On Tue, 22 Nov 2022 11:46:00 +1030, Jonathon Dyer wrote:

>You may be conflating the Starport with the Startown (which may or may not
>exist at all, except notionally, depending on the particular world's
>politics, prevailing morality, and law-enforcement appetite).

>I think, based on our airports, anything available within a starport would
>be about two-and-a-half times the price it would cost outside the gates,
>and the choice would be limited to products with popular appeal ("Starport
>novels, anyone?).

Airports and seaports on Earth are really not good matches for starports;
the key is that in Traveller, a world - at least within the Imperium, and
given its history, probably within the Solomani Confederation as well -
cedes a chunk of land to the interstellar polity. That makes it no longer
part of the world, in a legal sense (extraterritoriality), and if the area
ceded is actually larger than the starport proper requires, the development
of a startown within the cession isn't unreasonable, especially on worlds
that are 'choke points' for trade routes, where in order to get from *A* to
*B*, you must stop at *C* for various and sundry reasons.

On Earth, with airports and seaports that are ports-of-entry, there's an
area that, _by courtesy_, is considered to be "outside" the customs
barrier, to allow for connecting services - but legally, as soon as it's
physically possible for passengers to leave the plane/ship and set foot on
legally recognized territory of the polity, they're within the polity and
subject to its laws and regulations. That's why customs can come aboard a
docked ship to inspect before the passengers are _allowed_ to debark.

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