Murdok Starport

Also called Murdok Highport.

Copper ore gets flown from Sterntown to the Space Elevator at the equator. From there it gets loaded into a car and shipped into orbit around Murdok. The space elevator was a huge investment from Sternmore Minerals, but now that it is operational it is far cheaper than launching heavy copper into orbit on spacecraft.

The elevator itself consists of a massive chain that anchors in the ground of Murdok and an orbital station in a geostationary orbit about Murdok. Imagine something like a bike chain where each link in the chain is 2 meters long stretching from the ground into outer space. Its anchor on Murdok is a single plate of steel roughly the size of a football pitch in a star pattern that descends into the ground for 500 meters. Attached to this massive bike chain can be different cars, some small and some large. They attach like the gears of a bike chain, so the gears are also massive. Fusion+ reactors on board turn the gears which allows them to ascend and descend on the chain. For added acceleration manoeuvre drives in some cars allow faster acceleration.

For carrying people a relatively small car is available that can carry 8 people comfortably and it takes about 2 days. These cars begin by ascending to 3,000 meters, disconnecting from the chain, and then accelerating with an onboard manoeuvre drive, then slowing down, before finally reattaching to the chain and docking with the station. This is the fast way to travel for light loads.

For the big heavy loads of copper there are no onboard manoeuvre drives. These purely ascend and descend via gear turning and take about 1 week to climb into orbit. This is perfect for moving heavy cargo slowly and cheaply from the planet’s surface into orbit.

A giant crane can attach and detach different cars from the space elevator depending on the cargo. Once a car is attached to the elevator its cargo will be loaded. For people there is a ladder that allows entry, and for cargo containers similar to shipping containers are used. The containers carrying copper ingots travel unpressurized so when they exit the atmosphere they are exposed to the vacuum of space. This helps prevent contaminants, disease, bacteria or other nasties from leaving Murdok. If an outbreak or other biological threat were to develop on Murdok the shipping of copper would not be affected so long as someone was on the planet to ship it up into the atmosphere. As the old cynical Traveller saying goes: No atmosphere, no disease.

The space elevator base on Murdok also contains a semi-permanent settlement. It has an airstrip, a commissary, a barracks, warehouses, and an admin building. In addition to the elevator there is a standard star port here with two landing pads that can accommodate space vessels. Roughly 40 people live here permanently, half of them guards, the other half assist with the port and shuttling people, cargo and copper between Murdok and the space station. The barracks here are built to house 100 people.