PMN1 said:
From O'Neil's book 'The High Frontier'
They (the windows) will naturally be subdivided into small panels...A window panel may have an area two or three times that of the window of a jet aircraft....for panels of that size the loss of one will certainly not be catastrophic for the community. For what we have called Island One, if one panel were blown out entirely, it would be several years before the atmosphere would leak out'.
...Been a while since I read that book, and I'll have to grab a new copy next time I see one at the Half-Assed Book store. There's been a bit of criticism of this particular bit of Gerry's design, in that IIRC he never did show any math to back up the air leak rates. On the other hand, remember we're dealing with a scope and size that very few people can grasp, and nobody has ever come across in real life. He also doesn't appear to take into consideration any sort of "domino" effect - a window blows, the vacuum sucks a nearby desk through it, taking out the eight adjacent windows, which in turn sucks a tree out that takes out more adjacent windows, etc, etc. When you consider that a person can be easily sucked through a blown airliner window at only Angels 50...well, let's just say he was really being optimistic about those big honking windows.