Naturally, when Shampoo returned with her captures there was great excitement and rejoicing among the supply-strapped Jedi Rebels. The best thing, aside from the surge of badly needed factories and equipment, was the incredible value of the depot station itself. There was alot to be said for a central shipping hub for simplifying the increasingly perverse cargo routes the Jedi had been coming up with out of sheer necessity.
Container ships, such as their stolen ones they'd been using for supply transports, were made with the design in mind they could go from transshipment point to transshipment point, and smaller craft would convey the cargo from there. Trade Federation ships were great because they didn't have that dependency and could go anywhere there was a need. But for the moment they had more of the regular container types and having one end of their runs anchored to the type of network they'd been built for saved alot of headaches.
So they chose a likely system, centrally located not just to the areas of space they'd already settled, but to significant expansion still planned, and installed the facility pretty much as it was. With it was the defense platform, but the orbital factories got moved to be where the shipyards were to get the most speedy use out of their products.
Then came the problems of cataloging what they had and organizing it. Both of which required they free up in the overstuffed station significant amounts of open cargo area to do the shuffling.
But how to free up the space?
You get stuff moved out, and the bigger the stuff the better. Lots of small parts had to be filed before they could be used so you knew how many you had. Moving them just compounded problems. So after some thought it was down to the prefab Imperial Garrison Bases, taking up hideous amounts of room and of no value to anyone.
Naga was of a mind to throw them out. But Ranma insisted he wanted to set one up just to see what made it up and how they worked. That was a good experience, picking a world and throwing a base together they learned alot. Then the budding spy corps wanted to do it, and Mansuco's training program started to include base construction so his people would know best how to take them out, and soon they were throwing quite a few together.
Looking at their equipment, suddenly they saw these bases were useful as armed, military spaceports. The AT-AT docking garages were wide and deep and tall enough to get most small and mid-sized commercial starships into for repairs or service or whatever. Perimeter defenses kept local wildlife out, and the bases came with their own sensor towers, space traffic control centers and software, even their own TIE fighter bays, turbolasers and shields.
It'd take an invasion force or an orbital strike to wipe one of those Garrison Bases out. So they were even somewhat secure against low intensity conflicts, granting a modicum of safety for their operations.
With the wide expanse of fields inside of their perimeter fences it was easy to set up ship docking bays and go into service as spaceports. They put an average of two on all of their worlds so far and it vastly simplified their infrastructure arrangement. A thousand good, well equipped starports made a significant difference, as it would for anybody. Especially since it gave their container ships points to trade cargo with at the outside end of their runs, letting those massive freight haulers serve at close to capacity.
Put a short range control computer and transmission tower on the bases and suddenly they had Trade Federation battle droids reequipped as coordinated laborers helping to run the things, too.
They decorated the bases with a different color scheme than flat grey, though. No need to be ugly. Ranko decided on green with some ornamentation to personalize each starport.
A thing they discovered later is that, between the powerful tractors of a Dragon Turtle and the ones of a garrison base, they could trade cargo containers direct from orbit to ground just by handing them off between tractors. That, supplementing the vast cargo space within the landing balls, would vastly simplify and speed up the resource transfer between Ranma's barely settled worlds and make better use of those they had, helping them to improve it all.
So, even though they'd intended this for ordinary container ships, recovered Trade Fed models started serving the duty more and more.ยบ
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(Posted Fri, 14 May 2004 21:04)
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