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Alright, so here are some historical flags of Venus, from the futuristic year of 1999.

In the year 2285, Venus has been terraformed into a tropical world of deserts, grasslands and rainforests, vast oceans, resurrected dinosaurs and a crescent-shaped sun.

But Venus in 1999, was, in a word, not a nice place to live. The atmosphere was composed almost entirely of CO2, and the pressure was high enough at ground level that it could be more closely compared to the ocean at the bottom of the Marianas Trench than the air on Earth. While you might be familiar with the acidic rain on Venus, you might not be aware that Venus back then was so damn hot, the acid rain evaporated miles above the ground.

With the exception of some unmanned probes being sent to the surface on survey missions, human activity on Venus in 1999 was restricted to the upper atmosphere, where temperature and air pressure were more amenable to human life. Here, Teflon-coated aerostats were able to float comfortably, using room-temperature oxygen as a lifting gas. As of 1999, the “Yellow Planet” has a population of around 7.5 million people (excluding its moon, Neith, which is a very different story), who entirely in the sky.

Due to the logistics of interplanetary colonization (communication lags in particular, and the long travel times to a slightly lesser extent), it became apparent very early on that the American/Japanese-led ventures on Mars, and the Soviet-led ventures on Venus, would require colonies that were self-sufficient and politically-autonomous from day one. Hence, systems of free association was established, whereby colonies basically became countries unto themselves, with ties to their motherland back on Earth mostly in legal and political, rather than physical (or even economic) terms.

Now, without further ado, time for some plump, juicy lore regarding these here wind-flappies:

First up is the flag of the VENUSIAN COUNCIL. Founded in 1986 as a sort of United Nations for the colonial polities of Venus, the VS (Venerianskiy Sovet) flag’s symbolism combines a modified version of the Interkosmos logo with the traditional symbol for Venus, and two hands shaking, on the white field of peace.

Interkosmos was a Soviet-led program to assist its communist bloc allies in putting people into space and get them into the Space Race. In Overheaven’s timeline, Interkosmos (much like everything else having to do with space) gets fairly steroidal, as a reaction to the capitalist Space Boom, which began in the late 70’s and roared loudest in the 80’s. Through Interkosmos, the USSR made it possible for the majority of the non-Soviet colonies on Venus to be established at all. Hence, the Interkosmos logo was widely viewed as a symbol of proletarian solidarity on Venus, which, given that really only communist bloc countries were colonizing Venus in the 80’s, made sense for it to be incorporated into the Council's symbolism when the flag was made.

As a sort of “meta” note, the hand-shaking motif is meant to be a callback to the old Warsaw Pact logo.

Next is the flag of the CONFEDERATION OF VENERIAN REPUBLICS. Also known as the “KVR” (from Конфедерация Венерианских Республик or “Konfederatsiya Venerianskikh Respublik”), “Soviet Venus” was founded in 1981, and was historically the largest polity on the Yellow Planet, prior to the planet’s formal unification in the 2050’s. When the USSR underwent its New Union Reforms in the 1990’s and transitioned from communism to a mixed-market social democratic system (going from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics), the KVR more or less followed the same trajectory, though the realities of life on Venus meant that even as the KVR opened up to said reforms, degrees of authoritarianism and central planning remained in place. So while the KVR remains in free association with the USSR in 1999, the population has been growing with the arrival of newcomers nostalgic for the “good old days”. Some find what they’re looking for, but most end up getting stuck there, after realizing too late that Venus isn’t just “Earth but hot and high up”.

The flag’s general design is meant to evoke the imagery of the original Soviet flag, but with the hammer and sickle replaced with a white image of Venera-4 (the first manmade object to orbit Venus and the first to land on its surface), surrounded by a yellow laurel wreath symbolizing peace, triumph and prosperity. The two dates, 1967 and 1977, commemorate Venera-4 and Niobe-1 (the first manned “landing” on Venus), respectively. The yellow and white stripes are meant to evoke the Venusian sky.

The capital of the KVR, Niobe, was the first settlement on Venus, established in 1977, and has always been the largest settlement on the planet. The other aerostats of the KVR in 1999 include Tereshkova, Leninsk, Gagarin, Tsiolkovsky, Kursk, Kharkov, Potemkin, Balakhany, Yamantatu and Riga.

Up next is the SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF MAUVANG. Consisting of two aerostats, Mauvang-1 and Mauvang-2 (with a third, creatively titled Mauvang-3, under construction), the flag combines the Vietnamese national flag with a nostalgic callback to the flag of the Viet Cong, with a stylized image of a rice plant.

While most of the flags here are fairly conservative in their composition, the REPUBLIC OF SANTAMARIA (a colony in free association with the Republic of Cuba and named after Cuban revolutionary leader Abel Santamaría), went in a rather bold direction. More communist-looking than the actual flag of Cuba, the flag of Santamaria has a gear for industry and a delta symbol for spaceflight, representing the unity of Cuban engineers and Cuban scientists on Venus. While Cuba itself transitioned from communist authoritarianism to multi-party social democracy in the early 90’s, Santamaria still has a decent number of old school commies running the show, and occasionally talks about seceding. But then they get the latest episode of Seinfeld beamed from Earth, and that keeps them placated for a few weeks.

Next, we have the flag of the CZECHOSLOVAK REPUBLIC OF NOVY USVIT, a colony formerly associated with the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, but now associated with the reformed Federation of Czechoslovakia back on Earth. While it might look a bit too much like its host nation’s flag, the symbolism of the flag of Novy Usvit (Czech and Slovak for “New Dawn”) in a way harkens back to the story of the Czechoslovak flag. The first flag adopted by Czechoslovakia in 1918 was a simple red-white bicolor, identical to the flag of Poland. A blue triangle was added to differentiate it from the Polish flag in 1920. For Novy Usvit, the blue is replaced with yellow. Because Earth is the Blue Planet and Venus is the Yellow Planet. The blue star with the Czechoslovak lion symbolizes the Czechoslovak proletariat conquering the vicious Yellow Planet for all the people of the Blue Planet.

Pretty badass for a small landlocked country you can’t point to on a map, huh? Czechoslovakia doesn’t get nearly enough love in science-fiction.

Novy Usvit consists of two colonies - Novy Usvit itself, and Ceslav.

Next up is the REPUBLIC OF ÎNFLORIRE, a colony in free association with the Federal Republic of Romania and Moldova. Despite the rather tenuous relationship between the USSR and Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania, Romania was able to participate in the Interkosmos colonization of Venus. The flag of Înflorire borrows the colors of the Romanian flag, and features a variant of the communist-era Romanian coat of arms. Instead of forest, mountains and an oil derrick, the CoA of Înflorire depicts two airships and an aerostat colony above the sulfuric yellow clouds of Venus; the aerostat colony depicted on the seal is in fact Înflorire itself. While communism is gone on Înflorire, evidence of Ceaușescu’s old cult of personality persists on the aerostat in the form of fading murals and the occasional old propaganda poster, obscured by adverts for the Nintendo 64 or Coca Cola. While the republic consists only of the single aerostat (actually three, lashed together into one colony), the overcrowding of Înflorire itself has prompted the construction of another colony, named Geneză, which is being built with considerable Japanese investment and is expected to fill up with Romanians from Înflorire as well as Moldovans arriving from Earth.

The REPUBLIC OF NADEZDA (“Hope” in Bulgarian) is a colony in free association with the Republic of Bulgaria (formerly the People’s Republic of Bulgaria), and its flag follows the Romanian school of design to a certain extent. The flag features the communist-era seal of the bygone People’s Republic in the upper left-hand corner, and the white-green-red colors of the Bulgarian national tricolor. The golden bands flanking the green stripe are meant to symbolize the amber haze of Venus. Admittedly, not the most inventive design, but it’s sufficiently different from the regular Bulgarian flag for everyone involved.

Oh boy. The NEUDRESDEN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC. So, this will take some explaining. East Germany, as the strongest Warsaw Pact economy, was able to build a rather ambitious colonial space empire, beginning with the rotating Von Braun-type Friedrich Engels Station in Earth orbit, and the Ruhe-1 and Ruhe-2 bases on Luna. However, East German ambitions got really crazy around Venus, with the eponymous Neudresden Station, a Von Braun-type habitat in orbit above the Yellow Planet, as well as two colonies on Venus’ moon, Neith (the dome-colonies of Thälmann and Müntzer), and four in the skies of the Yellow Planet herself (the airborne colonies of Wolke 7, Neuchemnitz, Humboldt-Stadt, Dämmerung and Ulbricht), which made the GDR/NDR the second-biggest colonizer of Venus besides the Soviet Union itself.

Because the NDR held so much propaganda value to the East German regime, colonists were often selected based on how loyal they were to the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). So when reunification came in 1989, a large number of diehard SED partisans in the NDR weren’t having any of it, and Neudresden became the first offworld polity to ever completely secede from the Earth. Obviously, in 1989, nobody (least of all Germany) was going to dispatch troops to go quell the Neudresdeners, so this secession more or less happened without a hitch, though the KVR did tell them to chill out, and war did nearly break out between the KVR and NDR over a miscommunication. For a while, there was a trend of Hollywood action movies in the early 90’s with East German terrorists from Venus as the bad guys. In 1997, Neudresden ceased claiming to be the sole legitimate government of Germany, and came to terms with being a purely-Venusian polity, as well as reforming and moderating its policies, though as of 1999, Neudresden is still something of a time capsule of the former East German regime, which is why many Ostalgie-stricken Germans from the former GDR have opted to immigrate to Venus.

Oh, also, the NDR’s flag is basically just a modified version of the old GDR’s flag. Not much to say, really.

And finally, Polan can into space, indeed. The REPUBLIC OF HEVELIA (named after the 17th century Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius) is a self-governing autonomous colony in the Venusian atmosphere, freely associated with the Republic of Poland back on Earth. The flag follows the pattern set by the Polish lunar colony of Księżyca, and consists of a white ensign with the coat of arms of the Polish People’s Republic in the upper left-hand corner, and red laurels in the white field; unlike Księżyca, which has a red crescent moon in the laurels, this flag uses the classical symbol for Venus.

Description

Alright, so here are some historical flags of Venus, from the futuristic year of 1999.

In the year 2285, Venus has been terraformed into a tropical world of deserts, grasslands and rainforests, vast oceans, resurrected dinosaurs and a crescent-shaped sun.

But Venus in 1999, was, in a word, not a nice place to live. The atmosphere was composed almost entirely of CO2, and the pressure was high enough at ground level that it could be more closely compared to the ocean at the bottom of the Marianas Trench than the air on Earth. While you might be familiar with the acidic rain on Venus, you might not be aware that Venus back then was so damn hot, the acid rain evaporated miles above the ground.

With the exception of some unmanned probes being sent to the surface on survey missions, human activity on Venus in 1999 was restricted to the upper atmosphere, where temperature and air pressure were more amenable to human life. Here, Teflon-coated aerostats were able to float comfortably, using room-temperature oxygen as a lifting gas. As of 1999, the “Yellow Planet” has a population of around 7.5 million people (excluding its moon, Neith, which is a very different story), who entirely in the sky.

Due to the logistics of interplanetary colonization (communication lags in particular, and the long travel times to a slightly lesser extent), it became apparent very early on that the American/Japanese-led ventures on Mars, and the Soviet-led ventures on Venus, would require colonies that were self-sufficient and politically-autonomous from day one. Hence, systems of free association was established, whereby colonies basically became countries unto themselves, with ties to their motherland back on Earth mostly in legal and political, rather than physical (or even economic) terms.

Now, without further ado, time for some plump, juicy lore regarding these here wind-flappies:

First up is the flag of the VENUSIAN COUNCIL. Founded in 1986 as a sort of United Nations for the colonial polities of Venus, the VS (Venerianskiy Sovet) flag’s symbolism combines a modified version of the Interkosmos logo with the traditional symbol for Venus, and two hands shaking, on the white field of peace.

Interkosmos was a Soviet-led program to assist its communist bloc allies in putting people into space and get them into the Space Race. In Overheaven’s timeline, Interkosmos (much like everything else having to do with space) gets fairly steroidal, as a reaction to the capitalist Space Boom, which began in the late 70’s and roared loudest in the 80’s. Through Interkosmos, the USSR made it possible for the majority of the non-Soviet colonies on Venus to be established at all. Hence, the Interkosmos logo was widely viewed as a symbol of proletarian solidarity on Venus, which, given that really only communist bloc countries were colonizing Venus in the 80’s, made sense for it to be incorporated into the Council's symbolism when the flag was made.

As a sort of “meta” note, the hand-shaking motif is meant to be a callback to the old Warsaw Pact logo.

Next is the flag of the CONFEDERATION OF VENERIAN REPUBLICS. Also known as the “KVR” (from Конфедерация Венерианских Республик or “Konfederatsiya Venerianskikh Respublik”), “Soviet Venus” was founded in 1981, and was historically the largest polity on the Yellow Planet, prior to the planet’s formal unification in the 2050’s. When the USSR underwent its New Union Reforms in the 1990’s and transitioned from communism to a mixed-market social democratic system (going from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics), the KVR more or less followed the same trajectory, though the realities of life on Venus meant that even as the KVR opened up to said reforms, degrees of authoritarianism and central planning remained in place. So while the KVR remains in free association with the USSR in 1999, the population has been growing with the arrival of newcomers nostalgic for the “good old days”. Some find what they’re looking for, but most end up getting stuck there, after realizing too late that Venus isn’t just “Earth but hot and high up”.

The flag’s general design is meant to evoke the imagery of the original Soviet flag, but with the hammer and sickle replaced with a white image of Venera-4 (the first manmade object to orbit Venus and the first to land on its surface), surrounded by a yellow laurel wreath symbolizing peace, triumph and prosperity. The two dates, 1967 and 1977, commemorate Venera-4 and Niobe-1 (the first manned “landing” on Venus), respectively. The yellow and white stripes are meant to evoke the Venusian sky.

The capital of the KVR, Niobe, was the first settlement on Venus, established in 1977, and has always been the largest settlement on the planet. The other aerostats of the KVR in 1999 include Tereshkova, Leninsk, Gagarin, Tsiolkovsky, Kursk, Kharkov, Potemkin, Balakhany, Yamantatu and Riga.

Up next is the SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF MAUVANG. Consisting of two aerostats, Mauvang-1 and Mauvang-2 (with a third, creatively titled Mauvang-3, under construction), the flag combines the Vietnamese national flag with a nostalgic callback to the flag of the Viet Cong, with a stylized image of a rice plant.

While most of the flags here are fairly conservative in their composition, the REPUBLIC OF SANTAMARIA (a colony in free association with the Republic of Cuba and named after Cuban revolutionary leader Abel Santamaría), went in a rather bold direction. More communist-looking than the actual flag of Cuba, the flag of Santamaria has a gear for industry and a delta symbol for spaceflight, representing the unity of Cuban engineers and Cuban scientists on Venus. While Cuba itself transitioned from communist authoritarianism to multi-party social democracy in the early 90’s, Santamaria still has a decent number of old school commies running the show, and occasionally talks about seceding. But then they get the latest episode of Seinfeld beamed from Earth, and that keeps them placated for a few weeks.

Next, we have the flag of the CZECHOSLOVAK REPUBLIC OF NOVY USVIT, a colony formerly associated with the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, but now associated with the reformed Federation of Czechoslovakia back on Earth. While it might look a bit too much like its host nation’s flag, the symbolism of the flag of Novy Usvit (Czech and Slovak for “New Dawn”) in a way harkens back to the story of the Czechoslovak flag. The first flag adopted by Czechoslovakia in 1918 was a simple red-white bicolor, identical to the flag of Poland. A blue triangle was added to differentiate it from the Polish flag in 1920. For Novy Usvit, the blue is replaced with yellow. Because Earth is the Blue Planet and Venus is the Yellow Planet. The blue star with the Czechoslovak lion symbolizes the Czechoslovak proletariat conquering the vicious Yellow Planet for all the people of the Blue Planet.

Pretty badass for a small landlocked country you can’t point to on a map, huh? Czechoslovakia doesn’t get nearly enough love in science-fiction.

Novy Usvit consists of two colonies - Novy Usvit itself, and Ceslav.

Next up is the REPUBLIC OF ÎNFLORIRE, a colony in free association with the Federal Republic of Romania and Moldova. Despite the rather tenuous relationship between the USSR and Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania, Romania was able to participate in the Interkosmos colonization of Venus. The flag of Înflorire borrows the colors of the Romanian flag, and features a variant of the communist-era Romanian coat of arms. Instead of forest, mountains and an oil derrick, the CoA of Înflorire depicts two airships and an aerostat colony above the sulfuric yellow clouds of Venus; the aerostat colony depicted on the seal is in fact Înflorire itself. While communism is gone on Înflorire, evidence of Ceaușescu’s old cult of personality persists on the aerostat in the form of fading murals and the occasional old propaganda poster, obscured by adverts for the Nintendo 64 or Coca Cola. While the republic consists only of the single aerostat (actually three, lashed together into one colony), the overcrowding of Înflorire itself has prompted the construction of another colony, named Geneză, which is being built with considerable Japanese investment and is expected to fill up with Romanians from Înflorire as well as Moldovans arriving from Earth.

The REPUBLIC OF NADEZDA (“Hope” in Bulgarian) is a colony in free association with the Republic of Bulgaria (formerly the People’s Republic of Bulgaria), and its flag follows the Romanian school of design to a certain extent. The flag features the communist-era seal of the bygone People’s Republic in the upper left-hand corner, and the white-green-red colors of the Bulgarian national tricolor. The golden bands flanking the green stripe are meant to symbolize the amber haze of Venus. Admittedly, not the most inventive design, but it’s sufficiently different from the regular Bulgarian flag for everyone involved.

Oh boy. The NEUDRESDEN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC. So, this will take some explaining. East Germany, as the strongest Warsaw Pact economy, was able to build a rather ambitious colonial space empire, beginning with the rotating Von Braun-type Friedrich Engels Station in Earth orbit, and the Ruhe-1 and Ruhe-2 bases on Luna. However, East German ambitions got really crazy around Venus, with the eponymous Neudresden Station, a Von Braun-type habitat in orbit above the Yellow Planet, as well as two colonies on Venus’ moon, Neith (the dome-colonies of Thälmann and Müntzer), and four in the skies of the Yellow Planet herself (the airborne colonies of Wolke 7, Neuchemnitz, Humboldt-Stadt, Dämmerung and Ulbricht), which made the GDR/NDR the second-biggest colonizer of Venus besides the Soviet Union itself.

Because the NDR held so much propaganda value to the East German regime, colonists were often selected based on how loyal they were to the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). So when reunification came in 1989, a large number of diehard SED partisans in the NDR weren’t having any of it, and Neudresden became the first offworld polity to ever completely secede from the Earth. Obviously, in 1989, nobody (least of all Germany) was going to dispatch troops to go quell the Neudresdeners, so this secession more or less happened without a hitch, though the KVR did tell them to chill out, and war did nearly break out between the KVR and NDR over a miscommunication. For a while, there was a trend of Hollywood action movies in the early 90’s with East German terrorists from Venus as the bad guys. In 1997, Neudresden ceased claiming to be the sole legitimate government of Germany, and came to terms with being a purely-Venusian polity, as well as reforming and moderating its policies, though as of 1999, Neudresden is still something of a time capsule of the former East German regime, which is why many Ostalgie-stricken Germans from the former GDR have opted to immigrate to Venus.

Oh, also, the NDR’s flag is basically just a modified version of the old GDR’s flag. Not much to say, really.

And finally, Polan can into space, indeed. The REPUBLIC OF HEVELIA (named after the 17th century Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius) is a self-governing autonomous colony in the Venusian atmosphere, freely associated with the Republic of Poland back on Earth. The flag follows the pattern set by the Polish lunar colony of Księżyca, and consists of a white ensign with the coat of arms of the Polish People’s Republic in the upper left-hand corner, and red laurels in the white field; unlike Księżyca, which has a red crescent moon in the laurels, this flag uses the classical symbol for Venus.