doors

Trope-a-Day: Script Reading Doors

Posted by

Script Reading Doors: Played oddly straight – the ability of people’s neural laces and muses to override local hardware, if they think of so doing, can create some of these effects – the ones involving staying open for longing looks, or operating stealthily, or while people are conversing through it, or other cases where the people involved could logically think of it in advance.

And automatic door circuitry is smart enough to understand who has permission to go through doors, or when someone has been v-tagged as going to a specific location, and the difference between someone walking to a door and walking past a door – but still, they’re not perfectly script-reading, even if they are much better at predicting intentions that purely proximity-sensor based automatic doors.

Trope-a-Day: Our Doors Are Different

Posted by

2

Our Doors Are Different: Well, sometimes.  Automatic, yes, just about all of them as at the Imperial level of technology (or, indeed, the modal level for the Associated Worlds) throwing an actuator on there is cheap, and people are carrying things in all hands often enough that it’s handy not to have to set them down to make the door open.  (Of course, most of these aren’t automatic, so much as operated by thinking “open” at them.)  Also, in microgravity, finding leverage may be annoying for much the same reason.

Leaving aside blast doors, vault doors, and other such things with locking mechanisms designed to survive someone letting off a nuke just outside, etc., and the cog-style spacetight doors designed to be openable regardless of pressure differentials, most of the rest of the Different Doors are the gratuitously fancy non-rectangular-and-with-multiple-moving-parts styles that serve no useful purpose whatsoever except for letting architects and interior designers show off as much as possible.  Which is to say, they don’t so much serve an out-of-universe desire to show off how cool and sciency and futuristic everything is, as an in-universe desire for… well, that.

Special note here to the really fancy swarm-doors made of large numbers of nanomachines pretending to be a wall that essentially melt away to create an opening, or even around you to create the effect that you just melted right through the wall, leaving it intact behind you.  Very expensive, but damn shiny-looking.

And, of course, to the biotech heart-valve or sphincter-based doors.

Trope-a-Day: Dilating Door

Posted by

Dilating Door: Actually, most doors are regular doors, except for doors in space – because of the whole opening/closing against pressure issue – which tend to be cog-doors that roll into place.  (In addition to the pressure advantage, they’re also relatively easy to open or close when the power is out, by disconnecting the actuator arm and cranking them manually, or rolling them physically.)

There are also doors which melt to let people through, except since they’re actually the power of Sufficiently Advanced Nanotech walls to reshape themselves any way they feel like, and the doors aren’t bound to appear in any particular position, well…  (These are mostly the province of the absurdly wealthy who just hate messing up the nice sleek lines of their space yacht with overt door openings.)

And the people heavily into organic technology for houses and starship interiors (see that trope) and other such things generally have “doors” that are actually sphincters, or heart valves writ large.  The effect is much the same.