one Single Bottle Exothermic Cutting SystemAnd here you can see them in action, such as a dude cutting a giant rock with one.Soldiers use these to go thru bunker doors, tanks, etc. It takes time, and it takes rods and oxygen bottles, but you get through.If they could make a smaller, even more portable one, they would, but that's the best it can be done, and it's damn useful.

My friend Marianne Dyson worked on the procedure for that when she was in mission control back in the early shuttle era.The shuttle could not land unless both payload bay doors were closed and latched. There was some leeway for some latches to be unsecured, but the doors were integral not only to the shuttle’s aerodynamics and thermal protection, but structural integrity. It could not come home without the doors being closed.Each door was operated by a set of powered hinged, all through gearboxes and a shared drive shaft to a pair of redundant drive motors. The latches were similarly ganged together and operated by paired redundant motors. But what if the linkages jammed? What if the extreme temperature cycling shifted something out of spec? What if something in orbital space ate up the lubricants (we learned several years into the program that atomic oxygen eats up all sorts of things at that altitude)? What if a motor brake jams?In the event of a failure, all the tools needed to manually secure the doors were located behind a thermal blanket in the forward bulkhead next to the airlock. A properly trained astronaut would go outside, and if the doors had failed to close, use a hand crank to close them. If the mechanism was broken, it could be disabled and a system of levers and ratchets used to crank the doors closed. If the latches would not mate, they could be disabled. If they wouldn’t latch, they could be clamped from the inside—all using specially made equipment, of course.Astronaut Jeffrey A. Hoffman has said that the shuttle was not originally going to have any provision for EVA, that it was going to be smaller and with a simpler job of delivering payloads to orbit and dropping them off. But when Air Force requirements led to a greatly expanded payload bay, and the seriousness of their potential failure was realized, spacesuits and and airlock were put into the design. I have no independent confirmation that that’s true.