BattleTech - The Board Game of Armored Combat
BattleTech Game Universe => The Inner Sphere => Topic started by: JA Baker on 27 January 2020, 17:31:41
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So, I know that there were settlements on Venus during the time of the Star League, but where they domed colonies? Or had the planet been terraformed?
Please not that I have very few of the source books, so simply pointing me at a page probably won't help.
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Venus was terraformed, but during the Amaris civil war, the Rimworlders shot the place up. Venus slowly reverted to it's natural habitat by 3071, IIRC
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After the degradation of climate, they had to dome the remaining cities, eventually abandoning the remaining few, after unforseen disaster destroyed one, wiping out an entire WoB faction. Investigation by Toyama faction confirmed that it was just a freak accident.
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After the degradation of climate, they had to dome the remaining cities, eventually abandoning the remaining few, after unfoseen disaster destroyed one, wiping out entire WoB faction. Investigation by Toyama faction confirmed that it was just a freak accident.
And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you on Lackland.
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Venus was terraformed, but during the Amaris civil war, the Rimworlders shot the place up. Venus slowly reverted to it's natural habitat by 3071, IIRC
It wasn't Venus that they destroyed - it was the giant solar mirror that reflected the sun's heat, making Venus cool enough to be terraformed. (According to some accounts, they were trying to re-purpose it as an anti-ship heat beam.) Without the solar mirror, Venus got too hot for anything but domed living.
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I wonder how big that mirror would have to be, for that to work.
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I thought it was a shade, rather than a mirror.
I wonder how big that mirror would have to be, for that to work.
Depends on how far out it was. IIRC it was at the Venus-Sol L1, so someone can probably compute how big something there would have to be to shield the whole planet. Farther away could make it smaller, of course, but being at a point of relatively little gravity was necessary due to its fragility IIRC. You couldn’t have it twice as far out and just towed along in between the two bodies by an old, outdated WarShip or something, it was too fragile for that.
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I thought it was a shade, rather than a mirror.
According to Sarna it was a Storm Inhibitor (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Storm_Inhibitor):
Each Storm Inhibitor was a giant orbiting mirror which was able to reflect heat onto a planet's surface. The reflected heat could be used to reduce the severity of a storm system or create high-pressure areas to redirect it. The heat could also be used to warm the planet, or regions of it, for purposes such as melting polar ice caps to increase the amount of liquid water.
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That’s the opposite of what Venus needs. It needs less heat, rather than more. JHS:Terra* calls it a “sunshade”, and confirms that it was stationed at the L1.
*To the OP: I know you said you don’t have a lot of books, but I do want to mention JHS:Terra. It’s got a long article on the history of Venus and it’s terraforming. If you get one book for Venus data, get that one.
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That’s the opposite of what Venus needs. It needs less heat, rather than more. JHS:Terra* calls it a “sunshade”, and confirms that it was stationed at the L1.
It also states...
Under the new leadership of Primus Marteen (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Andrea_Marteen), ComStar attempted to placate Terrans with a “Terra First” policy with... reconstruction of the Venusian sunshade to preserve that world’s terraforming (abandoned after some engineering studies)...
... so it could originally have been the aforementioned Storm Inhibitor while after the terraforming was (mostly) complete it was used strictly as a sunshade to preserve the terraforming. It could also just be an error/retcon of the older book to the new book ???
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That Sarna article doesn't say that Venus had storm inhibitors.
Neither does the original source that Sarna got its information from.
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That Sarna article doesn't say that Venus had storm inhibitors.
The Terra article can be read that it does.
https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Terra
However, Lowell's methods had two advantages: they were fast, delivering an atmosphere that could be breathed unassisted in less than a century (officially 2201, when the average planetary temperature also rose above freezing), and they established a self-sustaining ecosystem that was far more enduring than the worlds (like Mars' sister Venus) that depended on technological environmental stabilization, like Storm Inhibitors, oxygen factories, atmospheric processors, and seismic suppressor stations.
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The Terra article can be read that it does.
https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Terra
Which is why I said "that Sarna article" without reference to anything else at the site.
And one should always be careful when using Sarna for information for exactly this reason.
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Sounds like a call for Frabby to take a look at the two articles, then...
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The Terra article can be read that it does.
https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Terra (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Terra)
Then the Sarna article is wrong. Always go with the Sourcebook over the Sarna article.
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Then the Sarna article is wrong. Always go with the Sourcebook over the Sarna article.
It's referencing the old The Star League sourcebook (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/The_Star_League) which was from 1988 and not a part of my collection.
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No it wasn't. There are no references in that Sarna page to the SLSB. Also, I have a pdf copy of the SLSB, and I just checked. There are no mentions of Storm Inhibitors being used on Venus. In fact Bryant is the only planet mentioned as having them.
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Depends on how far out it was. IIRC it was at the Venus-Sol L1, so someone can probably compute how big something there would have to be to shield the whole planet. Farther away could make it smaller, of course.....
Not really. Farther from the planet would actually require a trivially larger diameter. The sun is not a point-source, it's a disc of considerable size, so placing the shade further from the planet only affects the light coming from the CENTER of that disc. The edges of the solar disc would still have a direct line to the edges of the planet, unless you increase the size of the shade.
On the other hand, you don't need (or want) to block 100% of the sun's light, so the shade could be a bit smaller, or else have openings in it. In the latter case, the slight angular differences in the incoming light coming from one part of the sun compared to another could allow it to cover the entire sunward surface of the planet, but at a much lower brightness than without the shade. That's probably the preferable solution.
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I think people are confusing MARS and Venus.
Mars needs more sun and more atmosphere and is described as having storm inhibitors.
Venus needs less sunlight and less atmosphere and is described as having a solar shade.
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That makes much more sense.
Though adding heat to a planet's atmosphere will improve the growth of storms, not inhibit it.