Physics question

> How about a "half-bubble" with an airlock on the side? Of course we'd
> be discussing repairmen in pressure suits.

I would agree with this. Perhaps a dome on retractable wheels and with a rubber skirt. Give the municipal authority time to wrangle over whether to call in a repair crew in their overtime or save expenses by having the repair done during regular hours. Several such domes could be placed in readiness along the verges of the window areas of an Island Three type habitat. It would be much more difficult with the sloping windows of an Island One type, but the windows of such a habitat will likely be shielded from line-of-sight exposure to space, light being bounced in by mirrors.

> One comment should made on this topic. I don't know the math to
> calculate wind speeds, but I have heard somebody remark that while the
> airflow may well be supersonic right at the opening, airspeeds just a
> few feet away would only be a few miles an hour.

I shouldn't be surprised if this is true. A vacuum cleaner can pick up a fairly dense and heavy object if the mouthpiece is placed directly over it, but leave dust undisturbed that lies a few millimeters away from the mouthpiece. And when you drain a sink, the soap suds away from the vortex barely move.
The distance between safe and doomed may be quite short. The repair crew should have safety equipment like that of mountaineers. Once the dome is over the hole but before it has been pushed fully into place and the wheels have been retracted, there should be quite a wind between the skirt and the glass surface, unless the dome is large compared to the hole.
If you have a pressurized tube where one end cap is suddenly removed, I should expect the wind speed to be inversely linear with the distance to the hole. With a pie-shaped pressure vessel, I should expect an inverse square relationship, once you are far away from the hole compared to the thickness of the pie. With the pressure vessel extending in three dimensions I should expect an inverse cube. These of course at distances large compared to the size of the hole.

And just as roads are often left in bad repair, full of holes after the winter, because the authorities are short-funded (or think that they are), you might expect a few such domes left over shattered panels until the authorities can afford to have them fixed.

Jon Lennart Beck.