>>11912446>Would it be worthwhile to treat Venus like a miniature gas planet and strip mine its atmosphere?As a source of nitrogen and carbon for early acceleration in orbital habitat construction, sure.
>An orbital ring ellipse that dips down into the atmosphere could allow pumping or scooping up gases from certain layers.Even if you assume orbital rings can work, you can't really do elliptical ones anyway, since they're supported by internal centripetal accelerations of matter and thus want to bulge out into a circle always. What you'd do instead is have two orbital rings, one sitting stationary to the ground at an altitude high above the atmosphere, and a second one down much closer to the surface, say 40 km above the datum (or whatever it's called on Venus). Connecting the two would be as many vertical tethers as you needed or wanted, and they'd be constantly shuttling bottles of gas up and down their length. You could even have tethers hanging down from the inner ring to take advantage of the much higher atmospheric pressures down there and skip on manually pressurizing those gasses.
>There aren't launch window issues like with MarsYeah there are, there's launch windows no matter you are or where you're going. Sure Venus has launch windows that occur with a higher frequency than most places, but it's not that huge a deal, especially if you've got a large fraction of people living in orbital habitats anyway.
>sunlight is strongSure, but a bit of a moot point because by the time we have the ability to build orbital rings around other planets you bet your ass we'll have cracked some significant power supply technology barriers.
>solar electric or solar thermal interplanetary ferry service Like I said, we'll have power supply tech by then that would allow vastly greater propulsion technology than we have today or that we could achieve with mordern-ish tech. We're talking at least fusion propulsion that gets similar TWR as ion drives but with >10x the Isp.
