We had a long discussion of this already elsewhere. LASH wasn't successful on Earth because centralized large ports with railways and trucks were more effective at distribution than dropping off lighters at various ports. It is not clear that this has any relevance to space travel.
Rhylanor Highport is not connected to the rest of the subsector the way Rotterdam is to the rest of Europe. And it is not possible to go from Mora to Rhylanor in one trip like it is to go from Shanghai to Rotterdam. The vast majority of systems can't handle megafreighters docking if you go by the ratings of starports. You can certainly imagine that there are private commercial ports or other infrastructure not suggested by all those C & D ratings, but that's not a given.
Yes, lighters would need a bridge, maneuver drive & power plant, etc. But what they don't need is a jump drive and the huge fuel requirements involved. And if you have a system where the megafreighters just go from class A port to class A port and everything is unloaded there, it's going to have to go onto other ships that do have jump drives. And if its a system with multiple planets, the main starport will need lighter equivalents to ship goods from Earthport to Mars colony, etc.
Space LASh could allow a megafreighter to deliver goods to smaller ports along the way without those ports needing the infrastructure to handle that huge ship. Critically different from ocean travel, there's no alternate delivery than a jump ship. There's no space railhead.
Whether the mega freighter going from Mora to Rhylanor and then Rhylanor loading all the goods onto smaller freighters to ship to all the lesser systems around is more efficient than the megafreighter acting as a jump tender for 'freight riders' and trading with those other ports along its route while minimizing time in system is unclear. It depends on a lot of factors we can't know about how space travel and space trade actually works.
Rhylanor Highport is not connected to the rest of the subsector the way Rotterdam is to the rest of Europe. And it is not possible to go from Mora to Rhylanor in one trip like it is to go from Shanghai to Rotterdam. The vast majority of systems can't handle megafreighters docking if you go by the ratings of starports. You can certainly imagine that there are private commercial ports or other infrastructure not suggested by all those C & D ratings, but that's not a given.
Yes, lighters would need a bridge, maneuver drive & power plant, etc. But what they don't need is a jump drive and the huge fuel requirements involved. And if you have a system where the megafreighters just go from class A port to class A port and everything is unloaded there, it's going to have to go onto other ships that do have jump drives. And if its a system with multiple planets, the main starport will need lighter equivalents to ship goods from Earthport to Mars colony, etc.
Space LASh could allow a megafreighter to deliver goods to smaller ports along the way without those ports needing the infrastructure to handle that huge ship. Critically different from ocean travel, there's no alternate delivery than a jump ship. There's no space railhead.
Whether the mega freighter going from Mora to Rhylanor and then Rhylanor loading all the goods onto smaller freighters to ship to all the lesser systems around is more efficient than the megafreighter acting as a jump tender for 'freight riders' and trading with those other ports along its route while minimizing time in system is unclear. It depends on a lot of factors we can't know about how space travel and space trade actually works.