On Sun, 23 Aug 2020 00:04:32 -0400, xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote to Freelance
Traveller:

>Question:
>Jeff, is the choice to go to numerics for Spaceports and retain alphabetics
>for Starports a conscious choice to give an immediate queue to what on is
>dealing with? Or was there another reason to change Spaceport codes to
>numerics?

That depends on how you want to define 'spaceport' rather than 'starport'.
You'll note that the numeric codes are for what I called "secondary
starports". I would consider the difference between "starport" and
"spaceport" to be that a "starport" can handle interstellar traffic
directly; a "spaceport" only handles in-system traffic. The difference
between the "primary" starport and a "secondary" starport would generally
be the traffic levels.

>I'd looked at your stuff on Starports before and found it interesting, but
>I didn't give it the depth of focus to really see how it would look over a
>diverse array of systems one might want to model.
>
>The requirement to have ship repair and ship building (and that jump ship
>building only happens at an A type starport) is kind of senseless since it
>is unlikely that any emergent culture might want to build their own jump
>ships but don't have an A class facility... so they just 'Ah, until we can
>afford the A class port, we can't build any local ships folks... SPA rules.
>Sorry.'?

I happen to agree, and were I designing the UWP from scratch, I would
separate out "port" from "yards" - and I would separate out "repair yards"
from "construction yards". However, for this particular thread, I stayed
with the standard, which includes a yard, because that's how it was written
and kept since 1977.