TBH I use both ground side and orbital for most. When you are a outfitting a colony, you get a “starport in a box”… well a few boxes. It’s 20 1dTon standard shipping crates. 10 of them are used to build the starport (offices, ground bases sensors and beacon, and other sundries) and 10 that are each 2 1/2 DTon sensor, commo and weather sats.
No good colony will be with out one!
Of course most of the megacorps build their own with their own spin.
For example, InstellArms’s version is normally deployed in more… rough… areas. Frontier, areas with pirates, etc. It has various upgrades to harden the colony.
On 23Jan2018 1337, Catherine Berry wrote:I'm quite sure that in most TUs you can buy or lease a "Traffic Control
in a Can" solution -- a packaged set of sensors, comm gear, and so
forth, probably just about filling a standard shipping container. Unpack
the components, attach the cables, install the antennas, hook it up to a
generator, run the setup wizard software, and you have basic airspace
and near orbital monitoring and management above the site. The automated
traffic management system would be adequate to keep a moderate volume of
traffic safely separated in flight, guide ships to appropriate landing
and berthing positions, and so forth.
Being a rather specialized need, there are probably only one or two
vendors offering these in any particular region. So looking around after
landing at a bare-bedrock port and seeing the familiar antenna gantry
design of a GsbAg standard low-end traffic control kit would immediately
tell an experienced spacer a lot about the world she'd just landed on.
I have it as a cutter module. For shipping the satellites (assuming you bought the orbital sensor option) would be just packed inside the module for shipping, along with the other exterior fittings (radio masts, radars, etc.). Once at the destination the stuff is unpacked and the module parked somewhere handy and set up. Inside it has a traffic control room, office space for the port master, some storage space for parts and records, accumulators and possibly a small fusion plant, and all the other stuff needed for a small space port's sensors and traffic control.Same idea, slightly different packaging.-- Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief-----The Traveller Mailing ListArchives at http://archives.simplelists.com/tmlReport problems to xxxxxx@simplelists.comTo unsubscribe from this list please go to http://www.simplelists.com/confirm.php?u=g8EYmpjfNu22Uwq2slNgbtlSYHMIUXYZ