Fritz wrote:
especially because there isn't something like beaming in Oolite. So how do you get there?
Like I said : take a taxi out to the shipyard from the offices on the space station.
There's no "beaming".
That's no problem.
Do you seriously think that the hanger decks are going to be tight to vacuum, behind doors big enough to admit an Anaconda? Have you ever tried to seal anything that wasn't circular against pressure or vacuum. No? I didn't think so.
Even if there are multiple layers of doors, there's still going to be the possibility of leaks to kill your expensivly pampered passengers as they board. Or even worse, your own laser-scarred hide. Even if there were another system for sealing the doors, there would be some sort of pressurised access tube for life forms, if not for cargo containers. And once you look at that, you're looking at a restricted number of standardised sizes, in the same way that you get 97 Octane Unleaded Qurium in one pipe fitting, and QuriumGas (from the fields of Qurait?) through a different size of pipe.
So, any ship for carrying people will have at least a 1-human pressure tube (2.5m diameter ; semi-automated locks and latches ; contains communications links in the locking mechanisms. Larger ships may have wider or more crew tubes. Taxis will need them too, precisely to enable personnel transfer to ships that don't want to pay the station's docking fee just to drop off a passenger.
Hmmm, GalCop would probably frown on links that you could establish between two ships in free space to allow the ready transfer of goods, without passing the eyes of the Tax Department.
That would imply a number of items of equipment, and a whole sub-economy.
On a different note - I detect a lot of CJ Cherryh's "Union" etc interstellar economy in the Ooniverse. I don't recall seeing that discussed in any of the history of the game development, but does anyone else see that?