Transports

The situation Brian describes has a good raison d'etre.

We have: Core worlds: Beanstalks, large orbital complexes (container ports),
and shuttles and streamlined ship landing areas (oceans and pads), vast
traffic and quarantine net, vast customs patrol Inner Colonies: large orbital
complexes (container ports), and shuttles and streamlined ship landing areas
(oceans and pads). large traffic net, quarantine, and fair sized customs
patrol Outer Colonies: bigger ones have a small orbital complex to repackage,
shuttles, streamlined ship landing, customs patrols, some quarantine Outposts,
Far Colonies: no orbital complex. Maybe no shuttles. Landing for streamlined
ships, not much of a traffic net and probably no
customs to speak off except on-planet ones, no quarantine to speak of

What does this mean: If I ship a large shipment from WhoMe Ltd. on Terra to
five different destinations in the known space region, they all go up the
beanstalk together to the container port. They are put in one large container
and attached to a container ship. They go economically to the nearest big port
by FTL, and are split out into smaller pallets loaded on smaller freighters.
Lets say one is landed here by shuttle (no beanstalk). The other four are
taken, 3 to small outer colonies that have small Highports which do customs
inspections and repackage the shipments into smaller chunks for their local
shuttles. The last goes by Free Trader to a far outpost which has only got an
automatic landing beacon, and no customs.

This justifies how the inner system is the economic powerhouse, how it is more
efficient (less repackaging, better sky to surface and surface to sky costs),
and why things on the rim come in small lots and cost a bunch of dough. And
why on the rim you hit small freighters whereas in the core you hit huge
containerships. And, correspondingly, why the UNSC controls the core:)