Re: [GZG] Dirtside and StarGrunt opportunities on Mercury

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 08:31:00AM -0500, Bobby wrote:
>What are we fighting for? Ask me, cause I do give a...

One express elevator to hell, going down...

>Can we mine minerals from Mercury? Just curious. It's not my area.

No, but it's a decent place to hide spacecraft. And to have a
controlling station for your sun-orbiting photoelectric arrays (beaming
power across the system).

>We are going to need some sturdy insertion vehicles, I think. Are we
looking
>at winds?

Exosphere at most. Basically you want a standard vacuum lander for a
.38g environment. If you need to come out of the planet's shadow, lots
of reflective screening, probably with some standoff distance from
non-sacrificial components; your mothership already has this. (Force
screens may help depending on PSB.)

On the surface, insulated landing jacks will do the job on the cold
side; on the hot side, even more insulation and reflective screens.
Ideally you probably want to go for a deep polar crater; near the bottom
where it never gets sunny, you get ice, but it's not as painfully cold
as the cold side.

(Note that "hot side" and "cold side" are literally ephemeral terms. You
get about 4,200 hours between meridian transits of the sun.)

R
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