Consider an equatorial platform over Venus, that floats not in the warm and foggy 55 km altitude but above the clouds.
At 70 km over Venus the air is 60 hPA (Yeon Joo Lee again pdf). That is like Earth at twelve miles up (remember, a kPa is ten hPa).
The platform wouldn't float over - so much as aerodynamically fly over, nose against the 100ms-1 / 225 mph wind at the frigid cloud-tops. To push against the wind: turbines behind the platform, spun by dynamos.
Such a platform would be free of sulphur corrosion, with little atmosphere, and cold. Materials would be well preserved here. Except where the interiors demand water and oxygen of course.
The floating / flying structures would resemble the fuselages for our aeroplanes but may be longer, given Venus' lower gravity. UV-shielded glass covered greenhouses would protect human-friendly life in them. The city seal features the harpoon.
Power limitations force a widely-dispersed village, not a city - mostly robots. Work requiring vacuum is more-easily done here... like restoring solar panels. It is a base for telescope-optics, as well; these vessels are designed for nightside drift (obviously).
UPDATE 12/14 MIDNIGHT: If we're dragging anything, Kindltot recommends trailing a weighted kite-tail behind anything we care about keeping stable. MATHS 12/19/2019 - first version posted Saturday morning. Having sat down to run some Physics Equations, per Larson, I've constrained some of my wild ideas - and come up with new ones. 12/20 - split off the port thingy. 1/29/2020 - this is not "eternal noon", sorry! 8/17/2020 - unless we beam the extra power from balloons... 10/31 - scale back its ambitions: "harbour" might have been the title's Problematic.
No comments:
Post a Comment