I have not watched much Star Trek outside of TOS when I was a kid (in reruns, but not that old yet), then a somewhat irregular scattering of the movies. I kind of bounced off TNG, and then by the time I started hearing some of the series were pretty good I felt like there was way too much to catch up on. I've seen some of the reboot-ish movies, but recently I've heard enough praise for Strange New Worlds and, this is key, a lot of "it's a prequel, you don't have to be up to date on everything!" so we have started watching it. (It turns out some of what happens is apparently referring to Discovery, so I feel slightly misled, but whatever.)
Anyway.
One of the earliest episodes refers to a "warp bomb": somehow (the details are vague) using warp technology to blow things up real good. Maybe that's actually what happened on Kythela? Cycling the jump drive in proximity to a station or planet is a Bad Thing in Traveller, and it's something I'm definitely keeping. Got to have an excuse to fly around in realspace, after all.
Interplanetary food trucks
What if, instead of orbitals, there were starships around jump points? Just a sort of ad-hoc arrangement of restaurants/shops/hotels? Not sure how practical this is if no one has to actually stop-stop at every system. Or maybe it's just a truck-stop sort of situation: big hauler pops in, and like forty-seven tenders go "heyyyyy, wouldn't some fresh fruits/vegetables be great?"
On the flip side: food trucks. Restaurant-starships, that hop from system to system, moving on when the novelty wears off. I figure they'd probably land, most of the time; they'd have to be of a size that they could park outside a starport area. Maybe bounce from city to city until they've worn out their welcome. They'd bring some supplies with them, but would also have locally-influenced menus that were different on each world, so there would be money in providing "restaurant tours" that followed favorites around so groupies could try different menus.
Interstellar governments
I guess the question, for Kythela, comes down to "who has authority to permit a station?" Within actual Inukari Union borders, that would be the commonwealth government (probably at the regional level). Worlds are self-governing, but the starports, both orbital and downport, are the equivalent of federal land. But the Ring is more loosely-affiliated, almost a condominium, especially as far out as Kythela, so I think the planetary government runs air/space traffic control and therefore rules on what gets to be in orbit.
That gets interesting when there's only three or four digits of population, and it's nominally a democracy. Nobody wants to start a real fight over it (especially the Zhdez, who prefer love-bombing), but ope, just gonna scooch a few hundred more of our kind of voter in here.
(Of course, if my fiction-so-far is canon, then somebody actually wanted to start a fight, by blowing up a station. Probably. I'm pantsing it, so maybe the station was collateral damage, or it was an accident.)
Close-up on 1921
Kythela 1921 is a "rest stop" on the route between Sundtia and the rest of Bertania Cluster: a low-population planet with little traffic of its own, but a necessary waypoint for the jump-2 freighters that service the Cluster.
Upper Kythela was an outdated orbital station: a rotating wheel providing Coriolis "gravity." Wheel stations are poorly suited for cargo transfer, but Kythela has minimal local cargo. This is fortunate, since the wheel suffered a catastrophic failure - a docked starship overloaded its power plant and the resulting explosion severed the wheel.
Upper Kythela is now a sort of ghost station: scheduled ships still pause there, but there is nothing for their crews to disembark for. Most don't stay long enough for a trip to the downport.
Kythela is undergoing a sort of revival: before the disaster, the orbital held most of the population, a mere thousand or so people. Post-disaster, rather than live on the underdeveloped planet, most of the station-dwellers moved to either Sundtia or Therbings. Seeing an opportunity to inexpensively sway the electorate, both Zhdez and Inukari provided incentives to move to Kythela for rebuilding. The first wave was blue-collar construction and trade workers, the second wave was artists.
Anyone who could plausibly claim any relevant skill whatsoever came to Kythela for the basic income. Thanks to the electorate-packing, there were more construction and tradesfolk than could be actually put to work, so enterprising artists took the stipend, didn't bother fighting for the few jobs, and instead treated it as a residency. Kythela Down has become an art colony, and while it's not large enough of a destination for passenger liners to make a week-long stop, most now offer at least one shuttle to the downport on each direction of their run.
The complication of this, for the sponsors, is that the artists don't have any ideological loyalty to either faction, and in fact are quickly unifying under Kythelan autonomy. An orbital will reduce tourism, in their view, and a military-coded shipyard will be bad for the vibe. The stipends are going more to actual construction workers, often Gvazd, since the "rebuilding" has turned into a legitimate construction boom: housing, hotels, galleries, and concert halls. The artists are finding it possible to make a living, albeit with the usual issues of gentrification and "selling out."
Border relations
Okay, I've thought more about Kythela's position and oh hey, that's right up next to the Gvazda/Vargr corridor, which is more Zhdez/Zhodani than Inukari/Vilani.
I think the station might have been Zhdez-built, though that section of the Ring is more or less Inukari-allied now, at least up to Sundtia. Antigrav was a technology they didn't want to give to the Gvazda, so they built a wheel.
It's probably the border situation that's going to get a shiny new highport built, or perhaps some competing ones. Zhdez are going the hearts-and-minds route, so they'll want to build it (as a Sundtia-based shipping company they own, generously making it a public station instead of a company base). Inukari want to go the military route, if J-4 drive is ever commercially possible (it's always just on the horizon), Kythela will be much more strategically placed.
Sand alleys
When we moved to Wichita from the big city, we were somewhat boggled by the presence of what people called "sand alleys" - unpaved roads in the middle of town. Technically not unpaved, I think: but rather than repaving, sometimes they poured sand. (Which works its way out of potholes, for the record.) They were never major roads, but still. Right in the middle of town!
Anyway, I'm running into this: backwater worlds in between higher-population ones.
Kythela 1921 is a Type D starport on The Ring, but it's a necessary stop between Therbings (J-2) and Sundtia (J-1) for jump-2 ships, which presumably do most of the traffic within that six-system cluster. J-3 ships travelling the larger Ring will probably skip it altogether.
It's not absolutely vital that there be services, given that ships don't have to refuel and really could just double-jump, but it does feel like there should be a station (even on a double-jump you might want to hop off and decompress a little, even if only for a few hours). So that was where I placed the aforementioned doomed wheel station.
But what happens when that station goes away? It's a backwater world, or the station would have been replaced already - they can't really afford to just up and build another one. Who built the first one, and when (clearly before agrav, or at least before the power to run it was readily available)?
Antigravity
I'm going to let the fuel question percolate for awhile. Meanwhile: antigravity.
If I expect to borrow Traveller starships, it's a given since none of them, or almost none, are set up for thrust-based "gravity" (e.g. "stack of tuna cans" deck layouts). This makes sense since jump isn't really thrust-based in Trav.
Technically it is for me, which is something to contemplate: why would you set up a ship so that your antigrav is always having to compensate for thrust at ninety degrees? Maybe a larger ship, that never lands on a planet and also has a larger cross-section, does align agrav with direction of travel. But if you're sitting on a planet for half(ish) your ship time, I guess airplane-like orientation makes more sense. If agrav can compensate for inertia, you don't have variable gravity as your acceleration changes.
I'm figuring antigravity is somewhat flexible. I've been noodling around with a little fiction writing in the gameworld, and one of the things that happens (spoiler!) is a wheel station catastrophic failure. With the loss of Coriolis force the wheel is in freefall, but a ship is capable of extending the gravity field far enough into the area around its lock to pull floating people toward it.
It is, though, an advantage tuna-can ships have, in that if they're docked nose-in to a station you just take an elevator down, whereas an airplane-type ship has a 90-degree gravity change in/around that airlock. So even if it doesn't have to adjust the pressure when docked to a pressurized station, it's going to have to "swivel" the gravity. Awkward.
