An airlock was a structure built into most starships that allowed beings to enter or exit pressurized atmospheres from the vacuum of space.
Shortly before the Battle of Endor, Admiral Jhared Montferrat of the Galactic Empire used an airlock on the Devastator to execute suspected Rebel spies.
A complex airlock aboard the Executor
Airlocks were equipped to most space-faring vehicles for the purpose of allowing their passengers to enter from and exit to the vacuum of space. They were also used as connection points between spaceships: by attaching two ships' airlocks and pressurizing the passage their passengers could safely pass from one to the other as long as the connection remained intact. This method of mid-space docking was mostly used to connect similarly sized spaceships that couldn't land in each others' hangar and was particularly dangerous as a hit to the airlocks' connection point could fuse them together, causing the ships to be stuck and requiring their crew to perform a manual disconnect using emergency controls in the airlocks' vicinity.
As an extremely common feature shared between most spaceships, airlocks came in vastly different shapes and sizes, from small hatches in a starship's floor to large circular tunnels with the seal in their end. Some were as simple as a room with a vacuum worthy seal on the space and a shield on the spaceship end and others such as these aboard the Executor-class Star Dreadnoughts were extremely complex structures with an attached control room and transparisteel observation windows.
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