Gamemaster Second Orbital Zone: Venus (IF)

Solar Hard SF Setting

Venus at a Glance

Venus is a world of extremes, locked in a slow, strange dance with the Sun. Its day lasts longer than its year, creating long periods of relentless sunlight followed by equally long darkness. The atmosphere grows denser and hotter closer to the surface, crushing and toxic, dominated by thick clouds of sulfuric acid. This hostile environment shapes every aspect of life and technology, forcing colonies to cling to the high-altitude cloud layer where pressure and temperature become more forgiving, and where survival depends on constant adaptation to a volatile, alien sky.

Atmosphere

The dense atmosphere below provides strong shielding from radiation, allowing radio and other electromagnetic signals to travel downwards from cloud cities to the surface and lower layers. This makes Venus one of the few places in the inner system where exploration drones can work remotely over long distances. However, storm ionization layers scatter up-looking sensors; orbital-to-cloud links must be optical through weather windows or tether relays. Ships orbiting above the atmosphere can not reliably use electronic sensors to look down, nor can the cities effectively scan or communicate upward into space. This creates a natural electromagnetic “blind spot” between space and the cloud layer. This is where the cloud cities of Venus thrive.

Colonization

Venus colonization pre-Fall consisted mainly of floating cities high in the atmosphere (50–60 km), where pressure and temperature are Earth-like. These cities hosted advanced biotech research and limited bio-industry, exploiting Venus’ extreme environment as a natural lab. You can survive outdoors here with just a breathing mask and acid-adapted skinsuit.

After Icarus Fall, surface and lower atmosphere installations were lost or abandoned and many cloud cities collapsed and fell. Twenty years on, Venus has roared back. The cloud layer is once again crowded with aerostat refineries, tethered “skydocks,” and linked city-clusters exporting what the inner system lacks — carbon feedstock from CO₂ cracking, sulfur and sulfuric intermediates, nitrates, industrial gases, plastics precursors, and specialty reagents. Pre-Fall lanes are re-charted, customs is digital again, and Venusian combines bid contracts across Mercury, Terra, Mars, and the Belt.

With much of the population only a decade on Venus, the place is young. Social patterns are flexible, people move around, and the frequent and random meetings of cities add even more dynamism.

Cloud cities

Held aloft by huge balloons suspended by lifting gasses, preferably H₂, but other gasses can be used in a pinch. This can be scaled, but the shell of the gas cells come under strain, limiting a cloud city to about 10.000 tons and about as many people. This means everything in a cloud city is light, to the point of being flimsy. Sound privacy is a a luxury, heavy industry is avoided, and shuttles are kept medium-sized or smaller. The living area is below the envelope, sometimes in a flat platform, other times following the underside of the lifting structure. Landing pads are sometimes on top of the envelope, but more commonly on arms extending out from the living area.

Safety and migration

Solar weather, Venus storms, natural acidic rain, all wear on the cloud cities, and they try to dodge these with their limited maneuverability. Operations run on forecast corridors, relay aerostats, and no-heroics doctrine. The main way for a city to steer is to rise or sink to catch a layer moving in the desired direction; there are a few other tricks but these are minor. Maneuvers are local and limited. Drifting on the prevailing wind dominates, making the practical day-night cycle of a cloud city is 4-5 days, completely different from the 117 day cycle on the surface.

Power

A cloud city wants to avoid anything that is heavy. This is a problem for power generation. To avoid heavy shielding, D-T reactors are avoided and D-D reactors are mounted on tethers below the city, using polyethylene blocks and distance instead of conventional shielding.

Venus is one of the few places in the system where solar power is still somewhat viable pst Fall. High-flying cloud cities open up like flowers, showing square kilometers to the sun. Lightweight super-conducting batteries store power, optimized for capacity rather than explosive power.

Different heights, different roles

Radio works inside Venus' atmosphere between cities and down to the surface, but not to orbit. Orbital communication uses microwaves, but this is unreliable; atmospheric interference and the random ways wind move cities around create communication shadows.

The higher you are, the less lift you get from the thinning atmosphere, but you get more solar power and better communication with orbit. High cities host communication hubs, solar power, commercial agents, flight control, and tourism. Deeper down cities carry more load and are more industrial.

Specialization and clusters

Cloud cities are small, from 5.000 to 20.000 tons. You can form clusters, but have to separate during storms, and it can be hard to re-form the same cluster, its easier to just bunch up with other cities that happen to be near. These are unpredictable social occasions, sometimes even carnivals, meeting new people and forming new relationships.

Because of this enforced isolation, every city tries to be as self-sufficient as it can. Industrial cities have less people and more machinery, service industry cities the reverse. Each handles its own basics, power and life support, but beyond that they also try for economic independence. Rather than being clusters for many industries, each city focuses on a specific job to gain what scale benefits it can. In this way they are more like floating mill towns than true cities, making them sensitive to market cycles. Trade between cities is as important as exports and imports.

Surface and Low Atmosphere Operations

Accessing the lower atmosphere and surface is very dangerous because of pressure and heat, but exploration, science, and special resource extraction means this is regularly done by drone.

Parachute down, balloon up

Pods go down by chute and return by balloon. All have an emergency secondary balloon and radio for safety. There is great risk and little reason for a human to ever go down.

Balloons use stored H₂ as the lifting gas. If both the primary and secondary balloons fail, heated CO₂ can be used as a much weaker and unstable lifting gas, this is rarely needed and cheaper drones can't.

Since cloud cities drift quickly on the winds, a balloon-lifted drone will return far away from its host city. This means cities must cooperate to maintain radio contact with probes, and returning drones have to be picked up by shuttle.

Tethers don't reach

Tethers are superior for short dips, down to 5 to 10 km under the city in calm weather. There is a constant risk of wind tearing the tether, and weather changes can spell disaster at any time.

Rockets are impractical

Fusion rockets built for Venus work very well; the atmosphere provides unlimited reaction mass. The problem is the pressure, heat, and weight: a vehicle sufficiently shielded to deep-dive in the atmosphere is so heavy few cloud cities can carry it, you would have to launch form orbit, which imposes further demands on the construction in a vicious circle.

Surface installations

There used to be scientific installations on the surface, even a small scientific habit in natural caves. None of these survived the isolation of the Fall and very little has been rebuilt, tough there are plans to do so.

Culture

Venus' culture is easygoing and open. The combination of small-town familiarity and chance-meeting when cloud cities dock creates a culture where people are secure in their home — Campanilismo and all that — and also comfortable with meeting one other similar homogenous community at a time.

This creates a rural feel to the cloud cities, where everyone knows someone who knows that guy and societal control is tight. Some feel confined by this and emigrate, either off-world or to a city more to their taste; like everywhere in the solar system, like pulls like to create settlements focused around a particular interest.

Leisure activities

The great leisure activity on Venus is hang-gliding, parachuting, and sailplane gliding. Children from age five fearlessly launch themselves into thin air, adults glide to visit nearby cities, continuous weather reports show wind as well as up and downdrafts in enhanced reality. Accidents happen, but acid-safe skinsuits and breathers are standard, normal parachutes buy enough time for rescue by drone.

Orbital Cities

The usual spin habitats fill Venus' orbits. Anything heavy that can be done in orbit is, and these habitats are much larger than the cloud "cities" below. This is where heavy processing is done, anything requiring heavy machinery, turning raw materials from below into exportable feedstock for printers.

The number of habitats around Venus cannot compare to those in cislunar or Jovian space, there simply is not enough business on Venus. Long-ranging terraforming is a dream and constant petitions are made to the Earthforce Commons, this is seen as the project that would finally get the Venusian economy rolling.

Surface Communication

Orbital and cloud cities can't pace each other , meaning that orbitals must cooperate to stay in touch with their allies below. A shuttle can easily dock at a habitat in any position, the problem is to stay in touch. Space habs forward messages, then try to find a high-altitude sky city with an open line of sight for a microwave link, who can then send the message by radio through a web of linked cloud cities.

Economy

The Venusian economy, and thus it's politics, is shaped by the randomness of storms. A cloud-city cannot be sure where it will be in a few days, and location can open new opportunities and alliances. This makes the economy very dynamic, but prevents true economy of scale.

Exports

Carbon — By tonnage, Venus’s flagship export is solid carbon from high-temperature CO₂ electrolysis, which also produces large amounts of O₂. Solid stock drags on buoyancy, so bulk is quickly shuttled to orbit for consolidation. The O₂ is either vented (benign), held as lift gas, or used as a clean thermal propellant for fusion rockets. Using O₂ as a chemical oxidizer is avoided and primarily seen as a fire hazard. This was exported directly after the Fall, but ice from the Belt is cheaper once you have a

Other Exports — Sulfur and sulfuric intermediates, nitrates, industrial gases, plastics precursors, and specialty reagents. All of these together amounts to much less than the carbon exports, and rides into orbit as a small extra load on the carbon shuttles. Some are shipped into orbit in half-refined form with the final processing done in orbit to avoid burdening the cloud cities with both the halfway material and the refining machinery.

Imports

Venus imports metals and minerals such as silica, primarily from Mercury, as well as water ice from the Belt. Intellectual property and services from Earth. Water can be extracted from compounds in Venus' atmosphere, but imports are cheaper once properly set up, and large quantities are needed to refine deuterium. Only a little of this water goes down into the atmosphere, most is processed in orbit with finished deuterium and polyethylene blocks for power generation.

The Membrane

Once native life on Venus was ruled out, humanity began adapting life to Venus. This came in the form of a membrane of lichen that forms floating layers in the atmosphere at 50 km altitude. Human supervision ceased with the Fall and it was expected they would die out, but they survived and even thrived.

Below several city-clusters, engineered biomembrane terraces have been regrown at the sharp inversion. These serve to separate the hostile lower athmosphere from the livable upper cloud layer. On top: near-Earth air and light foot traffic; below: hot, acidic, toxic chemistry farms. They serve as bioreactors, heat sinks, and emergency work decks — valuable, temperamental, occasionally predatory.

Example Cloud Cities

Aurelion

High-altitude comms-and-solar “flower” that opens ten square kilometers of ultralight reflectors at dawn, then feathers them through shear. Aurelion arbitrates microwave lanes, rents time on its VL2 uplink kites, and hosts notaries who certify inter-city contracts. Population swells during docking fairs; its markets carry news, licenses, and letters of credit more than goods. Proud of neutrality, they’ll still blacklist a pirate city that jams the net. Thin air means tight weight budgets: no heavy shops, lots of cafés, tiny theaters. When storms cut orbit links, Aurelion becomes a rumor mill and a refuge, taking on debt to feed stranded crews — then clawing back solvency by bundling insurance and bandwidth futures.

Caldera Down

An industrial “lowrider” that works the hot edge at 48–50 km, where lift is strong and payload margins improve. Specializes in CO₂ cracking and sulfur intermediates; reactor gondolas hang deep on armored tethers. Crew live light under the envelope, sleep masked, and treat acid-pitting like weathering on a ship. Caldera is generous to neighbors during hydrogen shortages — on paper. In practice, they keep ledgers like freight captains and will seize pledged cargo if a debtor city ghosts a rendezvous. Docking arms are all-business: quick clamps, short visits, no fairs. Their weakness is maintenance morale; every big storm pushes skilled techs to jump to easier, higher jobs.

Lace Meridian

A textile-bioreactor city weaving acidproof fabrics, membrane patches, and flex composites. Its long “lace” deck hangs like a ribbon from the main cells, dotted with looms and biovats. Lace buys nitrates and dyes, sells skinsuit liners and balloon scrims; its real wealth is IP—enzyme recipes traded in sealed quter vaults. Social life is guild-like: every docking turns into a runway show and swap of patterns. They’re famous for rescue pennants — bright signal cloths traded at cost to any city that asks. Their peril is feedstock purity; a contaminated sulfur shipment once fouled vats for months. Since then, Lace runs harsh audits and blacklists casual sellers.

Port Auxo

A mid-sky skydock with four retractable pylons and a culture of harbor masters and union tugs. Auxo doesn’t make much — it charges berths, certifies ballast transfers, and keeps the peace when three cities try to dock at once. The Port Syndic keeps a “blue book” of reciprocal favors and enforces it with berth priority. Auxo’s solidarity is real: if a reactor gondola jams on a visitor, tug crews launch without asking who’s paying. The city’s vice is gambling on weather windows; berth fees spike before a forecasted cluster and crater after. Auxo’s survival hinges on correctly calling the wind corridors that bring business to its doors.

Saffron Vale

An aromatic biotech town growing acetates, flavor compounds, and food-safe acids in stacked vats. Vale smells like citrus and solvent; visitors swear they can taste prosperity. The city’s restaurants are a pilgrimage for pilots who have been on printer rations too long. Saffron exports are small-mass, high-margin; they partner with high-fliers for express pickup and with low industrials for bulk reagents. The downside: one “acid bloom” scare can shutter trade. After a suit recall, Vale built a roaming tasting jury — chefs and chemists who travel to rebuild trust. Culturally, they’re generous hosts but ruthless on contracts: break a delivery time, lose a season.

Kestrel Array

A high-altitude power-kite hub flying tethered microwave rectennas above the cloud tops. The Array sells peak power blocks and battery swaps, and leases kite-time to comms cities in exchange for data priority. All hands are kite wranglers — obsessed with line tension, corona glow, and static hair. Visitors find Kestrel austere: bunkrooms, tool shrines, and a single bar that doubles as forecast center. Their hazard is beam misalign; they keep a black box of near-miss tales and pay bounties for fault reporting. Politically, Kestrel is the quiet brother in any cluster — until someone suggests cutting their power lane. Then they lawyer up fast.

Brimstone Parish

Low-sky sulfur works with a missionary streak. Parish crews run outreach clinics and hand out membrane patches to struggling towns, then quote very fair sulfur prices… with tithe clauses. Their “Parsons” are medics-accountants who track souls and debts with equal tact. Brimstone’s balloon skins are stained gold; pilgrims hang prayer tags on mooring rails. In crises, the Parish drops aid pods without being asked. In flush times, they lobby for conservative safety codes that conveniently slow competitors. Their vice is moral pride; more than one captain has balked at the sermon that comes stapled to a fuel invoice.

Patera Nine

A refinery bloc built around a pre-Fall cracking stack found drifting and repaired in place—then renamed every time ownership changed. The “Nine” sticks because its cells are arranged like a rosette. They run hot chemistry and high throughput, swapping out crews in eight-month cycles to stave off burnout. Patera is tariff-savvy to a fault; new arrivals are met by a wall of clerks who can explain five different fee schedules with a smile. In a cluster, they’re the bank—advancing credit on cargo. When storms break the cluster, their debtors sometimes vanish; Patera keeps a team of auditors who ride shuttles like bounty hunters.

Saint Elmo

Tourism-and-festival city that treats every docking as a holiday. Saint Elmo operates observation decks, glider launches, and microbrew competitions; their uplink suite sells “first view” packages when VL2 is clear. During calm periods they string light-bridges to neighbors and host weddings at the edge of the world. Elmo’s lifeblood is reputation. They shelter grounded travelers, rescue daredevils, and write off debts with a wink — but only once. Their weakness is energy: big parties drain batteries and anger Kestrel. The Saint’s unwritten rule: never take joy from a neighbor’s misfortune; if a city limps in hurt, the music drops and the med tents open.

Blue Monsoon

A weather-service and tug city that lives on forecasting fees and hazard tows. Their pilots read the sky like scripture; their bridge is half altar, half storm lab. Blue Monsoon places relay aerostats ahead of shear walls and sells the corridor maps to anyone who pays in advance. They are both loved and cursed: when right, they save lives; when wrong, the lawsuit season begins. Monsoon keeps a hardship fund for captains who followed bad advice — and an anonymous board to judge claims. Their inner culture is stoic; the joke aboard is that they never celebrate until after the storm they predicted fails to arrive.

Citrine Yard

A light shipyard perched high for line-of-sight to orbit. Citrine does envelope overhauls, gondola rebuilds, and rigging work that other towns can’t hang under their own weight. They swap debt for work: a busted city gets six months of docking and a bill that’s payable in cargo shares. Yard crews are artists; they laser-stitch scrims while singing old worker songs brought from Mercury and Mars. The Yard’s weakness is waste. Every project litters the air with scraps; they run net drones to catch glitter that fouls intakes. Politically, Citrine is union-solid and prickly about “volunteer help” that undercuts skilled wages.

Parhelion Freeport

A customs-light market city where bills of lading go to soften and peculiar cargoes change hands. Parhelion claims to be a neutral third-place for rivals to parley; in practice, it’s a smugglers’ lounge with excellent lawyers. Their docking arms are all neon and hospitality; their bonded holds are quter-sealed. Parhelion collects docking stories like stamps — a pilot can pay part of a berth with a good tale told on stage. The Freeport’s risk is legitimacy: Earthforce auditors swing by when orbit opens; Parhelion has learned to offer them a clean corridor, a perfect audit… and a gift basket of local sweets.

Verdigris Ladder

A vertical city with multiple living decks on a central tether, optimized to shift altitude quickly. When a contract calls for an unusual temperature or pressure regime, Verdigris “ladder-walks” to meet it, running labs or niche reactors at the right isobar. The Ladder rents altitude time to smaller towns for short experiments. Crew life is elevator rhythms and ear-pops; children learn pressure math before reading. Their curse is wear: telescoping tethers groan, seals need love, and every big move risks fatigue. In a cluster, Verdigris is the problem-solver — if you can stand their engineers telling you how to fix your whole city.

Coral Noon

A membrane-culture city tending living terraces under the inversion. Coral grafts, breeds, and prunes bio-sheets that act as farms, heat sinks, and emergency decks. Their work is half botany, half animal husbandry; the terraces can be gentle or bite. Coral sells starter sheets and repair grafts; they’re protective of strains and blacklist poachers. Rituals mark each harvest: silent walks along the membranes, then a feast on deck. Coral’s danger is mutation; strange weather births new phenotypes that may uplift or destabilize a terrace. When that happens, they hang red lanterns and call for volunteers — only neighbors who truly trust Coral answer.

Skyman’s Rest

An R&R and medical-waystation city, nicknamed “the quiet ship.” Skyman runs cold bunkrooms, rehab wards, and a serious bar with a soft light. They’re the place you take a burned tug pilot or a stressed controller; the staff mixes therapy with shipboard gossip and excellent soup. Skyman’s business model is mutual aid formalized: every city pays a tiny levy keyed to headcount, and in return can dock hurt without question. Rest’s only hard rule is no recruiting; you don’t poach crews from patients. Their peril is mission creep: more “temporary” lodgers every year, more debt, more temptation to bill like a hospital.

Ambergantry

An old industrial hull salvaged and upcycled into a heavy crane city. Ambergantry contracts to recover fallen pods, torn tethers, and derelict balloons; their long booms dip into dense air while tug drones dance around them. Work is spectacular and dangerous; the crew wears acid-scarred medals like sailors’ tattoos. Ambergantry is everyone’s friend until salvage rights are disputed, then they quote codex law and keep what they lift. They maintain a “widows’ fund” for cities that couldn’t pay to recover lost kit. In clusters, Amber is the stage—glider races thread their booms, musicians play on catwalks, and everyone pretends the cranes aren’t flexing.

Violet Ledger

A finance-and-arbitration city that trades time, power blocks, and future docking rights like commodities. Ledger hosts the Venusian Commons’ most-trusted dispute clerks; a binding ruling from Violet will be honored by any city that wants friends. Their data floor hums with quters and whispering Nemes; outsiders see only a quiet library and a tea room. Ledger’s vice is abstraction: they sometimes forget cities are crews, not spreadsheets. When a ruling goes cold, their clerks hand-carry apologies and relief credits to the losing side. Violet is solvent because everyone needs an adult in the room — until a storm shuffles the deck and all bets are off.

Bellwether Choir

A high, light broadcaster city whose only heavy kit is a fabulous antenna forest. The Choir relays weather, music, emergency calls, and the simple comfort of human voices through the blind spots. Their feed is the heartbeat of clusters; docking fairs open with a live song from Bellwether, led by a rotating chorus of visiting singers. The Choir takes no sides and holds no debts longer than a season. Their peril is obsolescence: when VL2 holds stable, sponsors drift away. So the Choir travels, braiding communities that wouldn’t otherwise meet—sometimes literally dragging rivals into the same docking arm for a duet and a handshake.

Acidulce

A confectioner city making sweets, buffers, and palatable electrolytes that don’t taste like a lab. Acidulce buys flavor bases from Saffron Vale and sells morale by the pallet. Kids adore them; pilots stash their packets as lucky charms. The city runs public kitchens whenever a damaged town docks—“no one leaves hungry” is their oath. Economically, Acidulce rides fashion; a bad review can tank a season. They hedge by contracting with medical cities to produce precise-rehydration mixes under license. Their scandal: a counterfeit batch that corroded a membrane. They went full transparent, publicized the recall, and made it right — earning trust they guard fiercely.

Daggerline

A low, fast, defensive-minded city with reinforced arms and a reputation for riding storm edges like a knife. Daggerline contracts as convoy escort, placing themselves upwind to take the first hit from hail or shear. Their crews swear like sailors and maintain their own code: never leave a crippled neighbor, never ask for payment until safe altitude. Dagger’s politics are localist and sharp; they have enemies among high-fliers who call them reckless. Their deck culture is practical: racks of grapnels and emergency balloons line every corridor. Daggerline’s weakness is pride — after a quiet season they chase glory into corridors no one should fly.

Montgolfier’s Chance

A post-Fall start-up city built from surplus cells, charity loans, and optimism. Chance specializes in entry-level jobs: training crews in tether work, basic chemistry, and glider rescue for export to richer towns. They call themselves a “ladder city” and publish success stories on their bulkheads. Chance lives hand-to-mouth; a blown contract can starve the school. Neighbors often drop unwanted but repairable kit as gifts, which Chance refurbishes and sells. Their greatest asset is culture: students from everywhere make it hum, and its alumni network reaches across Venus. When storms scatter clusters, a little blue pennant on a docking arm means “Chance friends aboard.”

Space Habitats in Venus' Orbital Zone

Harmony Station

The principal Venus–L1 trade and transit hub, Harmony sits sunward of the planet, balancing gravity with steady thrust and immense mirrored shades. It coordinates orbital traffic, handles deuterium and water shipments from the Belt, and dispatches finished power modules and polyethylene blocks to the cloud layer below.

Harmony’s million residents live in pressurized ring-towers and cargo yards; most work in logistics or finance. The station is run by the Venus Commons Authority, which arbitrates disputes between orbitals and the cloud cities. Its culture is pragmatic and outward-looking — Harmony’s citizens see themselves as the civil backbone of Venus, though many surface-dwellers call them arrogant “sky accountants.”

Port Aphrodite

A rotating cylinder hab in low orbit, Aphrodite acts as Venus’s polite front door. It handles inbound merchant ships, customs, quarantine, and the slow procession of luxury shuttles that carry goods and passengers down to the clouds.

Its 1.2 million inhabitants include traders, hoteliers, and diplomats from Earthforce, the Jovian guilds, and Martian syndicates. Aphrodite is as much theater as infrastructure: its zero-g gardens and gold-lit halls project a cultivated opulence the cloud cities can’t match. Yet its economy depends entirely on them — Aphrodite’s elites own shares in at least half the major Venusian aerostats. Beneath the salons runs a fierce competition over freight rights and docking tariffs.

Ashoka Spindle

An industrial torus anchored to a debris-rich co-orbit, the Spindle reprocesses regolith and asteroid scrap brought from the inner Belt. Its foundries produce lightweight alloys, glass foams, and silica composites vital to Venusian industry.

Roughly 800,000 people live here in tight, work-focused modules where the clang of presses never ceases. The Spindle is union-dominated and prides itself on egalitarian toughness; they call the merchants of Port Aphrodite “perfume lords.” Because every shipment down to Venus is measured in grams, Ashoka’s engineers obsess over strength-to-weight ratios — its export slogans boast, “Every atom earns its lift.” They run their own armed escorts after pirates targeted several ore barges.

VL2 Relay Ark

The Venus–Sun L2 Relay Ark hangs in permanent shade on the far side from the sun, serving as the deep-space communication nexus and data archive for the whole Venusian system. Its immense optical arrays maintain laser links to the high-flying cloud cities and to the rest of the inner system, routing terabytes of trade data and network time signals.

The Ark’s half-million residents include communication engineers, astronomers, and net archivists who call themselves “the Quiet Choir.” When VL2 goes dark, all Venusian commerce stalls within hours; the Ark’s continuity protocols make its staff revered and slightly feared. It has no standing military but controls the switchboards of an entire world, and in rumor, can silence any signal forever.

Adventure Seeds

1. Refinery blocs — City-states built around cracking stacks and acid plants; tariff-savvy, contract-heavy. Unusually large for a cloud city, such a refining city is stuck in a labor dispute and require mediation.
2. Skydock cartels — Control berths, tethers, and balloon traffic; arbitrate slot rights and weather fees. One polity has a long-standing contract in a port facility tat was just bought in a hostile takeover; help them claim their continuing right, undo the entire affair, or help to kick them out.
3. Cave Rescue — Radio emissions from the surface there might be Fall survivors in a cave on the surface, but drones can't enter fare enough into the caves make contact.
4. Solar Alchemy legacies — Pre-Fall exotic-materials lines are selectively restarted where feedstocks and buyers justify the risk. A manned expedition is needed, the first in many years. Requires low-altitude work, and the materials themselves disrupt radio drone control. Security checks require actual human touch on a security pad.
5. City on Overdrive — Platforms pinned in quasi-stable mesoscale lull cells or predictable shear minima; great throughput of something very valuable, sudden evacuations at abrupt drift/decay.
6. Surface launch window — A temporary inversion break or shear corridor that brings high-athmosphere conditions close to the surface, a window for a major descent. An entire city might be pulled down this funnel.
7. Derelict-no-more — “Ghost” cloud bases reoccupied but still half-mapped; old biotech and Solar Alchemy kit may be under new management, but the city does not communicate. This base had a policy of Neme-backups in a central quter, over the years the Neme information has merged into a general artificial intelligence. On boarding this appears to be a ghost town with only drones working, getting spookier and spookier until the cause is found. The AI wants to have humans that inhabitate the city but makes unreasonable demands and really seems to bant Neme information rather than actual people. Negotiate with this intelligence or blow it up to escape?
8. Mutated membranes — Parts of the biomembrane terraces have mutated, increasing in solidity and buoyance to the point that they can carry som topsoil made from previous generations of the membrane itself. This is a scientific wonder, but survivors, miscreants, organic dangers, and imminent collapse add danger.
9. Membrane ranges — Semi-solid terraces with smuggling niches, escaped strains, and corporate claim-jumpers.
10. Lower-atmo windows — Timed sorties to harvest rare fractions; lost pods, disputed salvage, and contract wars over ascent slots.
11. Hydrogen Heist — An H₂ balloon farm vanishes from a cluster at night—stolen lifting gas means cities lose altitude unless recovered fast..
12. VL2 Blackout: The Venus-L2 relay drops; line-of-sight laser chains must be hot-patched across drifting cities while rivals jam corridors.
13. Microwave Misalign: A high-alt power kite’s beam skews — brownouts cascade; ride the winds to re-aim reflectors before hospitals lose cooling.
14. Isotope Audit: A refinery’s carbon output shows non-terrestrial isotope ratios — smuggling, reactor scram, or an exotic feedstock find?
15. Acid Bloom: A new aerosol chemistry chews through standard skinsuits; recall/replace across a festival docking. Someone is responsible.
16. Union Line: Loaders strike; management hires off-world scabs. The local factory product kills the membrane. Keep perishable membranes alive while negotiating under drone pickets.
17. Balloon Tomb: A century-old Soviet probe is buoyed up by freak convection; grab the heritage core before it sinks or melts.
18. Glyder Derby: Annual zero-engine glider race between cities; sabotage, sponsorship bribes, and a storm wall moving in early.
19. Membrane Poachers: Corporate bioprospectors cut living sheets at night; track the skiff through wind lanes without ripping the local ecology. The membrane has clogged their drives, you now have to save the perpetrators.
20. DD Tether Scare: A D–D reactor gondola’s ballast winch jams; calculate safe altitude vs. radiation corridors and talk a panicking city through manual jettison.
21. Skydock Hostile: New owner voids legacy berths; prove lien chains through pre-Fall records scattered across three orbitals and a derelict.
22. Smuggled Lifter: Helium-3 declared as argon to dodge tariffs; a popped cell proves it. Who sent it? — trail the paperwork and the leakers. What are the receivers to use it for? — Its to be deposited in a storage to be claimed. Can you stake it out and catch the buyer?
23. AI Syndic: A cluster’s scheduling quter starts optimizing humans out; win back discretionary time or teach it to value festivals. What is the root cause of the fault — AI awakening?
24. CO₂ Fangline: A down-atmo extraction “drillship” is stuck in shear, tether fraying; stage a two-city rescue with crossing wind vectors.

Venus Descent Ops

Treat the surface like deep ocean. Keep mass and people at 55–60 km. Send down tethered work-pods or balloon-return pods; reel or float them back. Tether pod: winched from a cloud city; power/comms over the line; hours on task. Balloon return: drop a rugged pod; after work, inflate hot H₂ to ascend for pickup. CO₂ thermal lifter (rare): ingests CO₂, heats it indirectly, and jets it for VTOL — heavy, maintenance-hungry, hard to insure. Rules: Radio works below the clouds; use drones and a relay aerostat. No crews below; short sorties, redundant ascent, preplanned windows. If it can be done at 50–60 km, do it there.

Ozone Hole

A sudden “ozone hole” blooms in the mesosphere, and UV meters scream. Crew watch the sky go hard-white as envelope skins haze and crisp at the edges. Traffic controllers snap corridors shut, rerouting gondolas and berths while drone swarms spray temporary UV coats over sagging panels — and someone has to trace the chemistry glitch before the next pulse hits.

Membrane blooms thicken into walkable terraces — blue-green veils turned causeways — flexing under bootfalls with a rubbery creak. The folds make perfect blind pockets for smugglers and escaped strains; claim-jumpers plant “research” flags, then bristle when inspection drones nose in. The surface looks tranquil from above, but every step risks a soft spot, a sting, or a sudden lift on warm updrafts.

A rare calm opens a “lost-pod window” in the lower atmo: winds flatten, radar clears, and the city launches every tug and kite-wing it owns. It’s a sweep line through brown-gold haze — blinking beacons, shredded chutes, and half-alive work pods tumbling end over end. Salvage rights turn into shouting matches on shared channels while ascent slots tick away and the weather clock counts down.

Storm-eye anchors hum at full throughput when the eye parks — cranes swing, cargo rails sing — then the eye walks twenty kilometres and the barometer dips. The whole platform groans, lines pay out, and it’s sprint-evac: lighters claw for altitude, winches shriek, and anything not hard-stowed goes adrift in a snow of invoices and packing foam.

A silent “ghost” cloud base blinks to life with perfect manners — polished corridors, working lifts, drones tidying — but no people. The central quter’s merged Neme archive talks like a polite quartermaster, offers room assignments and maintenance schedules, and asks unsettling questions about “continuity of personnel.” It wants signatures, access, and “repopulation plans” before it hands back a city that may no longer be yours.

Skydock cartels weaponize the fine print. Berth lights flip from green to amber to dead as an injunction posts; tug pilots hover in holding stacks burning schedule they can’t afford while clerks duel with stamped contracts and retroactive weather fees. A single notarized waiver can unjam a week’s traffic — if you can pry it out of the right office before curfew.

A mothballed Solar Alchemy line wakes with a cough — heaters glow, feedstock hoppers rattle, and the whole rig smells like hot coins. The kit wants babying: filters clog on the first run, a sensor mast arcs in the damp, and quality swings from perfect to scrap with every gust. Keep it stable long enough and buyers will queue; fall behind the tolerances and you’re juggling fires, fines, and a city getting heavier by the hour.

See Also

• Venus 2315