Venus - useful?

[tneva82]

A prison on, or beneath, Venus would perforce be a death sentence to anyone sent there.

I can see the place becoming a prison after originating as something else - a mining outpost, for instance. This extreme prison would not be the place where they send prisoners they want to keep alive, for any reason. This is where they send them to die. But in dying, hopefully they will yield some good, in the form of ores they mine before their suits fail on them.

Assuming their suits fail.

Any technology that is sufficiently advanced is conceivable only as magic to less advanced civilisation(or however saying went).

Therefore we can't know just how advanced tech they have available. For all we know building safe prison in venus is pretty trivial matter for TL15 folks.

 

[RandyT0001]

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.

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?

 

[tneva82]

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?

Well I'm not him but I'll list one: Airless rockball might be missing number of rare materials/gasses venus has which criminals would be collecting as their work(either you work or you die. Who wants to die when he has chance?).

 

[Supergamera]

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?

I'll take a shot:

1. Venus-prison doesn't have to worry about artificial gravity, while (at least in Traveller universe, where everyone seems to like 1G) asteroid-prison has to create gravity. This makes it easier to detect, if you're trying to be discreet.

2. Thick atmosphere probably makes long-range communications and scanning more difficult, good if you're concerned someone could have access to smuggled equipment and send messages.

3. It takes time for a ship to land and return to orbit from an atmospheric planet, compared to an asteroid. This makes it a lot harder for a ship to aid an escape before it is detected and intercepted.

4. The insidious atmosphere also means a ship can't hide somewhere on the planet and wait for a signal, or easily leave a cache of equipment for an escapee. If you can steal a vacc suit and escape from asteroid-prison, you may be able to hide and wait as long as your life support holds out, which could be a while. On Venus-prison, you're pretty much gone in 12 hours.

5. At least for our solar system, Venus (I believe) is inside the 100D range of the sun, so jumping out takes some extra time. Most asteroids will be a lot easier to jump to and from. However, this may not apply everywhere, and doesn't rule out Mercury as an alternative.

 

[Alexander Cecil]

Years ago, a Solmani megacorporation conducted extensive exploratory mining on a Venus. This was a calculated risk based on computer models which predicted extremely rare, hard to manufacture chemical compounds in the planet's crust. Though the mine ran successfully for several years, advances in chemical synthesis techniques allowed similar compounds to be made industrially, eliminating the need for the mine.

The megacorporation kept up the mine for years after its official close, as the costs of maintenance were far lower than the costs of building a new mine if the facility were needed again. A handful of generations and hostile takeovers later, you have a new meacorp with little clue why it is holding onto this expensive hole in an insidious rock, and they place it on the auction block.

The auction happens to coincide with clandestine advances in Jump-7 theory, an avenue which could give the Imperial government an edge in a universe where communication is at the speed of travel. Since any progress in this field relies on very specific compounds, the ones originally found in the Venutian mine, the Imperium quickly bought it up using a holding company as an alias.

To keep the mine and its research a secret, the Imperium and the local subsector government have chosen the offer death-row criminals a second shot at "life". Many take the government up on the deal, and are shipped to the mines to spend the rest of their days. Life in the mines is hell, but the guards are always happy to gesture to the airlock and remind prisoners that they can leave whenever they want.


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There we have it. It's not the perfect story, but it's solid enough that I think my players would buy into it. There is reason for the mine to exist, reason for it to now be a secret prison planet, and even several available adventure hooks.

I may just use this.

 

[EDG]

I don't think it would ever be useful as a settlement colony, but there could be all sorts of funky crystals and minerals just laying about on the surface (there is really no way to know what that kind of temp and pressure does to mineral formation)

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).

 

[EDG]

Actually I'm pretty sure traveller rules makes mention that PC's are by default not your standard characters...

I'm pretty sure they say the opposite. In fact, one of the big points people keep making about Traveller is that the PCs are Average Joes.

 

[EDG]

Well I'm not him but I'll list one: Airless rockball might be missing number of rare materials/gasses venus has which criminals would be collecting as their work(either you work or you die. Who wants to die when he has chance?).

There's not an awful lot on Venus that you can't find on Earth. There are no "rare gases" in the atmosphere, and the mineralogy is very similar - pretty much the whole planet is covered in basalts and other basic rocks. Like I said earlier, there may be metallic sulphide frosts on the mountaintops, which could be of interest (and being at the tops of the mountains it's marginally more accessible than the surface), but I'm not sure that there's enough there to make extraction worthwhile. IIRC there's also more carbonatite and komatiite rocks, but they don't really have anything special in them that are unique to Venus.

 

[kristof65]

So we've talked about what we can't do with Venus, and why certain things would be more practical elsewhere, let's speculate on what we could do with Venus.

For instance, given it's size relative to Earth, if it's feasible, terraforming Venus to more hospitable conditions would seem like a no-brainer. Note that is predicated upon terraforming such a hell-hole being feasible.

Beyond that, what else is Venus useful for?

 

[EDG]

For instance, given it's size relative to Earth, if it's feasible, terraforming Venus to more hospitable conditions would seem like a no-brainer. Note that is predicated upon terraforming such a hell-hole being feasible.

I disagree. Terraforming Venus is a heck of a lot harder than terraforming Mars - you have a massive thick atmosphere to get rid of, and solar insolation is always higher. It's not just a case of dumping some bacteria on it to eat everything up. We thought long and hard about it during the Transhuman Space playtests, and came up with things like gigantic sunshades to block the sunlight and cool the planet, but the physics just didn't work.

Beyond that, what else is Venus useful for?

Scientific research (not just on Venus itself - you could park a solar observatory in orbit, it'd be easier to get to than Mercury and not quite as hot)? A big rubbish dump? Does every planet have to be "useful"?

 

[rust]

Beyond that, what else is Venus useful for?

In a previous campaign we used Venus as a testing area for equipment
(robots, vehicles ...) designed for the use on extremely hostile planets,
and for extreme sports ("Venus Diving") with a high lethality rate for bo-
red rich idiots (rescueing them did pay rather well).

 

[kristof65]

For instance, given it's size relative to Earth, if it's feasible, terraforming Venus to more hospitable conditions would seem like a no-brainer. Note that is predicated upon terraforming such a hell-hole being feasible.

I disagree. Terraforming Venus is a heck of a lot harder than terraforming Mars - you have a massive thick atmosphere to get rid of, and solar insolation is always higher. It's not just a case of dumping some bacteria on it to eat everything up. We thought long and hard about it during the Transhuman Space playtests, and came up with things like gigantic sunshades to block the sunlight and cool the planet, but the physics just didn't work.

Note that I said if it's feasible, it's a no-brainer. I never said it was feasible, or that it was more feasible than Mars. Merely that if it was feasible, it was a no-brainer. Why? Because it's one of our closest neighbors, and it's roughly the same size as earth.

EDIT: I suppose I should qualify that with not just feasible, but realistically feasible.

Does every planet have to be "useful"?

Certainly not. But given that Venus is one of our closest neighbors, it would be nice if it were useful in some way.

 

[Jeff Hopper]

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.

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?

Sure, but I think that you are just looking for an arguement and a way to discredit the idea. I'm willing to play along with that for my own amusement.


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.

2) Politics. A lack of a death penalty on the homeworld requires a prison where the worst, most hardened offenders cannot escape so that the citizens feel safe while claiming that life imprisonment is more humane than death.

3) Beachhead/Testing Facility. You can test all of your hazardous environment gear on Venus with a ready made supply of expendible prisoners as guinea pigs. If an escape attempt is tried, they can monitor its progress right up until their protective gear fails - granting more data.

4)Grad student projects. There is an isolated population of people who nobody really cares about that has a very low chance of escape. Do your most sadistic sociology/psychology/medical experiment here. Traveller meets Dr Mengele.

(Come to think of it, this would make a great setting for a horror game done with Traveller. Oh, but that is "metagaming" - an apparently dirty word. )

5) The irony of it. Don't think that is a good reason? Go look up the naming history of Iceland and Greenland. Remember that a hardened politician will believe that a voter would eat up the idea of a prison on a hellhole named after the Goddess of Love.

6) Airless rockballs have surfaces that are easier to access than Venus. On any airless rockball all you have to do is land. On Venus you have to land in an atmosphere that is 92 times that of the Earth with a wind speed between 0.3 to 1.0 meters per second and a temperature of 460 degrees celcius (all Venus probes to date haven't lasted longer than 2 days on the surface, and they were designed for the environment).

7) Because its there (the driving force behind many ventures into hostile territory)

8) Since airless rockballs are easier to reach than the surface of Venus, they are more valuable for settlement and resource acquisition than Venus

9) Airless rockballs are more common than atmosphere type C worlds like Venus, so the inhabitants of those airless rockballs would want thier prisons in inaccessible locations that were not near their neighborhoods - like Venus

 

[kristof65]

Jeff - you missed one:

- It turns out that Venus has large viens of lanthanum* under it's crust.







*or whatever handwavium material your FTL system uses.

 

[Jeff Hopper]

Jeff - you missed one:

- It turns out that Venus has large viens of lanthanum* under it's crust.







*or whatever handwavium material your FTL system uses.

[Zap Branigan]I use Exotic Matter myself, but that is just because it is sexier than normal matter. Its usefulness in Wormhole creation is just an attractive byproduct.[/Zap Branigan]

 

[Infojunky]

Hey I had a mad scientist Terraform Venus in a game I ran. He was also populating it with a Odd assortment of wildlife. Mad Science is the best excuse I have for some of the odder places in my 'Verse....

 

[EDG]

The OP was talking about how he was interested in Venus after reading a wikipedia science article about it (and mentioned minerals etc on the surface). To me, that suggests he's interested in what it can offer realistically so that's how and why I responded the way I did. If he'd said "hey, I just read an article about Venus in Pulpy Space Opera" then sure, that'd be a cue to suggest non-realistic things to do with Venus as a Space Opera environment... but he didn't.

Either way, it's nothing to do with being "just a game", which is a rather uninformative reply as it is. We all know it's a game, but what does that have to do with anything? There are people who enjoy games with a realistic setting and people who enjoy games where realism is not a concern (which I think is where Jeff is coming from), but neither approach is more valid or objectively more or less enjoyable than the other - it's all down to peoples' preferences.

 

[EDG]

- It turns out that Venus has large viens of lanthanum* under it's crust.

That'd be Common Traveller Misconception #78651: Lanthanum doesn't occur in veins or large deposits. It's a Rare Earth Element, and its geochemistry means that it isn't t found in significant amounts in planetary crusts at all, and always as tiny amounts with other minerals. The way we locate and extract it on Earth is most likely the same on any planet in the universe.

 

[kristof65]

Common Traveller misconception #78651: Lanthanum doesn't occur in veins or large deposits. .

I don't see how that's a misconception at all. Lanthanum, being the handwavium material it is, shows up when and how a GM wants it to.

Period.

 

[EDG]

Merely that if it was feasible, it was a no-brainer. Why? Because it's one of our closest neighbors, and it's roughly the same size as earth.

I guess it depends on what you think a "no-brainer" is. Mars is generally considered to be the much more obvious candidate for Terraforming because its current environment are a lot more similar to Earth's than Venus' (and vastly less hostile too). And it'd be easier to add atmosphere than take it away. Heck even Mars' seasons are the same as Earth's (even if its year is about twice a long) because the axial tilt is so similar.

So to me at least, Mars is a way more obvious "no-brainer" for terraforming than Venus.