Starport Frequency

[Diveguy]

Family convo tonight based on local observations, leading to a Traveller correspondence.

Even for Starport classes there might be some differences in traffic. which influence EVERYTHING downstream.

1-2 - Major spaceport, near-constant traffic, ships landing/launching are just a thing.

3-4 - Active but scaled. "Wow, it's mostly just in-system or orbital stuff here. That T-990 Dragonfly looks cool!"

5-6 - All traffic is awesome. "Yeah, we sometimes sit here all day without seeing anything. But any time we do I love it - that's a ship that came all the way from outer space!"

 

[kilemall]

Family convo tonight based on local observations, leading to a Traveller correspondence.

Even for Starport classes there might be some differences in traffic. which influence EVERYTHING downstream.

1-2 - Major spaceport, near-constant traffic, ships landing/launching are just a thing.

3-4 - Active but scaled. "Wow, it's mostly just in-system or orbital stuff here. That T-990 Dragonfly looks cool!"

5-6 - All traffic is awesome. "Yeah, we sometimes sit here all day without seeing anything. But any time we do I love it - that's a ship that came all the way from outer space!"

Range it 2-12, modify per starport type and pop.

2-4 low
5-9 scaled
10-12 high

Pop-7= DM
Starport A +3
Starport B +2
Starport C 0
Starport D -1
Starport E -2
Starport X -4
TL 7 or lower -2


For more refined results, probably separate system traffic and interstellar.

Xboat/trade routes, local trade codes/starport and pop/starport of nearby systems affect interstellar and asteroid/local pop/ind-poor-rich trade codes affecting local.

 

[Badenov]

So, I betray my background when my first thoughts on 'Starport Frequency' is it ought to be locally assigned in-system since there's no real way it could interfere outside the system (they're only a year or so apart time delay-wise, but spacially, the signals should have completely dissipated), but that all stations would monitor 121.5MHz for emergencies. Then I read the thread and realized as usual I had missed the point entirely.

 

[coliver988]

GURPS Starports calculated traffic based on economics, using world trade numbers and nearby systems. It reflects a much busier, Star Wars style of Traveller universe in my eyes, big ship vs small ship TU.

You used WTN (World Trade Number, based on [trying to remember even though the book is right behind me] population, tech maybe government) as a base, but then used BTN (Between? Trade number, for neighboring worlds) to figure out just how much tonnage was going through the port, and based on that you could calculate the number of ships daily, weekly & yearly.

20+ years ago, when I first got laid off, I wrote a windows program that actually took all that into account. decades later I am still playing with silly things like that even though there are much better applications on the web or spreadsheets doing that. My blog has that history from way back.

edit: and like Badenov, I thought the post was going to be the distribution of starports. Radio frequency did not enter my mind.