Do settlements spring up around stargates? I understand that if the stargate blows up the settlement is absolutely done for, but surely there would be some people willing to take the risk, either to hawk their fares or set up temporary lodging or something.
If the stargate blows up, the system ain’t gonna look too pretty. The kernel has the mass of a small moon, call it 1e17 kg. Equivalent energy is 9e33 J, which is one order of magnitude shy of annual solar energy output, and one order of magnitude more than it would take to blow up the Earth and accelerate the shrapnel to solar escape velocity.
Or, y’know, think of it as a yottaton bomb.
But for the most part, it’s not the danger - which is minimal if you stay outside of the nominal light-second sphere within which something might jump arrive right on top of, or inside, you - it’s the logistics.
Tempting as it is to hawk fuel, spares, and the last real food before Proxima, it’s a pain in the butt to try and orbit the gate at that distance or keep station with it, and to haul all the stuff you need or want that far out-system. Especially since in-system traffic can see their destination from there, and transit traffic? Well, transit traffic is going to have to dip in-system anyway to get between gates, so you might as well build Bob’s Hydrogen Shack somewhere where it’s more readily accessible to the transit traffic than on one gate which might not even be the relevant one, y’know?
tl;dr It happens, sometimes, but it’s not the popular option. Mostly, what you get out by the gates are military pickets and the home for the local customs, and even then, that tends to be in border systems.
The multiple gates being spaced apart like that seem to coincidentally be very good for in-system trade. Was this a design choice by Ring Dynamics?
It’s mostly just a result of two separate pieces of physics.
First, that when you have multiple devices powered by moon-mass black holes and capable of wrangling space-time in unnatural ways, it’s only common sense not to put them all crowded together, belike. Particularly since they like space-time that’s relatively unstressed in ways not caused by them .
And second, while equal-massed Klemperer rosettes aren’t stable, they’re still a decent starting point for artificial stabilization. Not to mention that in systems that have an outer-system gas giant around in a suitable orbit for stargate use, you can use its Trojan points for stargates and save yourself a lot of time and energy required for full artificial stabilization. The home system stargates make use of Iälessá’s Trojan points in exactly this way.
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