Originally posted by atpollard:
As a suggestion to why:
The average citizen spends most of his life living below sea level in spaces that resemble a shopping mall. They work in submersibles, tending plankton and schools of fish. They swim with advanced scuba equipment. The starport is the cathedral of this community. It is the ultimate expression of their collective identity.
Every citizen can still remember the first time that they visited the port. They remember the change in sound as the lift passed the water line and they heard wind against the outer hull instead of the steady flow of water. Words cannot express the first glimpse of the sky. All of the pictures in the world cannot prepare you for the first time you see it. They never imagined that so much space could exist. No outsider could fully understand what this place means to the people who live below it.
Very nice. That conjures some wonderful perspective in the mind's eye.
One thought for lower tech variants, where weather control isn't an option, where materials might not allow such a graceful shape, and where you might not have the ability to cheaply bust or divert a hurricane would be to look to today's oil platforms and look just a wee bit into the future.
Architecturally, this would suggest to me a platform high off the water (or that can adjust its height off the water) to accomodate 50m+ waves (yes, this kind of stuff actually happens at sea). It would also suggest multiple pilars around the outside and possibly some interior, rather than a single support column (less torque on the pads - the current design, if the pads were heavy, would require some serious material design if the big pads were to support heavy starships). Storage locations for starships could be in enclosures beneath the pads, accessed via aircraft-carrier style elevators.
At many water ports, landing ships may have maximum size restrictions (for ones that want to land on port pads). Large enough ships may be forced to free-float (you can run arms for fuel and personel transfer out to them or accomplish this via specialized small craft). Their may thus be floating mooring buoys nearby. They have to be tough enough (they're big enough, anyway) to weather storms independently of the facility although they may be able to send all but essential crew to the facilities in the event of true foul weather, as a precaution.
To some extent, submersion may be an option, but note that ships designed to resist 1 or 2 atmospheres of external pressure or to resist the outward pressure of gasses at 1 atmosphere vs. a vacuum is nowhere near the same thing as designing something to handle 10+ atmospheres of crushing pressure from the outside. Every 33' (on earth, not sure how that changes elswewhere) is an extra atmosphere of pressure.
How deep do you have to go to avoid huge 50m+ wave surges? I assume the effects actually go well below the mean water level (50% of waveheight, as a wild-arse minimum assumption). So if you have 50m waves, you may need to get a minimum of 25m down to be out of the waves, and another <don't know how far> to avoid the turbulence caused by the storm. Let's guess you have to go down at least another 25m in this case. So, 50m at 1 atmosphere every 10m or so. So at least 6 atmospheres pressure your ships have to be able to withstand.
Obviously, cannonically, we know SDBs can do this. I don't know what the relationship between hull armour rating (our only real gauge of str) and the ability to go to depth is. But I doubt an armour 40 free trader or luxury liner could dive too deep. So it might not have the option of ducking storms by diving deep.
Anyway, that's just some extra grist for the mill. For a high tech (say C+) starport, the one in the images is wonderful. I'd give the moon some sort of tinge of blue or something to help visually separate it from the tower's white colour if you're going to have the tower rise in front of it, or give the tower some sort of tinge of colour.