NewMars On phpBB3

The FluxBB conversion continues stable.

The weekly Google Meeting on January 12th included discussion of GW Johnson's work on a paper about planning a campaign to settle Mars.

We also considered the challenges of designing equipment to operate on Venus. It appears there are a number of materials that are reliable at the 500 (or so) Celsius temperatures and 92 bar pressures. Since the entire atmosphere at the surface is CO2 in it's supercritical (fluid) state, this material appears to be well positioned for use in machinery designed for the environment.

A recent addition to the vision of how to operate on Venus is the proposal to capture updrafts that must exist on the Venus surface.

Because the atmosphere is hotter at the surface than it is higher up, the less dense atmosphere must rise, just as is true on Earth when the Sun heats a section of desert sand. On Earth, experiments have been performed to see if rising air can be harnessed to generate power. That principle might work on Venus, but details of where such in installation might be placed, and how it would work remain to be determined.

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The weekly Google Meeting took place on schedule yesterday.

Topics discussed included:

Space Tugs and book prospects
Venus probe designed to operate in the 500 Celsius environment
Optical Plane concept (research required)
Kinetic weaponry (ancient technology brought forward)

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The new version of FluxBB is continuing to hold steady.

The forum saw return of one of the founding Administrators yesterday.

Josh Cryer has a registration date in 2001, and served until 2018 when he took retirement.

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We have completed another week without incident.

We are starting to think about long deferred improvements.

The first item had been the "like" feature, but now a file hosting capability is on the agenda.

Currently we use Dropbox and Imgur to hold text files and images.

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The new software completed another day without incident.

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The new software for the forum continues to run without incident.

Many thanks (again) to SpaceNut, kbd512 and other members who helped to prepare and test the many changes introduced to the underlying software. It is gratifying that the software is behaving exactly the way it did before (on the surface).

Like swans gliding serenely across the surface of the pond, I assure everyone that little paddles are churning frantically under the surface, to keep up with member requests in real time. And those requests are being handled with support services that are current as of 2024.

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The forum is now working and we are now dealing with securing the database backup that kbd512 created during the conversion procedure.

We saw that RobertDyck logged into the new system.

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As of 19:27 New Hampshire time, kbd512 succeeded in persuading the new software to run using the URL we are used to.

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To my surprise, the conversion is underway.

Please expect it will take several hours.

If all goes well it should be back by evening.

It is now about 14:30 New Hampshire time, so it might be worth checking back at 17:00 New Hampshire time.

it is 19:26 UTC

Best wishes to kbd512 for a smooth transition!

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We'll try again next week....

All team members were not able to schedule time for the conversion today.

Both old and new systems remain open for logins.

(th)