Mars or venus?

[Scotius]

Seriously, why some people are so fixated on Venus? Because of liveable gravity, temperature and pressure (and constant acid spray ) high above the hellish surface? On Mars you have access to raw materials of all kinds. You can have industry, fabricate necessary things - be partially or completely self-sufficient in a nutshell. In a can floating above Venus, every bit and doodad needs to be brought from the outside - because only thing available to you will be carbon dioxide. And please, stop with the "Lets drag a bucket on a long cable across the surface and get materials." You won't be doing that. Things required for most industrial processes rarely just lay out in the open. You either need to dig for them, or refine them from the ores - which involves processing tons and tons of raw stuff to get one load of useful substance. Go ahead: grab a bucket and start dragging it across the country in a straight line. Let's see how long it will take to gather enough metal to craft a single simple hammer. On Venus it would be even harder - on Earth you have a chance to accidentally go through a junkyard

[G'th]

1 hour ago, Scotius said:

Seriously, why some people are so fixated on Venus?

I don't think most people find Venus appealing specifically for base or colonization purposes. At least those that are thinking in terms of the scientific purpose of a more permanent human presence anyway. A permanent long term station on Venus would be a brilliant place for atmospheric research. I doubt there's much to gleam from the surface that would be beneficial for the amount of effort it would take to actually explore it properly. 

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, tater said:

Hollow cylinders are not stable. (Longer ones)

Is O'Neil aware?

[Bill Phil]

4 hours ago, tater said:

Hollow cylinders are not stable. (Longer ones)

Hollow cylinders of length 1.3 times the radius or greater are not stable.

However, cylinders are the best option when comparing living area to total mass, under certain assumptions. 

And even a longer cylinder can be kept stable by connecting it to another longer cylinder. Angular momentum cancels out and you get giant flywheels for some kinds of maneuvers. Only issue is that the bearings would need to be insanely strong.

http://alglobus.net/NASAwork/papers/2007KalpanaOne.pdf

The link above is a paper on the Kalpana One design for an orbital space settlement.

Edited October 8, 2017 by Bill Phil

[tater]

Kalpana 1 is basically a wide torus. The original O'Neill cylinders are very much longer than 1.3*radius.

Obviously, a torus is a subset of cylinders.

[Vanamonde]

Why does the idea of suspending colonies in Venus atmo keep coming up? It makes zero sense. 

Settlements grow either because the locale is favorable for living conditions, or because there is something valuable enough to justify hauling the necessities of life to that location. But suspended over Venus you would not have breathable air, ores to mine, land on which to grow crops, a source of water either to drink or for agriculture, a stable base on which to construct things, or pretty much anything else. And as an added bonus, there's the possibility of plunging miles to your death in incinerating temperatures and crushing pressures if something goes wrong with your suspension system. Even if it were technically feasible, there is nothing there to justify the effort and expense. 

One would be better off building a colony in space, where it would not have gravity for the comfort of inhabitants, but neither would you pay the gravity-related costs of flying supplies to and from the place, it would have no more resources than Venus atmo but no less, either, and there would be no imminent danger of catastrophically falling. 

[AHeroReborn]

CO2 MAKES OXYGEN AND METHANE! VENUS'S ATMOSPHERE IS FULL OF CO2

[Bill Phil]

1 hour ago, tater said:

Kalpana 1 is basically a wide torus. The original O'Neill cylinders are very much longer than 1.3*radius.

Obviously, a torus is a subset of cylinders.

Not really. A torus has a diameter much larger than the smaller cylinder's diameter. A cylinder has no such smaller cylinder. We can also nest smaller cylinders within Kalpana One for various purposes, as is proposed in the paper.

A torus is very inefficient for shielding. You have to not only shield the "ground", but also the "walls" and "roof" of the smaller cylinder. In a cylinder, you only have to shield the ground and the end caps. The longer it is the more efficient it is.

Once again, there are methods to counteract the instability of longer cylinders.

A torus may be useful for smaller stations and settlements, but when scaling up the inefficiencies of the geometry become harder to handle.

[shynung]

3 hours ago, AHeroReborn said:

CO2 MAKES OXYGEN AND METHANE! VENUS'S ATMOSPHERE IS FULL OF CO2

So is Mars'. The same process that makes methane out of CO2 is also applicable there.

[tater]

At some arbitrary point, a cylinder becomes a rectangular torus. Something less than 1.3r, for sure. So it's either an incredibly short cylinder, or a rectangular torus, depending on where you put the cutoff.

It;s not an O'Neill cylinder, however.

 

 

[Bill Phil]

3 hours ago, tater said:

At some arbitrary point, a cylinder becomes a rectangular torus. Something less than 1.3r, for sure. So it's either an incredibly short cylinder, or a rectangular torus, depending on where you put the cutoff.

It;s not an O'Neill cylinder, however.

 

 

Yes. At some point keeping the end caps on the cylinder is pointless, so you make it a torus to save mass. 

[mikegarrison]

On 10/7/2017 at 9:50 PM, tater said:

A collapsing lava tube would still be man vs nature, it just wouldn't be nonsense.

Dude, don't tell it to me. I didn't write the book. I'd have a LOT more money if I had.

[MatterBeam]

12 hours ago, Scotius said:

Seriously, why some people are so fixated on Venus? Because of liveable gravity, temperature and pressure (and constant acid spray ) high above the hellish surface? On Mars you have access to raw materials of all kinds. You can have industry, fabricate necessary things - be partially or completely self-sufficient in a nutshell. In a can floating above Venus, every bit and doodad needs to be brought from the outside - because only thing available to you will be carbon dioxide. And please, stop with the "Lets drag a bucket on a long cable across the surface and get materials." You won't be doing that. Things required for most industrial processes rarely just lay out in the open. You either need to dig for them, or refine them from the ores - which involves processing tons and tons of raw stuff to get one load of useful substance. Go ahead: grab a bucket and start dragging it across the country in a straight line. Let's see how long it will take to gather enough metal to craft a single simple hammer. On Venus it would be even harder - on Earth you have a chance to accidentally go through a junkyard

Of all the places in the solar system, Earth and Venus are perhaps the only places where gravity is not an issue - in other words, the importance of Venus depends on how vulnerable human life is to the effects of micro or low gravity. Saturn too, but its very far away.

Imagine you want to raise a child. You can do so in a habitat spinning in vacuum, trusting the radiation shielding and the suppliers to keep the kid alive until it grows up. Or, you can do so in Venus's atmosphere, trusting balloons and suppliers to maintain viable conditions. The balance tilting to one option instead of another depends on the specifics. For example, if rotating habitats become very cheap to make and are everywhere, plus transporting products between them is easy and quick, then we might never need to build a permanent establishment on a planet. If on the other hand, closed life support for a large population is impossible and supplies take months to travel between destinations, then it might be better to exploit Venus's resources. Or you know, just stay at home.

Dragging a bucket across the surface can dig up many of the common minerals found in lava flows, which are essential to agriculture by fertilising a soil to grow on. This includes elements such as calcium, phosphorus, nitrogen, silicon, magnesium, iron ect. The quantities won't be huge, but its a massive step up from a rotating habitat orbiting in a literal void. 

If we have the technology to travel across interplanetary distances and build floating habitats, it might not be too much of a stretch to implement methods of setting up industries on the Venusian surface. Practically all the mining techniques we are familiar with work on Venus, except at 735K instead of 293K. 

10 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

Why does the idea of suspending colonies in Venus atmo keep coming up? It makes zero sense. 

Settlements grow either because the locale is favorable for living conditions, or because there is something valuable enough to justify hauling the necessities of life to that location. But suspended over Venus you would not have breathable air, ores to mine, land on which to grow crops, a source of water either to drink or for agriculture, a stable base on which to construct things, or pretty much anything else. And as an added bonus, there's the possibility of plunging miles to your death in incinerating temperatures and crushing pressures if something goes wrong with your suspension system. Even if it were technically feasible, there is nothing there to justify the effort and expense. 

One would be better off building a colony in space, where it would not have gravity for the comfort of inhabitants, but neither would you pay the gravity-related costs of flying supplies to and from the place, it would have no more resources than Venus atmo but no less, either, and there would be no imminent danger of catastrophically falling. 

You must relativise. Compare Venus to other places in the Solar System or to vacuum habitats. It has some advantages and some disadvantages, that is all. 

8 hours ago, AHeroReborn said:

CO2 MAKES OXYGEN AND METHANE! VENUS'S ATMOSPHERE IS FULL OF CO2

Methane is CH4. The H, hydrogen, is excessively rare on Venus. 

[tater]

7 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

Yes. At some point keeping the end caps on the cylinder is pointless, so you make it a torus to save mass. 

Is that the semantic point people use, end caps and it's a cylinder? I have always tended to call it a torus as soon as it's at least about like a wheel (even a truck tire).

The end caps were not something I spent much time considering before. If you put the station in a lower orbit, the GCR flux baseline approaches that of Earth (earth shadows a large % of sky). Then it's a matter of the sidewall height. The ring above you shadows around zenith. With highish sidewalks, you can still give a sliver of sky on one side, and the other side has a reflector for sunlight.

[regex]

Quote

Mars or venus?

The asteroid belt, after we genetically engineer humans to handle zero-G.

[DAL59]

 

[AHeroReborn]

1 minute ago, DAL59 said:

 

Heh. Interesting accent.

[kerbiloid]

They did it.

Spoiler

 

[NSEP]

On 09/10/2017 at 12:20 AM, AHeroReborn said:

CO2 MAKES OXYGEN AND METHANE! VENUS'S ATMOSPHERE IS FULL OF CO2

Its not like CO2 is the rarest thing that could only find on Venus. You can easily get it on Mars too.

[NSEP]

If Venus is so Earth like, with pressure, temperature and gravity, then why not stay here? On Mars you at least got challenges and problems that you can learn from, and go further with. Sure, Venus got its challenges too, but making a balloon float above Hell is only going to make you move forward if we had more Venuses in our Solar System. And suprise suprise, Mars has flaws most celestial bodies have too, so, if you learn how to for example protect yourself from solar radiation, you can also live on other alien worlds with solar radiation as a problem.

Im afraid this is a stupid argument.

[magnemoe]

On 8.10.2017 at 10:33 PM, Vanamonde said:

Why does the idea of suspending colonies in Venus atmo keep coming up? It makes zero sense. 

Settlements grow either because the locale is favorable for living conditions, or because there is something valuable enough to justify hauling the necessities of life to that location. But suspended over Venus you would not have breathable air, ores to mine, land on which to grow crops, a source of water either to drink or for agriculture, a stable base on which to construct things, or pretty much anything else. And as an added bonus, there's the possibility of plunging miles to your death in incinerating temperatures and crushing pressures if something goes wrong with your suspension system. Even if it were technically feasible, there is nothing there to justify the effort and expense. 

One would be better off building a colony in space, where it would not have gravity for the comfort of inhabitants, but neither would you pay the gravity-related costs of flying supplies to and from the place, it would have no more resources than Venus atmo but no less, either, and there would be no imminent danger of catastrophically falling. 

This, it makes no sense, you can not do much at Venus, yes you have some resources but less than Mars and the asteroids, the main killer is however to get away from Venus, its at hard as from Earth but you lack Earth infrastructure. 
I say Earth orbit, Asteroids, Moon and Mars makes sense, not Venus.
Getting gravity from spin is far easier if you want an decent sized base, Don't need to be an ring just two arms with two habitats. and an elevator. 

Terraforming Venus would be nice but not something we could do anytime soon. 

[WinkAllKerb'']

On 08/10/2017 at 4:42 PM, tater said:

Venus is never going to be a normal place, even given any possible interventions you can imagine (unless you plan on getting it to spin up some how).

//%% planet //%%void well may be it's better to learn to survive middle of two star system than to aim walking again (meeeeeeeh i want to walk again, well may be after a long space trip after generation and genaration you may change you mind and don't want to walk again #YourOnlyMindMatterLookLikeYouThinkGravityIsAMustForDarwinInSpace #EvolveStage353//steamApp//584763)

Edited October 10, 2017 by WinkAllKerb''

[DAL59]

 Venus's atmosphere has useful elements for agriculture(in the acids.)  Unlike Mars, it has plenty of nitrogen.  

[Helmetman]

I agree with Vanamonde's last statement.

I first like to reference the Outward bound: Colonizing Venus video posted by @AHeroReborn a few posts up.

What is the narrators accent of the video he posted? He says 'Oarth' (instead of Earth) and a lot of more 'oar' speech accents throughout his narratation.
What accent is that? American I guess, but I am not

Anyway...

These airships are single launches right? So the airship gets hauled to Venus atmosphere? How? Does it re-enter like a airship? It can't right? Airships don't tolerate reentry, right? Tell me about the magical element or read on...

So I hereby assume it fills it's balloons at below critical velocities after reentry before plunging further down? Can you fill a balloon that fast without sinking to fast in the atmosphere? HOW?

Also, how do you get supplies there? With another airship? As Vanamonde said, you can't get resources from Venus itself, so what do you live on?

Cargo Resupply missions? How does a small cabin with a very large balloon dock to another small cabin with another great balloon? Some kind of walkway?

And if this walkway is required then what? You have another great balloon that is just there to be expanded after loading cargo just to get snacks onboard the airship at Venus?
That seems a waste of cash and 'matter' if I'm honest. And as said, the resupply balloon will only be there to get expanded.

Also, how do you get back to orbit?
Is the crew compartment a actual rocket? So that you have a mechanism to quikly cut the balloon where it sways off through engineered control thrusting so you can freely navigate your way back to orbit without hitting it on the way up? The balloon is in the way, so it needs to disperse fast, right? This is instant in KSP, not in real life, definitely not based on the balloon dimensions concerning the video previously posted.
Or do you have to dock another rocket to the airship to get the astronauts back to orbit?

If you live above hell, I'm sure you can only vacate your airship when there was a ascent module to get you back to orbit and ultimately home (earth, I mean Oarth, lol)
Oh, and by the way, roman goddess my foot, by JUPITOAR!
 

 

Edited October 10, 2017 by Helmetman

[HebaruSan]

7 minutes ago, Helmetman said:

I first like to reference the Outward bound: Colonizing Venus video posted by @AHeroReborn a few posts up.

What is the narrators accent of the video he posted? He says 'Oarth' (instead of Earth) and a lot of more 'oar' speech accents throughout his narratation.
What accent is that? American I guess, but I am not

Isaac Arthur is an American with a speech impediment. He has difficulty pronouncing 'R'.