How to check for atmosphere behind a door on a damaged spacecraft

First, yes I was inspired by this question: "How do you check if a room behind a door aboard a spaceship has an atmosphere/pressure?"

I wanted to take the scenario further, instead of asking how the ship could be designed to handle this I want to know how a survivor could work their way through this.

Say you are on board a large space craft and it was damaged by a meteor. All the power is out and all bulkheads are closed and you need to get to the bridge.

The ship wasn't engineered to provide any kind of instrumentation to solve this problem under these circumstances (the computer does the checking).

How can one survivor using what he has around him check if the door has pressure or not behind it.

• he can't use a battery to power the sensors
• no magic tricorder hand sensor to do it for him
• you are welcome to imagine any materials that could reasonably be present in this situation. The scale and purpose of this ship will remain unspecified (though more general solutions would be appreciated)

Edit People seem to need a scenario:

To reduce construction costs we, FUBAR corp, fitted our newest commercial transport ship with the latest economical emergency pressure seal doors. They feature top of the line integrated pressure sensors that constantly monitor and report to the ship's computer. We removed costly antiquated redundant mechanisms with our new distributed multifunctional failsafe autonomous safety system built into every door. Each doors micro computer can handle safety and security locking procedures independent of ships central computer. In the case of power outages our new doors each utilize the latest tritium backup battery capable of performing for weeks without recharging. Our doors can even serve as a passive comm system in emergency situations.

And there's more, our improved luxury restrooms .......

Surprise the backup batteries were all defective because they cut costs and went with the cheapest distributor or no one realized they fail when exposed to certain frequencies of radiation.

posted over 6 years ago

anon‭

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