Engineering Closet

The Engineering Closet, in development stages.

The Engineering Closet in the Hawking III is an aptly named closet off of the Interlock. Approximately 4 feet deep by 3 feet wide, the closet is as tall as the rest of the hab and is entirely taken up by 8 wooden boards forming what would be shelves if they were connected by boards. This is because, due to Fire Safety Procedure, a room less than 1 metre along its smallest direction cannot hold students at any time. In the Beta reality the engineering closet theoretically holds the vital machines that keep the habitat going, but for a long time in Alpha reality it mostly held old video cards and a box of what is rumoured to be 126 km of fiber-optic cable. It also contains the fabled Engine speaker.

In the EECOM software the Engineering Closet is treated as the same room as the Interlock. Because of this it is treated as not being airtight, and although it has the metal tabs necessary to support door panels they are not wired. Despite this, EECOM displays a door between the Interlock and Engineering Closet, which simply never registers pressure differences. There was an Engineering Closet in the Hawking II for a few months before the room change.

Project to Clean the Engineering Closet

In 2009-10 Lyra Evans and Samuel Baltz began a project to clean up the engineering closet. They

• attached a shelf to the top of the closet's wooden structure
• boarded up holes to make it look airtight
• replaced pieces of duct tape that were letting light through or falling off
• procured a ShopVac and used Aluminium Tape to make it look like an air compression system
• found some boxes with lots of wires

Mikaela Stiver notably designed and built a small door to cover up the indent outside of the engineering closet's power box, as well as to provide easy access to the closet from outside the habitat.