Quote:My impression of the status of handwavium in its 'legal zones' planetside was that it's, mmm, allowed but treated as a hazardous material? That, while not actively hostile to having fen running around, they're still essentially mundane.
Okay, Valles... clarify for me, because I'm not really getting it. Why is it cheaper for Venus to construct oil than it is for Earth? My understanding is that oil is really pretty nontrivial to create, and the only reason we use the stuff is that we can pump it out of the ground. There will still be oil pumping out of the ground throughout the time we're covering here, and I utterly fail to see how any process to *create* the stuff can hope to compete on price. You could probably make an efficient LNG run the other way. You could pick up CO2 from Venus, freeze it down into blocks, drag it off to Jupiter and mix it right with hydrogen - forming natural gas and water. You use the water for whatever you need water for locally, liquify the natural gas and ship it back home. Unfortunately for Venus, his is eight hydrogen in for every carbon out, and that's really just not efficient. If you're saying that the great efficiencies come from use of handwavium - well, there are earthbound users of wavetech - Australia if nowhere else - and they've got pretty much *all* of their resources local. So what's Venus got in the complex hydrocarbon trade that Earth don't got?
Checking the chemical formulae for hydrocarbons on wiki, the rate of occurance is between two and three to one. Metallic hydrogen has a predicted density of 2.5; dry ice's is about 1.6, but about a third of that is oxygen, which is undesirable for our purposes. Overall, I think they come out surprisingly equal.
Economic competition vs. terran-origin fuels would come down to two things, both stemming from the same source: Since Venusian fuel is totally synthetic, its composition can be chosen precisely. This means that it is, 1, better fuel (since it has only the parts of conventional fuel that give power, but none of the others), and, 2, much better for the environment (because the bits that'd ordinarily end up forming smog and such just aren't there).
Ja, -n
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