Spacecraft Parking

[rgrove0172]

How do you guys visualize the orbit about a busy industrial planet like King? Are there "parking orbits" centered around the moon's Lagrange points? Do the ships occupy a given orbit until cleared to approach a station for cargo onloading/offloading? Do they stay distant and smaller shuttle perform the operations?

Whats your view?

 

[BMonnery]

King is industrial?

The American Arm is essentially:

King - resource extraction
Ellis - agriculture
Hermes - industry

To feed King (which has no agriculture at all and would starve without it) a large freighter needs to leave Ellis about once every 10 days.

Levels of 1 ton of food a year per person are about right. To put this in context 2300 UK needs 4 large freighters (Anjou size) arriving per day to feed itself, and hence (after home production) about 250 freighters plying up and down to feed the UK.

The real issue is getting it up the gravity well. On the order of MLv68 was spent getting each shipment to orbit for the starship by catapult. This points out one absurdity of 2300ad. We need cheaper interface transport.

 

[rgrove0172]

I was referring to the mining facilities, refineries or what have you. Admittedly more "resource extraction" as you say but my question stands.

 

[McPerth]

I imagine various facilities in Earth orbit. Aside from the space station IIRC in L5, there would be The space terminal of the beanstalk, OQC's facilities, other national space stations (each whit its own OQC office), factories, powersats...

In 2300, most ships are not streamlind, so there have to be orbital stations for the ships to load/unload cargoes and as storage for those same cargoes waiting for download or to be loaded to a ship.

The real issue is getting it up the gravity well. On the order of MLv68 was spent getting each shipment to orbit for the starship by catapult. This points out one absurdity of 2300ad. We need cheaper interface transport.

Excuse me, perhaps it's obvous to you, but where are those costs listed in 2300?

 

[whartung]

From the sounds of things, it looks like we're not talking about a particularly crowded sky here. Perhaps, at most, "dozens" of ships, if even that.

Quoting HHG -

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

So, I think that SW ships would go in to an established orbit where they can discharge their drives, and they'll just sit there. Since, outside of using SW, the cost of moving through the gravity well (from upper to lower orbits and back) is still expensive, I think the star ships would delegate those task to "local" traffic rather than move their own ships.

Simply, as rule, I think everyone would "park" as soon as they can and then move as little as possible beyond station keeping. If they need to dock to some orbital structure, then obviously they'll move over when called, other than that the locals can come to them. They're smaller, nimbler, and respectively cost less to fly around than the larger ships.

 

[rgrove0172]

Excuse me, perhaps it's obvous to you, but where are those costs listed in 2300?

MgT2300AD - Page 267