#rovers

Clockwork robots are a staple of the steampunk genre. But it turns out we also may have a use case for them in the real world! And by the real world, I don't necessarily mean Earth. I mean Venus!

Venus is an incredibly unfriendly place to just about anything that isn't also made of sulfuric acid. The atmosphere will melt down nearly anything you drop into it, so our most successful probes come with balloons and parachutes that try to keep the probe above the sulfuric acid clouds for as long as possible.

Out of sixteen or so probes landed on Venus, all by the Soviet Union, barely a quarter managed to return data before melting. Of those that did survive, none lasted much longer than one hour.

But that's what you get, when surface temperatures are nearly a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. If you can manage the heat, the clouds are up to 96% droplets of sulfuric acid. Still not enough pain? The atmospheric pressure on the surface is 92 times that of Earth. It's the equivalent of being 3,000 feet beneath the sea.

No wonder most probes descending to the surface are simply crushed before Venus's other hazards can get them.

The environment is clearly too hazardous for a rover that would do fine on Mars. The electronics are the most sensitive part, and we may have to simply do without them.

Therefore, to explore Venus, a rather funny choice may be to simply go backwards a few hundred years in technology. Early computers didn't need electronics. Instead, they had literally solid-state components in the form of counting wheels and cogs. Take a look at Charles Babbage's Difference Engine.

(Notice the stanchions for scale)

Or the Antikythera mechanism, which survived sitting at the bottom of the sea for us to figure out that it could be used to predict eclipses.

If you use a clockwork mechanism, powered by a small wind turbine, to also serve as the source of movement, Venus suddenly becomes a lot more survivable. Every single material on the rover can be made to withstand the pressure, temperature, and acid!

Then borrow a tank design from World War I, with treads going all the way around the outside so the rover can be flipped over.

Okay, but what about sending back some actual data? It's neat to have a mechanical box trundling along, but kind of useless without some data.

You guessed it, 1800s technology to the rescue again. This time, with Morse code!

The F-22 Raptor is a stealthy plane. So stealthy, that it's kind of inconvenient for normal operations when you want to know where it is. To fix that, there's an optional module that can be bolted to the skin, a radar reflector.

So put one of those reflectors on the Venus rover, have an orbiting satellite watch the radar signature, and connect the reflector to the rover's data input so it'll make the reflector blink out its data. I'd really expect something more like binary than Morse, though.

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