Monday, August 21, 2017

Highland Department of Roads

The Highland Department of Roads maintains the system of gates, beacon stations, and waystations along the Major Routes in subspace. They also operate the hyperdrills that stabilize subspace and make possible the placement of gates in planetary orbit. Workers of the department are called roadies.
Along with members of the Grand Postal Service roadies also maintain and operate the hypercable system. They work with the posties in ensuring messages are delivered once they have exited the hypercable system for delivery to systems not connected.
As might be expected with such a wide range of responsibilities there is no typical roadie.
Within the Grand Human Union the department maintains huge traveling road camps in subspace, typically built on large 500,000-1,500,000 cuft ship platforms which contain quarters, workshops and hangars for hyperdrills, mining craft and other supporting vehicles.
Subspace contains no natural occurring bodies to provide construction material so road camps typically ferry raw materials from asteroid belts and gas giants in handy systems in normal space into subspace to provide stock for the huge industrial nanofactory fabricators located in the road camp workshops and for the portable fabricator machines used to construct the gates, beacon stations and  waystation frames. Much of the interior of these structures are constructed by follow on contractors.
Typically thousands of workers support the typical road camp and the camp supports dependents as well. Many couples work the road camps and spend most of their lives traveling along the roads.
Operating roads still require a cadre of specialist technicians to support the repair robots which maintain the beacon stations. Some live at one of the waystations and travel down their route in brakes or HUVs configured as repair vehicles, returning to family after a few days on the road seeing to their charges.
Others are under the care of technician couples working from saucer shaped ketches, 15,000-50,000 cuft vessels containing living spaces, workshops and stock storage holds, most commonly staffed by extended family. In many ways this class of roadies most closely resembles the lighthouse keepers of maritime days, living in relative isolation as they move down the road of their section, maintaining beacon stations, picking up repair stock at roadie depots on the waystations and repairing hypercable installations.
Another responsibility of the Department of Roads is the DOR stormwatch channel. Stormwatch sensors located in beacon stations transmit gravametric information to weather centers located at certain waystations in each road section. The weather stations analyze the information and post storm warnings to be broadcast from the beacon stations to local traffic on the DOR stormwatch channel.
Keeping the stormwatch sensors operating is a part of the job of the maintenance road crews. Most of the storm analysis on the establish network is done by AI, but on new roads or ones still under construction people still have to aid in storm detection.

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