ToughSF links Erik van Helvoirt over Venus ~2013. Van Helvoirt now works at Guerrilla Games of Horizon fame. I don't think there's a game attached to this pic.
This is a balloon, dangling a station with ... panels. Probably not radiators, probably solar. For them to work consistently where the balloon itself isn't overhead this is likely a polar latitude. I wonder if that's the vortex.
ToughSF says the balloon is helium. Commenters ponder whether hydrogen could work. I suspect hydrogen would burn in sulfur-dioxide - but we might not have sufficient SO2 way up here to spark it up. More serious is that hydrogen isn't that much more common than helium up here. Best I think would be superheated... CO2, with a balloon reinforced against implosion. Leave the hydrogen for the colonists to sip.
With all those dangling panels, though, how are they protecting from that insane windspeed, especially polar?
No comments:
Post a Comment