Hi HN, I'm a writer turned aero engineer. Obsessed with Venus colonization for years, so I built a simulator to feel what it's like to fly there.
Veenie simulates Venus' atmosphere in the browser within ~2% of VEGA 1985 telemetry. You can also fly HAVOC, EVE, Landis' cloud city and other aerostats.
The fun part: let an LLM fly the balloon. One-click copy a tactical prompt with live telemetry, resource costs, 5-hour trajectory forecast (computed via Web Workers). Teleport below 40km to see ChatGPT panic:
https://veenie.space/fly?vehicle=EVE&lat=40&lon=-70&alt=3500...
Endgame: Venus at 50km is 0°C, 1 atm, and full of CO₂/H₂SO₄ (methalox fuel) and deuterium (120-1500x vs. Earth). Atmospheric flight there is a slow-twitch strategic game of thermal management that's perfect for AI agents. I'm presenting this at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) next week to push for crowdsourced AI training data.
hackiku•1h ago
Veenie simulates Venus' atmosphere in the browser within ~2% of VEGA 1985 telemetry. You can also fly HAVOC, EVE, Landis' cloud city and other aerostats.
The fun part: let an LLM fly the balloon. One-click copy a tactical prompt with live telemetry, resource costs, 5-hour trajectory forecast (computed via Web Workers). Teleport below 40km to see ChatGPT panic: https://veenie.space/fly?vehicle=EVE&lat=40&lon=-70&alt=3500...
Endgame: Venus at 50km is 0°C, 1 atm, and full of CO₂/H₂SO₄ (methalox fuel) and deuterium (120-1500x vs. Earth). Atmospheric flight there is a slow-twitch strategic game of thermal management that's perfect for AI agents. I'm presenting this at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) next week to push for crowdsourced AI training data.
Stack: SvelteKit 5, Threlte/Three.js, Neodrag (draggable avionics), singleton for scrollytelling beats.
Physics: Headless TypeScript engine, Web Workers, 4th-order Runge-Kutta integrator, VIRA atmospheric model, subsystems bus.
The physics engine and Mission Control sandbox (https://veenie.space/lab) are fully open source: https://github.com/hackiku/veenie (go gentle on me, but not into that good night and all)