Venus - useful?

[EDG]

1) The environment of Venus is far more deadly to potential escapees (and their equipment) than an airless rockball. This will keep the prisoners more busy with just surviving than they would on an airless rockball.

A deadly, kill you in a few seconds or one minute without protection environment can't be deadlier then another just because it has a higher temperture or greater pressure (might be quicker by a few seconds).

This is also a very good point - an airless rockball (or even an underwater colony) is still an uninhabitable and rapidly lethal environment. The only major practical difference is that an insidious environment is actively eating away at your protection too (unlike the vacuum setting). But then you also have the limited air supply in a vacc suit to worry about, and arguably that's just as much of a timer as the corrosiveness of an insidious world eating away at your suit (but you also have the air supply to worry about there).

But then you also have random solar flares to worry about on a vacuum world. And extreme surface temperature variation (go into shade, and the temperature will drop very rapidly and very deeply). So those rockballs aren't really much better, all things considered.

 

[Jeff Hopper]

Sure, but I think that you are just looking for an arguement and a way to discredit the idea.

How can they be busier trying to survive on a Venus planet than an airless rockball when the facility has already been built to provide a breathable atmosphere, water, temperature, etc? A deadly, kill you in a few seconds or one minute without protection environment can't be deadlier then another just because it has a higher temperture or greater pressure (might be quicker by a few seconds). Your original premise is just for storage of prisoners not requiring the prisoners to do work or mine.

Prisoners can't escape from low berths/ cold sleep on their own, they are unconscious. So put your hardened criminals there if the world has some aversion to a death penalty. It's cheaper and just as secure.


How many insidious atmosphere worlds have something really important enough that the Imperium or even a nearby world would choose to invade it. Even if it was the case why would you trust criminals/prisoners with some of your highest priced material, landing craft, vacc suits, etc. You're not going to evaluate the material on site while it is still being eroded by the enviroment. Wouldn't it make more sense to have specially trained people to test the equipment then bring it to a isolated suite on a station/ ship located above the insisdious atmosphere to sample and evaluate?


So you build a prison to house an isolated population that nobody cares about on a world where the elements will defeat the protective housing in a short time thereby requiring constant and costly maintainance just to use the occupants as test subjects for genetic experiments and new drugs? I just can't understand how this is cost effective when other alternatives exist.


Irony is not based on logic or reason, it is a literary tool. Are you saying that it's logical that some world leader built a prison on a hellhole world because he has an extreme sense of irony.

Your original post had the prison underground. It was not about resource mining. Yes it is safer to land a ship on an airless rockball than on a planet where the atmosphere and environment is going to erode your ship's seals within a few hours, maybe a day, but that is still a huge expense to build on such a world just as a little extra deterent when it would probably be just as useful and probably cheaper to build weapon emplacements on the airless rockball to defend it from unauthorized ship landings. (But this is the best of the ones you provided.)

There are more airless rockballs than there are hot hellholes like Venus. I don't think that there's going to be a shortage of airless rockballs anytime soon that justifies the expense of building a prison on a hot hellhole.

"Because it is there" is not a logical reason.

The only thing your post lacked was a claim that I was playing the game wrong.

 

[Jeff Hopper]

While high realism may be what works for you, it may not necessarily work for everybody and cannot be applied to every situation.

Do you somehow feel that realism (or commentary about what the realistic options would be) is a threat to your gaming?

And now you are trying to insinuate that I am saying something I'm not.

Thank you for the moment, but you can argue this with someone else.

 

[RandyT0001]

This isn't about you (or anybody else) playing the game "wrong". It is about your previous post:

I could make up any number of reasons that would seem logical or sensible. The best reason for doing this would be to provide players something from which to plan jailbreaks or escapes that they would have fun with.

Thinking I might have overlooked a logical reason to build a prison on a Venus like planet I asked:

So besides the metagaming reason could you give me four logical reasons for building a prison on Venus makes more sense than an airless rockball taken from your list of reasons?

You provided several possibilities to which I analyzed and presented my counter arguements. IMO none of your ideas offers a logical reason to build a prison on a hot hellhole instead of an airless rockball. This leaves the only reason to have the prison on an insidious atmosphere planet is a meta game decision because the referee thinks it would be an unique setting to have a jailbreak. If that's the referee's decision that's great, have fun. I thought I might have missed a logical reason (in game logical reason).

 

[Jeff Hopper]

You provided several possibilities to which I analyzed and presented my counter arguements. IMO none of your ideas offers a logical reason to build a prison on a hot hellhole instead of an airless rockball. This leaves the only reason to have the prison on an insidious atmosphere planet is a meta game decision because the referee thinks it would be an unique setting to have a jailbreak. If that's the referee's decision that's great, have fun. I thought I might have missed a logical reason (in game logical reason).

I think that you are just looking for an arguement and a way to discredit the idea.

Thank you for proving me right.

Have a Nice Day! :lol:

 

[RandyT0001]

Thank you for proving me right.

Have a Nice Day! :lol:

Well if you need somebody to do some thinking for you don't hesitate to ask. I'm willing to help others clarify their assertions like this one.

 

[Jeff Hopper]

Well if you need somebody to do some thinking for you don't hesitate to ask. I'm willing to help others clarify their assertions like this one.

I think that you are just looking for an arguement

 

[EDG]

I think that you are just looking for an arguement

Hate to break it to you Jeff, but you're the only one being argumentative here.

I just asked you a question: "Do you somehow feel that realism (or commentary about what the realistic options would be) is a threat to your gaming?"

You replied by accusing me of "insinuating that you're saying something you're not".

Huh?

How am I "insinuating" anything if I'm just asking you for clarification about your viewpoint? I just asked you a simple question - I really don't know if you feel that realism threatens your gaming, that's why I asked. I just don't understand why you're presenting your point of view here if you aren't willing to explain or defend it when asked about it.

 

[kristof65]

do i have to say something again?

 

[EDG]

do i have to say something again?

No offence, but can you please just stay out of it for once? I asked Jeff a perfectly reasonable question. So did Randy. We both got fobbed off and I don't understand why he's being so defensive about it. There's no reason for anyone else to get involved here - if he doesn't want to talk about it with us (or anyone) then fair enough, though I don't understand why someone would make a point and then refuse to discuss it further. I'm just baffled as to why he thinks I'm attacking or baiting or insinuating anything about him when I'm just asking him for elaborations and explanations - you know, the sort of thing that comes up in normal discussion - especially given that we agreed earlier that the acceptable levels of realism were up to the individuals involved.

 

[tneva82]

Prisoners can't escape from low berths/ cold sleep on their own, they are unconscious. So put your hardened criminals there if the world has some aversion to a death penalty. It's cheaper and just as secure.

For all intents and purposes eternald cold sleep can be concidered similar to death penalty. Why there can't be similar dislike to it as to death penalty in future politics? How is cold sleep 'till system fails and you dies more human than death penalty?

"Because it is there" is not a logical reason.

Humans don't operate logically. That's proven fact through long and unlogical history of mankind.

 

[tneva82]

We DO know what that kind of temperature and pressure does to mineral formation, through experiments in diamond anvil pressure cells and thermodynamic modelling. Venus' conditions aren't anywhere near so extreme that we can't figure that sort of thing out in the lab (or even recreate it).

A diamond anvil =/= actual atmospheric conditions, we know the chemistry and atmospheric conditions of Mars, but the blue berries were a complete surprise.

Humans think they know lots of things but they don't know.

EDG might claim we DO know what that kind of temperature and pressure does to mineral formation but 1000 year ago humans said similary: We DO know that earth is flat and sun goes around earth. Interesting how facts we knew then aren't facts now at all. Similary what we know now will be known to be false in future in oh so many areas.

 

[Gee4orce]

Interesting idea. How long would it take for a garden world to become a Venus?

I hope for our sake that the answer is 'a really long time', but I fear that it could probably happen a lot quicker than anybody would be comfortable with. That's the nature of closed feedback loops, such as CO2 greenhouse effect, which raises temperatures and causes sequestered CO2 to be released, which raises temperatures, etc, etc.

..but when you're talking about warring aliens who can build pocket universes and Dyson spheres - all bets are off anyway.

 

[Gee4orce]

EDG might claim we DO know what that kind of temperature and pressure does to mineral formation but 1000 year ago humans said similary: We DO know that earth is flat and sun goes around earth. Interesting how facts we knew then aren't facts now at all. Similary what we know now will be known to be false in future in oh so many areas.

I think, so long as no small children or animals are harmed, you can have a world with veins of pure Lanthanum, Tantalum or Unobtanium if you like. The point is that you build a setting that's fun and perhaps even believable, a backdrop on which to create and play out dramatic situations in the pursuit of entertainment.

If we insisted on nothing but 100% reality then a) the setting would be limited to months of coasting about the Solar system in chemical rockets, b) it would turn into a science lesson, and c) it wouldn't be a game.

So maybe people can just lighten up and let other do what the heck they like in their TU. It's good to hear the facts and science behind an issue, but if someone chooses not to employ that information in their setting, well, that's entirely their choice, and I'm sure it's made for the best personal reasons. No sense in arguing about it here, really.

 

[EDG]

Humans think they know lots of things but they don't know.

I think it's more accurate to say that some humans think we don't know a lot of things that we do actually know.

EDG might claim we DO know what that kind of temperature and pressure does to mineral formation but 1000 year ago humans said similary: We DO know that earth is flat and sun goes around earth. Interesting how facts we knew then aren't facts now at all. Similary what we know now will be known to be false in future in oh so many areas.

You are completely mistaken about that. You're not the first to claim it, but it saddens me that so many people seem to have a fundamental lack of understanding of the history of science.

1000 years ago most humans (in europe anyway) were fumbling around in ignorance because we had no rigorous methodology for understanding the universe. What we knew as "fact" then was mostly dictated by religious agendas that were not based on observation (or that tainted interpretation of observations) that demanded that the Earth was the centre of the universe. Now though, we have a solid methodology that is testable by objective observation and experimentation - science. This is why we are certain that (among other things) the earth is actually an oblate spheroid, and why we know the earth goes around the sun (or more strictly, the barycentre of the solar system which is located inside the sun). And in 1000 years time, that knowledge is still going to be correct.

Sure, maybe in the future people will be laughing at us for imagining that string theory could work, or that the speed of light was the fastest we can go in the universe, but you can bet that any new scientific paradigms they have then would have been built on what came before, just like Einstein built on Newton - because that's how science works.

 

[tneva82]

Now though, we have a solid methodology that is testable by objective observation and experimentation - science.

Just as people then had in their mind solid methodology. Wonder how much humans 1000+ years(let alone 100000+ years from now) laugh at us and how much we thought we knew.

 

[EDG]

Just as people then had in their mind solid methodology. Wonder how much humans 1000+ years(let alone 100000+ years from now) laugh at us and how much we thought we knew.

It doesn't matter what they had in mind, the point is that what we use now is objective - anyone can make measurements and get the same results, without prior agendas or assumptions. And that also means that comparisons with what we knew before aren't valid at all. Sure, theories can and will change over time (usually very rapidly at the start, as they're getting hammered out), but more often than not what happens is that additional data just refines the theory, and doesn't overturn it.

And don't confuse what was known with what was believed. People believed (and still believe) a lot of things because they didn't have the facts, or just were told to believe them. What you're claiming was "fact" 1000 years ago was nothing of the sort - they were just beliefs and assumptions.

 

[tneva82]

It doesn't matter what they had in mind, the point is that what we use now is objective

And we have no way to know how much essential knowledge we are missing and ergo we can't know for sure what we think to know is what is limited. We don't have a glue wether we are missing something that causes suprises if we would go and find out precicely what Venus has inside.

And don't confuse what was known with what was believed. People believed (and still believe) a lot of things because they didn't have the facts, or just were told to believe them. What you're claiming was "fact" 1000 years ago was nothing of the sort - they were just beliefs and assumptions.

And 1000000+ years from now humans of then are likely putting much of what we know now under belief and assumptions.

 

[EDG]

And we have no way to know how much essential knowledge we are missing and ergo we can't know for sure what we think to know is what is limited. We don't have a glue wether we are missing something that causes suprises if we would go and find out precicely what Venus has inside.

If we were missing anything that could affect the conclusions we draw from what we observe, we'd notice it. For example, we didn't know why Mercury's orbit was precessing more than Newtonian physics predicted before the early 1900s, but we could still see the difference and eventually Relativity explained that difference and solved the problem. So if we're missing any "essential knowledge" we'd know about it.

That's not to say that we know everything about the subject - obviously we don't - but observations we make today are still valid in the future. We may not know what Dark Matter is, for example, but we know it's there and we can see its effects on normal matter and we can use that to try to figure out its nature. And the data we get from those observations will still be valid when we do figure out what it is.

Again though, I think you are sorely under-appreciating just how much we do know about the universe today.

And 1000000+ years from now humans of then are likely putting much of what we know now under belief and assumptions.

No they won't, because we're not using beliefs and assumptions in science today. Science is based on observation and evidence, not belief. We used to believe that lightning was the "wrath of the gods", now we know it's an electrical discharge between the ground and the atmosphere. And it's still going to be an electrical discharge between the ground and the atmosphere in the future (as it really was in the past), because they'll still be able to take measurements and make observations to verify that.

And even if our understanding things was to somehow be completely overturned in the future, it doesn't invalidate what we know today.

 

[rust]

And even if our understanding things was to somehow be completely overturned in the future, it doesn't invalidate what we know today.

I also think that the data gained by modern scientific methods will remain
"true", but I very much doubt that our interpretations of these data will do so.

However, there is a difference between the careful interpretation of data,
what modern science is about, and the mythological and religious / mora-
listic interpretation of phenomena, what "science" thousand years ago was
about.

The main difference, in my opinion, is that a modern scientist can give up
a hypothesis when he is confronted with contradictions, because he knows
that it is just a hypothesis, while a scholar from a thousand years ago
would have found it almost impossible to give up what he considered The
Truth.