Gazetteer Topics

[Valles]

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* There's too much atmosphere and it's all entirely of the wrong mix.

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Yup.

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* The surface temperature is 500C and can't cool because of the weight of the atmosphere.

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And the sun don't help, either.

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* There's no water. At all.

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Sou desu.

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(There's a fourth problem - Venus rotates in the wrong direction and it takes 243 days to do it - but solving that one's a bit out of range for this partcular diatribe.)

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Solving this one is actually the ultimate purpose of the Castle network, as I see it. They generate about four to five times as much energy as they use - and store it. When they're all complete and fully charged, they'll activate in unison and wrap the entire damn planet in a drive field. They won't actually take it anywhere, just tweak its relative motion to something more... useful. And in the meantime, any single one of them is enough to make a given bit of space in their vicinity go eye-of-a-supercollider-grade wierd, making them a quite effective defensive system in the minds of those few paranoid enough to've thought about it.

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(In parenthesis I'll add this caveat: Should the Professor or the Wizarding World or somebody else develop a device that creates a stable wormhole, like a stargate or a portkey or a farcaster or something similar, then this particular hurdle becomes moot. All that needs to happen then is to sink one end of the wormhole relatively deep in Jupiter's atmosphere, sink the other about mid-level in Venus' atmosphere, open the wormhole and let pressure differential do the work. But this technology has not been invented yet, so the above paragraph still applies.)

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Given all the other wierd shit Handwavium's done, in their position I'd be perfectly willing to bet on my ability to find or create this by the time I ran out of other things to work on.
Another possibility would be coming up with a widget that suppresses the weak nuclear force within an extremely limited volume. CO2 splits into C and O2; C goes into the widget, 3*H2 comes out, probably very energetically, and can be reacted with your O2 and more CO2 to taste.
At this stage in the game, neither of these devices exist. But if they end up being created, they'll be a long way short of being the wierdest or most implausible thing handwavium's done.

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(It may be that the Senshi didn't know - or still don't - that the "we can terraform Venus with a handful of algae!" plan is woefully incorrect, and committed themselves to the project before realizing this. That said, it's entirely plausible that Castle Magellan and the future Castles are going to need some significant upgrades to deal with reality.)

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Their design accounts for such, yeah. I doubt Magellan has a population much over, oh, five thousand or so - its biosphere sections are mostly parkland, and something like a third of its 'dungeons' are still just sitting empty. Beyond that, it'd be quite possible to build, then dome, a series of terraces along the outer rim of its disc, and increase size that way. Or hang buildings off the bottom and another layer of doming on top of the current one... So. Significant upgrades are to be expected, and were.

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The best industrial way of reducing the atmosphere is to suck it up, seperate it into component gasses, bottle it and ship it somewhere else. This can even include cracking the CO2 into oxygen and carbon, both of which can be moved elsewhere. This will take just as long - possibly longer - than moving hydrogen from Jupiter, but the benefit here is that it can work alongside the biological mediation, and it provides the Senshi with items for trade in the Fenspace economy.

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For that matter, you can quite easily do both - ship comes in carrying metallic hydrogen and leaves with graphite and LOX.

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What items? Nitrogen, oxygen and carbon. Gaseous nitrogen and oxygen are critical components necessary for Martian terraforming, and using the Venusian excess of atmosphere to bulk up Mars' excuse for air has a nice symmetry to it. Pure carbon can be sold to manufacturing concerns on Luna and the asteroids for use in creating handwavium-composite building materials for bigger and better habitats, as well as the next generation of Fen spaceships. The current VTP plan has the Senshi making complex organics for export as well, but the hydrogen requirements suggest that they're better off putting all their imported H2 into water production and not hydrocarbons.

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In terms of direct increase in the world's resemblance to Earth, yes, but...
Economically speaking, Fenspace is the dusty accretion disc swirling around the neutron star that is Earth. An overwhelming majority of the human race and its wealth is tied up in the world and will remain so for the forseeable future.
Earth will pay good money for complex organics. Earth won't pay for water. Earth has water coming out its ear-holes already. Running and expanding a terraforming project takes good money.
Ja, -n

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