Venus

Posted by: Silvestra Luria, Sentinel

Venus may be the planet most like Earth in size and geology, but its climate couldn’t be more different. The infernal temperatures, the crushing atmospheric pressure, and the rains of sulphuric acid evoke the myriad hells primitive humanity imagined for itself.

Venusian orbit isn’t ideal, either. Venus has no moons, and nearby asteroids are scarcer than elsewhere in the system. Habitats have to be built entirely from materials mined on the surface or shipped in from other planetary systems. Water takes the longest journeys to acquire, coming usually from ice asteroids captured in the far reaches of the outer system.

Venus rewards the intrepid, though, and habitats predating the Fall grew prosperous on specialized manufacturing and research. Pre-Fall Venus was a frontier with neither entrenched elites nor a true underclass. When everyone was a professional, striving toward utopia and high culture was the prevailing meme. Now, post-Fall Venus is going through growing pains. The Morningstar Constellation embodies the progressive capitalism of the pre-Fall technocrats, but it faces upheavals due to immigration, power grabs, and growing organized crime.

The Surface

“Anywhere but here,” right? Sit through a safety briefing for work on the Venusian surface, and that’s where you’ll want to be.

The surface is rugged and beautiful in its way. Old timers say it’s like a cross between the high desert of the American southwest, with its vast plateaus and canyons, and Iceland, with its black basaltic rock, crisscrossed in the lowlands by rivers of magma.

The winds that whip volcano, mesa, and lava plain are a superheated mix of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. At the surface, the pressure is almost 100 times that of Earth’s atmosphere (or equivalent to a kilometer below Earth’s oceans). Only dim light reaches down here, and that which does is refracted by the titanic pressures, so that to someone on the surface, the horizons rise around them like the sides of a colossal bowl. Temperatures reach nearly 500 Celsius. Lead is permanently molten, metal sags and flows, and carbon dioxide exists in a supercritical state where it’s both a liquid and a gas.

Only the most specialized biological settlers call the surface home, and they’re confined to low-pressure zones high in the mountains. The peaks offer rich mining and good sites from which to remote control equipment closer to the surface. Although it’s possible to jam from orbit, relay stations on the peaks experience less communications lag and fewer weather-related disruptions.

Below 7 km altitude, any permanent structures on Venus are crewed by synthmorphs and infomorphs. In most cases, the synth operations in the lowlands are teleoperated, with few or no egos permanently sleeved in the equipment there.

Equipment goes into the lowlands, but mostly doesn’t come out, unless it’s returning with cargo. Mining and industrial sites on Venus are surrounded by eerie boneyards — morphs, bots, and machinery that broke down and weren’t worth retrieving.

Though the surface has been mapped with radar, the clouds block monitoring from orbital and high-altitude cameras. Large swathes of the surface remain unvisited and unexplored. This makes it a useful, if inhospitable locale to avoid pying eyes. It also leads to rumors of hidden dangers, from exsurgents and TITANs to secret Factor operations.

Life in the Clouds

At altitudes of 50 to 60 kilometers, the environment becomes more favorable. Air pressure ranges from 50–85% of Earth’s surface and temperatures average between 7 and 40 °C, depending on latitude. In this environment transhumans need only a breather and eye protection against the occasional sulfuric clouds to go outside.

This altitude is the ideal range for aerostats — floating habitats that can stretch a kilometer or more in height and diameter. Even at this altitude, Venus’s atmosphere is dense and heavy enough, being mostly carbon dioxide, that an object full of enough oxygennitrogen atmosphere is buoyant. Aerostats use a combination of buoyancy and immense propellers to maintain an altitude where life support systems can compensate for external temperatures and pressures with a minimum of effort.

Transportation

Venus rotates too slowly for a space elevator, so most travel to the surface is by lander. Venusian landing craft are heavily shielded and structurally reinforced against the planet’s hideous pressures. Compared to other landers, they’re rather beetle-like, and expensive to operate in terms of fuel. Morningstar is in the process of building a rotovator in Venusian orbit. This 12,000-kilometer spinning cable will dip down into the atmosphere to aerostat altitude in such a way that the cable’s orbit and planet’s rotation nearly cancel out. This allows the end of the cable to collect cargo and transports which it then carries back up and flings into space.

Venusian aircraft need only stubby wings and rotors due to the thick atmosphere. Almost all fixed-wing craft are propeller driven, since jets have to carry their own oxidizers in this atmosphere. Dirigible airships provide an economical if slow method of ferrying cargo and travelers between aerostats. Luxury passenger airships are growing in popular as a vacation experience. Aircraft and devices like wingsuits often aren’t built to survive on the surface, so they carry emergency bubbles that provide a temporary shelter for passengers and crew until rescued.

Some aerostats use extremely durable cables to anchor themselves to the surface for short periods. During this time, elevator cars provide transport up and down the cable. Surface roads are primitive and exist only within busy mining and industrial outposts, so all groundcraft are off-road vehicles.

Rise of the Morningstar

The success of the movement to secede from the Consortium surprised the Venusians more than anyone, and they're still sorting out how to keep this Morningstar Constellation thing afloat. In reality, the terraforming debate is far from decided, and the Consortium still has a presence here with various aerostats and orbitals that did not defect. Morningstar’s lack of a military leaves it vulnerable to invasion, but luckily the Planetary Consortium doesn’t currently have the stomach for this sort of action.

Terraforming Venus

At one time, the very idea of terraforming Venus didn’t hold water — pardon the dad joke. Photodissociation — breakdown of water’s molecular bonds by solar radiation — combined with Venus’s lack of a magnetic field means that simply hurling comets at Venus won’t work. Mars retains most of the water from comet impacts, but Venus loses it rapidly to the sun.

The solution, now in its proof of concept stages, is an array of orbital mirrors and solar panels. The mirrors reflect solar radiation away from Venus onto solar panels. The energy collected from the solar panels is either stored or beamed to to other points in space, even delivering energy as far as the outer system. At full scale, the system could reflect enough radiation for standard terraforming techniques to work.

Terraforming is the most divisive issue in the Morningstar Constellation’s hot-blooded politics. That idealists and dreamers have staked out positions on both sides of the debate doesn’t help. In the pro-terraforming vision, Morningstar, over the long term, competes with the Planetary Consortium on its terms — ownership of a habitable planet. In the other, aerial-terraforming position, transhumans adapt to Venus, preserving and profiting from the planet’s unique physical properties. Venus may be inhospitable, but it provides opportunities for science and industry found nowhere else in the Solar System. Several industries rely on Venus’s superheated, high pressure atmosphere — an environment that would no longer exist if we terraformed the planet. And travel in the dense, energy-filled roil of the Venusian atmosphere is practically free for those with the patience and navigational technology to sail its skies.

Aerostats

Aerostats normally float 50–60 km above Venus’s surface. They move with the atmosphere, usually maintaining a fixed latitude but circling the planet roughly every four days with the prevailing winds. Large aerostats are usually shaped like mushrooms or inverted teardops. The wide, domed top usually has a lofty public plaza or atrium at its center. The empty space and abundant air provide more buoyancy. Dwellings, work spaces, and public utilities line the outer walls and form narrow internal boundaries.

Public spaces are beautiful, but private spaces are very compact. Everything is made of strong, lightweight materials. In the largest aerostats, paths for bikes and scooters run parallel to the walkways. Otherwise, people get around on foot. At the bottom, the aerostat tapers to just an anchor point for a hanging counterweight that prevents the habitat capsizing in storms.

To aid in keeping altitude, a large aerostat usually has three or four propellers ringing its widest point. The propellers extend on short arms from the dome’s edge. Aerostats won’t sink to the surface unless both the interior gases are lost and the propellers are disabled. But an aerostat with disabled propellers may slowly sink to an altitude where the temperature outside the habitat is too high for unsuited transhumans to survive.

Smaller aerostats come in a wide variety of plans: cigar-shaped habitat modules with long outriggers on either side to keep balance, upright cylinders surrounded by concentric rings of gas bags, and clouds of spherical modules linked together by structural tubes. Thousands of the smallest “aerostats” are little more than autonomous blimps dropped by larger aerostats that carry radio relay equipment, weather sensors, and the like.

Aphrodite Prime

Home to 300,000, Aphrodite Prime is a center for tourism. It is home to a number of genegineering hypercorps and the vast Aphrodite Aviary, a sphere in the habitat’s base. Here the proponents of the Aerial Terraforming Initiative showcase their latest designs for life forms that could live and thrive in the upper Venusian atmosphere: aerial kelp, flying mantas, balloon fish, and float ferns. Morph designers here compete to develop both humanoid and avian gliding/flying morphs.

Octavia

Octavia is the de facto capital of the Morningstar Constellation and the most populous aerostat. It holds 500,000 people in a space half a kilometer in diameter at its widest, and over 600 meters tall. Apartments here are tiny but well-designed, and the walkways and bikeways never cease their bustle. The flight deck midway up Octavia’s “stem” and the spaceport atop its dome are the busiest on Venus. 55 kilometers below is Venus’s northern hemisphere. Roughly one day in four, Octavia is above Ishtar Terra, with its many mining settlements — especially busy days for the city’s flight deck and refineries. Octavia is the seat of Morningstar’s government, a force in culture and fashion, a competitive cloud diving destination, a refining center, and home base for over 40,000 drone operators.

Orbitals

Most habitats in Venusian orbit circle the equator, part of a belt of mostly autonomous solar plants, refineries, and manufactories. Cylinders and toruses are the most common habitat type here, as there are few asteroids to capture.

Gerlach

Gerlach is a multi-module cylinder 1 kilometer in diameter and 4 kilometers long, with a population of 120,000. The inhabitants have strong ties to the Argonauts, sympathies for the outer-system autonomists, and are strong proponents of morphological freedom and cognitive experimentation. The habitat interior is known for its nine pyramidal arcologies and verdant landscaping, making it one of the most desirable in the inner system. Each of the cylinder modules spins at different speeds, simulating different gravities so that those used to lighter gravs can acclimate to Venus’s stronger pull. Gerlach’s residents voted to secede from the Consortium but did not join Morningstar, preferring to keep their independence.

Surface Habs

Surface habitats are few on Venus. Bunker-like and always at high altitude, most inhabitants are drone controllers, technicians, and engineers. The populations are young, there to put in service and make money, and bored as fuck in their off hours. Local culture tends to be escapist, eccentric, and in some cases borderline scum barge-esque.

Demon

The largest outpost in the Maxwell Montes peaks of Ishtar Terra, Demon’s town sigil is a petroglyph of a demon opening a trap door. The inhabitants are all under 50 and cashing in big on working 16-hour days jacked in to various mining bots. They spend the other 14 hours of each cycle fighting, fucking, and getting high as shit in a sprawling underground base that previous occupants with too much time and fabber access on their hands have decorated to look like Satan’s bordello.