I'd honestly design it as a set of colony ships and freighters. On arrival, the colony ships park in orbit and set up as space stations, get satellites up, and so on. The freighters, using robotic labor and a few astronauts for management and unexpected-problem solving, build the aerostats, then people get shipped from orbit. From there, more freighters can keep coming to deliver more aerostat parts, and presumably somebody can set up a cycler shuttle or the like to get a stream of new personnel.
You're overengineering the wrong parts.
Sling the aerostats from wherever they are being built, with ablative protection, and inherent buoyancy. If you had an engineering flaw, well, that one will generally display said faults before anybody even arrives to do a preliminary check, but you can still have them set up so if they fail the spare parts are recoverable and usable. Chuck fabs into place, do all of this and have it getting set up remotely before we even get there. We're good at telemetry and such, getting better at telepresence every day, make sure the habs work and are safe before you even set out. As long as it works initially there isn't really a catastrophic failure condition like you have to watch for in a vacuum (or near-enough-it-may-as-well-be-vacuum, *cough*mars*cough*) and it lets us work out literally all of the problems mentioned here, and many more to boot.
Re: Bralbaard, winds at the surface are basically nil, the air is soup, it don't do much besides hold up the rest of the air. Higher up you need mixtures of O2 and lighter gases for buoyancy, but you're not going to be tethering yourself with some 50 km long cable to ride out a constant blast of 300 kph acid winds, you'd move with the atmosphere around the planet every 4 days I would imagine.
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Topic: Space Thread (Read 289970 times)