At 10/11/15 05:56 PM, Scintillating wrote:
In the Ridley Scott film The Martian, our hero uses a plastic tarp to cover a 6 ft diameter opening in his potato-growing habitat, then proceeds to repressurise it. That's rich! Even at a measly third of the 12.6 psi (4 psi is approximately the pressure at the summit of Mt Everest) they showed on screen in his video logs, that tarp would have to resist over 8 tons of force. Goddamn, NASA, I want one of those tarps!
In the book, it's "habitat canvas" designed specifically to be used for repairing holes in the habitat. He doesn't use duct tape, he uses a resin which is specifically designed to seal surface breaches in all sorts of surfaces of the habitat to make them airtight.
Making the stuff translucent for the movie was just an aesthetic decision by set design. In the movie, it's what looks like translucent plastic. They still call it "hab canvas" though, so the assumption you should make is that it's a much stronger woven material embedded in a flexible plastic substrate. This could be done using fiberglass.
It seems that a lot of reviews of the movie pointed out that a massive storm on Mars would be like a light breeze on Earth, but taking license with that is acceptable in my opinion.
Some planetary scientist from NASA was talking about that, so yeah.
Let's point out plot holes or flaws in films that just made you smack your face through the back of your head.
In the 2010 version of True Grit, Mattie and Rooser Cogburn take the weakest and most worn down pony available, leaving La Boeuf at the camp on top of an overlook and told he would be sent help, despite the fact that there were bunch of perfectly healthy horses standing around without riders.
In Interstellar, Brand's soliloquy implies that love exists as fundamental force of nature on another plane or dimension, which implies to the audience that it is a real explanation for the final act, despite the speech actually being a metaphor for the science underlying the final act.
