You know, I've pretty much seen this episode as "Towering Inferno in space" since I first saw it, but it just struck me how similar it is to a real-life incident:
In 1967 there was a tremendous fire aboard USS Forrestal off Vietnam. The fire was caused not by an enemy attack but by a simple accident on the flight deck coupled with some old ammunition that did not perform as it was supposed to. During engine start on one aircraft a short circuit caused it to fire a missile that stuck another plane rupturing it's fuel tanks and starting a fire. Fire crews responded immediately, but could not extingish the fire before the heat caused a 1,000-pound bomb on the burning plane to detonate.
That explosion blew a hole in the flight deck, allowing burning jet fuel to penetrate into the ship. It also killed all (or almost all) the trained firefighters aboard, and schrapnel perforated the fire hoses.
As the fire spread, one of the first areas threatened was the engine room that supplied water pressure to the firefighting systems.
I think some good ideas could be mined from this incident.
http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/...stal-fire.html
I agree that shutting off the force field that holds the air in seems an obvious solution, and deserves some explanation for why it won't work. I like the idea above about battery power and severed controls from the bridge. In fact, perhaps all Apollo and Starbuck need to do in their EVA is to destroy/disconnect those batteries. Considering they need to do so from outside the hull, and the systems would be armored to prevent an attacker from doing exactly that, they would probably still need explosives, but this allows the airtightness of the bay to be restored simply by running a power cable from an area with power to the shield generators, or the closing of airtight doors from the bay itself that were disconnected and/or jammed in the attack.
