> how you would launch rockets from a balloon city without disturbing the equilibrium of the balloon city because it is assumed that rocks thrusting down with great force would damage the balloon city in a way it would not easily recuperate from

It's a floating platform. Same as the ones SpaceX lands its rockets on. Same as a gunboat firing projectiles.

Will a launching rocket impart force to the platform? Yes. But unless the platform is super weirdly balanced, or the rocket absurdly oversized for the platform, it will stabilise after rocking a bit. (You'd have to design the platform to be stable in winds, anyway.)

And if you do have an absurdly oversided rocket, you don't launch it from your platform. You float it off to the side on a dedicated launch "boat" and have it ditch its floaty as an ultra-early first stage.

>It's a floating platform. Same as the ones SpaceX lands its rockets on. Same as a gunboat firing projectiles.

It's a great comparison that helps me understand it a bit. In many respects, Venus's atmosphere is as heavy as an ocean. That said, I can still see how if you're talking about the upper atmosphere with pressure similar to what you would have on Earth, the force necessary to do a straight vertical takeoff imparted against a platform seems like it could cause problems.

But it might just be the Archimedes thing of "give me a prop large enough and deliver long enough and I can move the world" applied to atmospheric dynamics, e.g. enough buoyancy and you're good to go. I just don't know how much is "enough" when you're talking about Venus and if that runs into prohibitive engineering complexity that makes it different from our familiar Earth examples.

Not saying it can't be done but I think that one question at least, was reasonable.

>And if you do have an absurdly oversided rocket, you don't launch it from your platform. You float it off to the side on a dedicated launch "boat" and have it ditch its floaty as an ultra-early first stage.

The ww2 german "v2 in a tube towed by a U-boat so it can get closer to its target" project being a decent conceptual example of this.

No need for a launch boat. Just light the fuse and eject it from your balloon. Think subsurface missle launch by an Ohio-class sub.