Afternoon Kelly St. Clair,

     Starports generally have two components: a surface facility and an orbital facility. The surface facility includes cargo handling, a landing field, control towers, and other necessary areas. Surface starport components are frequently called Down (as in Regina Down Starport). Orbital facilities are present (usually in stationary orbit above the surface component) to enable the handing of unstreamlined ships, and to allow construction of heavy craft in orbit. The orbital component is often called Orbital (as in Regina Orbital Starport). Type D and E starports have no extensive orbital facilities, but usually have navigational satellites or similar equipment. Non-streamlined ships at these starports must be serviced by shuttles. Starports, being the primary point at which starships interact with a system, are usually the location for additional bases, such as scouts bases, naval bases, or other military installations, and for shipyards."

From the information provided above the likelihood of orbital facilities without ground components are rare, while not having orbital facilities out in the boonies are much more likely. The closer one gets to civilization the more likely a planet has both orbital and ground components.

A colony in the early stages I would image probably uses the colony ship as an orbital facility if it is not designed to land on the planet. In this case there would not be any ground facilities until the first shuttles have landed. The ship in orbit might remain intact and used as the colony's orbital component or be disassembled for components to build the colony.

I agree that location that are protected may only have orbital facilities if for no other reason than to let the ships patrolling local space can dock to keep the crews from going stir crazy.

During the Long Night worlds that lost space flight would probably still have the ruins of the ground facilities as well as the unreachable orbital facilities. I'm not sure on how the orbital facilities fared during the time frame and they may have been lost too.

Tom Rux

From: "Kelly St. Clair" <xxxxxx@efn.org>
To: "TML" <xxxxxx@simplelists.com>
Sent: Saturday, August 12, 2017 1:02:51 PM
Subject: Re: [TML] What class of Port is this?
On 8/12/2017 12:54 PM, tmr0195@comcast.net wrote:
> Afternoon PDT Phil Pugliese,
> My apologies for not editing my response back to the original post and
> for not being clear in my post.
> If a planet does not have any sort of permanent ground presence I can
> see that it probably has only an orbital port.
> Here is how I think ports may be established:
> The inhabitants start with a ground installation to reach orbit.
> Expanding throughout their system they establish orbital facilities. In
> Traveller once the jump drive comes on-line one or more of the orbital
> facilities get upgrade to a star port and/or new facilities get built.
> Ground facilities for the original space program may or may not be upgraded.
> Worlds that are being terra-formed or be colonized might have orbital
> facilities first and then have ground facilities built later.
> Tom Rux
The vast majority of inhabited worlds in the 3I are colonies, I believe.
  There aren't any natives, no "original" space program.
There may well be worlds that had to climb back out of their gravity
well during/after the Long Night, to reclaim the orbital facilities
already waiting there, but I submit that's a different sort of situation.
--
---------------
Kelly St. Clair
xxxxxx@efn.org
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