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[LordBaal]

By travelling at the same 360km/hr (with afoermentioned materials that can handle the acid).

Fair enough, as long there's not a bit of turbulence.

not to count that the ground beneath my feet is actually solid.

And if you were flying in a hurricane, the ground would be pretty dangerous to encounter.[/quote]
But I'm am not flying. Those habitats will, perhaps not into the ground (unless an structural failure), but into each other eventually.

Where the winds from the west hit winds from the east. (Hint: discovering what updraughts and downdraughts there are is a key investigation by the first unmanned balloon-probes looking at viability, as well as just themselves trying to survive whilst studying their other ground-based objectives.

Knowing where it is won't prevent free floating objects from getting there (and eventually crashing into each other).

Tornado-level, but not tornado-turbulent, as far as we know. They will stay put (as best as we can tell, so far) within the stream of air, carried along with it in an (it is hypothesised) stable and steady manner.

Which is an awful amount of "ifs" for what would be one of the most important projects of mankind. There's nothing ensuring they won't at least bump into each other even when traveling in the same direction.

It is all relative.  Venusian days, for 'air settlers' could be quite different from whatever those 'ground settlers' might experience, as they whizz away below at 360km/h in the other direction, stubbornly proclaiming that they on the (frequently volcanicly refreshing?) surface are the stationary ones.

... The ground settlers will be dead, melted to the bones, while the air settlers would be screaming in panic as they crash into each other habitats and soon to be joining the ground ones in the afterlife. Fixating on the frame of reference of motion won't change that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Colonization_of_Venus

On one hand it seems metals can be get from the atmosphere after all (although who knows in which quantities), also sulfuric acid apparently can give off water and oxygen.

On the other hand however the guy there states that the claim that the atmosphere is " 0 to −50 °C" at 50km is absolutely not true.

On the griping hand, he also states that the acidity of the environment is often overplayed. This is however contradictory to almost any other source and all formal sources on the issue.

[Max™]

There isn't a region where west winds slam into east winds unless you go looking for it. The whole upper atmosphere is in superrotation, and moving with it will give you about 96 hour "days" if you don't do anything but float along.

You'd need to be steering into other habitats to make collisions happen, actively steering into them with propulsion to make them lethal.

Alright, that's approx 1/2 reduction in pressure over that range. Your habitat would need some major buoyancy control capability to achieve that. Something like making a Dirigible that can fly to Mt Everest while carrying a city.
And if you can't achieve that, then you'll be spending a rather large chunk of collected energy trying to cool down the city so that its inhabitants don't die from heat stroke.

Not saying that it's not possible - just that its yet another major engineering hurdle that makes this all quite a bit less of a no-brainer than you've been painting it.
It's either that magnificent feat of futuristic technology on Vens, or raising a bunch of airtight tents on Mars.

Airtight tents that can keep however many pounds per square inch inside, hopefully without being popped.

It's 1400 W/m^2 at the proposed 50km altitude. Same as on Earth's surface you get 1000 W/m^2 (max) instead of the 1400 in orbit. See the NASA study linked earlier.

Interesting take they have, I was thinking that 50~54 was the ideal range, but my info was based on the older Landis studies. Either way there is a lot of energy available just from sunlight at these altitudes, additional energy from thermovoltaic methods, and who knows what other ways we might find to tap into the energy available while sitting on top of a superheated atmosphere receiving nearly twice the irradiance we get here at the top of the atmosphere?

[mainiac]

Airtight tents that can keep however many pounds per square inch inside, hopefully without being popped.

Sure but that's a straightforward and static challenge which is why people are so confident about it.  That's the great thing about working in a near vacuum, things obligingly stay pretty much close to the same.  So you have a single problem: how do we get a mass efficient way of holding back air pressure?  And that's something that is pretty familiar to us.

With Venus you are talking about weather.  We dont build ships to sail on calm seas, we build ships to sail in a gale force wind and then hope they are never tested.  We dont build levies to survive a typical year, we build them to survive a once in a century catastrophe, if not a once in a millennium catastrophe.  Maybe Venus is actually easier.  But you aren't shedding any light by constantly referring back to a low or no atmosphere environment.  It's a fundamentally different kind of challenge.

[Starver]

By travelling at the same 360km/hr (with afoermentioned materials that can handle the acid).

Fair enough, as long there's not a bit of turbulence.

Right now, I think the best guess is that its a laminar flow. This needs to be studied.
/goes off to cancel imminent launch of Venus Colony fleet, mumbling about inconvenient schedule disruptions...

not to count that the ground beneath my feet is actually solid.

And if you were flying in a hurricane, the ground would be pretty dangerous to encounter.

But I'm am not flying. Those habitats will, perhaps not into the ground (unless an structural failure), but into each other eventually.[/quote]How? If they are drifting on the breeze, the closer they happen to get, the more similar the breeze in every respect. At worst, they'd drift together at low velocity, relative to each other, and station-keeping propulsion can deal with that.

Where the winds from the west hit winds from the east. (Hint: discovering what updraughts and downdraughts there are is a key investigation by the first unmanned balloon-probes looking at viability, as well as just themselves trying to survive whilst studying their other ground-based objectives.

Knowing where it is won't prevent free floating objects from getting there (and eventually crashing into each other).

Its highly unlikely it is there. This is what we'd survey for, though. (Winds don't just 'hit each other' and pass through, colliding their payloads like two contra-orbitting satellite objects, frexample, there'd need to be identifiable discontinuities...

Which is an awful amount of "ifs" for what would be one of the most important projects of mankind. There's nothing ensuring they won't at least bump into each other even when traveling in the same direction.

For the first part, that's what we'll ascertain before we do anything serious. For the second part, I've covered that.

... The ground settlers will be dead, melted to the bones, while the air settlers would be screaming in panic as they crash into each other habitats and soon to be joining the ground ones in the afterlife. Fixating on the frame of reference of motion won't change that.

Ever heard of hypotheticals? And we may be able to deal with tne former, we've as yet no reason to believe the latter will happen, but we're darn certain going to find out before we go there for real...

/mumbles about cost over-runs and delays and the parking fees currently being incurred at the space-port...

[LordBaal]

/mumbles about cost over-runs and delays and the parking fees currently being incurred at the space-port...

Hahahahaha!

[Dorsidwarf]

The venusian colonists in this thread seem to have never encountered actual wind. Actual wind is not a simple, balmy carrying force that moves in a straight line universally, even in high-altitude jetstreams. Air flows chaotically, with different parts of the same wind moving at slightly different speeds, often in slightly different directions, and I've not read any evidence that the winds on venus are magically exempt from this.

I also agree that the proposed plans seem to be engineering for best-case conditions, then saying "Look it's cheap and easy". Anything is cheap and easy if you engineer for best-case. Space stations can be made out of plastic and insulation foam if you don't care about what happens if a micrometeor hits it.

[Starver]

I am not a venusian colonist!  I am a martian immigrant! ...ooh what a giveaway

(And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laminar_flow ...at those altitudes and with the seemingly consistent temperature general gradients with neither daily nor seasonal variations and no Great Vernusian Spot or even minor storms visible in the cloud layer, it seems to be largely free of obvious turbulence, even at the small scale.  Much like my balloon ride, once significamtly above the ground (on an admitedly fine Earth-day), even though I'm also well aware of what a Gale Force Nine/maybe Ten feels like and many, many more times have experienced gusty winds of far lighter stremgths that have inconvenienced my grounded being.)

[mainiac]

Was your balloon ride nob stop for a statistically significant period of time?  Also do you have any research describing this miracle weather?

[x2yzh9]

I don't know if this has been brought up before, but I'd like to interject here-It's been proven that certain objects in the solar system have an electromagnetic field, up to a certain extent. EM Fields have been proven to deflect radiation, based on angular relations to the solar system's bodies(not exactly proven per se, but I imagine that's a leap of logic very small) and as such have been protecting our solar system for many millennia. As things change over a broad scale of time, things change on the minutest scale as well, so it wouldn't be hard to say that altering certain planets native environments to be hospitable could have an inverse effect on Earth if not properly managed and taken care of.

[alway]

Oh yes, 300 km/h winds, how terrible. How could we ever create something capable of withstanding and even flying in such winds?

...
Oh right.
http://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=747439

Just operated a flight from HKG-ANC, 13 Dec, and off the coast of Japan, we had 270/255 knots of wind! It was great, nice smooth ride. Those winds lasted for about an hour. When we got in the NOPAC they had died down to about 120knots and as we went further east, they gradually went to 0. Abeam SYA the winds were light and variable. About 200NM out of ANC, they picked up slightly to about 280/40.

All in all, typical winds for this time of year.

Literally just a commercial airliner.

[Max™]

It is REALLY FREAKING HARD to find anything on the winds of Venus when it is all buried in those stupid thunderbolt electric universe morons. For those who don't know, they're what happens when new age crystal kooks go interplanetary, pay no attention to anything referencing electric wind, current, thunderbolts, and so forth unless it is directly from NASA or ESO or a similar level agency.

I did find this though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckzY9JGLUek

Shows the atmosphere rotating around and the drag introduced from the faster equator and poles rotating at different rates produces the Y-shaped cloud waves.

[mainiac]

Oh yes, 300 km/h winds, how terrible. How could we ever create something capable of withstanding and even flying in such winds?

...
Oh right.
http://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=747439

Just operated a flight from HKG-ANC, 13 Dec, and off the coast of Japan, we had 270/255 knots of wind! It was great, nice smooth ride. Those winds lasted for about an hour. When we got in the NOPAC they had died down to about 120knots and as we went further east, they gradually went to 0. Abeam SYA the winds were light and variable. About 200NM out of ANC, they picked up slightly to about 280/40.

All in all, typical winds for this time of year.

Literally just a commercial airliner.

TIL that airliners are lighter then air and fly nonstop for decades.

[LordBaal]

Oh yes, 300 km/h winds, how terrible. How could we ever create something capable of withstanding and even flying in such winds?

...
Oh right.
http://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=747439

Just operated a flight from HKG-ANC, 13 Dec, and off the coast of Japan, we had 270/255 knots of wind! It was great, nice smooth ride. Those winds lasted for about an hour. When we got in the NOPAC they had died down to about 120knots and as we went further east, they gradually went to 0. Abeam SYA the winds were light and variable. About 200NM out of ANC, they picked up slightly to about 280/40.

All in all, typical winds for this time of year.

Literally just a commercial airliner.

TIL that airliners are lighter then air and fly nonstop for decades.

Also comercial airliners are designed to travel faster than that. And if I understand right thise abeam winds were favorable and smoth winds? What if they had not?

[Starver]

I bet I forgot to design my venusian colonisation fleet to withstand the rigours of space as well...  What a scatterbrain I am...

[Amperzand]

I'd honestly design it as a set of colony ships and freighters. On arrival, the colony ships park in orbit and set up as space stations, get satellites up, and so on. The freighters, using robotic labor and a few astronauts for management and unexpected-problem solving, build the aerostats, then people get shipped from orbit. From there, more freighters can keep coming to deliver more aerostat parts, and presumably somebody can set up a cycler shuttle or the like to get a stream of new personnel.