Transports

The situation Brian describes has a good raison d'etre.

We have:
Core worlds: Beanstalks, large orbital complexes (container ports),
and shuttles and streamlined ship landing areas (oceans and pads),
vast traffic and quarantine net, vast customs patrol
Inner Colonies: large orbital complexes (container ports), and
shuttles and streamlined ship landing areas (oceans and pads). large
traffic net, quarantine, and fair sized customs patrol
Outer Colonies: bigger ones have a small orbital complex to repackage,
shuttles, streamlined ship landing, customs patrols, some quarantine
Outposts, Far Colonies: no orbital complex. Maybe no shuttles. Landing
for streamlined ships, not much of a traffic net and probably no
customs to speak off except on-planet ones, no quarantine to speak of

What does this mean:
If I ship a large shipment from WhoMe Ltd. on Terra to five different
destinations in the known space region, they all go up the beanstalk
together to the container port. They are put in one large container
and attached to a container ship. They go economically to the nearest
big port by FTL, and are split out into smaller pallets loaded on
smaller freighters. Lets say one is landed here by shuttle (no
beanstalk). The other four are taken, 3 to small outer colonies that
have small Highports which do customs inspections and repackage the
shipments into smaller chunks for their local shuttles. The last goes
by Free Trader to a far outpost which has only got an automatic
landing beacon, and no customs.

This justifies how the inner system is the economic powerhouse, how it
is more efficient (less repackaging, better sky to surface and surface
to sky costs), and why things on the rim come in small lots and cost a
bunch of dough. And why on the rim you hit small freighters whereas in
the core you hit huge containerships. And, correspondingly, why the
UNSC controls the core :)

Thomas Barclay
Software UberMensch
xwave solutions
(613) 831-2018 x 3008