> winter"what happens when your pet cat sharpens his claws on the walls?"mute

LOL!

I suppose that's a point. You're saying the whole point of designing the walls to be "plastic and thin" is that they will offer a ready and instantly accessible source of water fire extinguisher. Not that THAT would do any good in a Class C Electrical fire, or a Class B Oil/Solvent fire, as we've already established in Gahalia's "**nine*foot*high * mushroom*cloud * of * fire**" scenario ( http://www.rinkworks.com/rinkforum/view.cgi?post=35131 ). Also, you'd have a problem with the walls having no impact resistance, no puncture resistance (meow!), no real structural integrity; and maybe even a flammability problem, ironically enough (since you've designed them to burn-through and break easily "in case of fire," right? I'm pretty sure that would violate every known building code in existence :-)

Perhaps a better solution would be to create a gel-like flooring material which, when it heats up to some critical "stuff is burning" temperature, would undergo a change of state and release a dry chemical flame retardant -- as needed -- directly into the area where there's a fire.

I get this idea from a fire marshal's observation that a toddler's gel diaper was once found untouched -- amongst the blackened ruin of a house fire that had raged at 800-1200°C. Of course such high temperatures would 'vaporize' any theoretically standing water that could be stored inside a room's walls. Vaporize it within minutes.

Yet another wacky idea: fill the floor with some rapid-fire foaming material that bursts out of the floor (propelled using the same method that a car airbag works). The foam will just smother the fire and prevent it from room-jumping even before it really gets started. If we had the technology, we could also use some sort of medical foaming agent that soothes and protects any first or second-degree skin burns that might have been caused by the fire. If the injury were more serious, the foam could administer some kind of first aid and life-support functions. And oh yeah, for these last few things to work, the foam would have to be harmless and breathable as necessary -- in addition to being a good flame retardant.

Or maybe asbestos underwear would still work as well. :-)

Wolf "just tossing around some ideas" spirit