Reynard said:
Weightlessness isn't cheap if you incur medical bills for the experience. Just like low berths though, you might take a chance on hurting or killing yourself to save a few creds.
Not a few, a ship large enough to give you a full gravity rotation is 100 meters in radius and it rotates 3 times a minute, and because its such a spindly structure, it can't land, and My campaign doesn't have small craft, that is spaceships that can land and take off from a planet with less that 100 dtons of volume. There are no fighters, launches, ship's boats, pinnaces, or modular cutters, the main reason for this is the reaction drives I use require about the same amount of fuel that is set aside for the Jump Drive in a standard TL9+ campaign. There are no reactionless maneuver drives in Triplanetary except for a stolen starship, the 1600 ton lab ship, which came with 2 ships boats, and a fuel shuttle. The thieves who stole the starship, didn't want to be found by authorities, and their expertise was somewhat lacking in the understanding of how a maneuver drive or a Jump drive works, they came from a tech level 8 world with a lot of off-world contacts, they were expert enough to steal a starship, but they didn't know how a maneuver drive works or how to repair one, they did know how a fusion reactor worked and understood enough about that to direct the work of Earth physicists which helped them build working viable fusion reactors as early as the 1960s in their altered timeline, from these reactors, they build a version of the Nerva rocket powered by a much safer fusion reactor with little permanent radioactive fallout particles instead of the highly radioactive fission reactors that were initially envisioned, this led to an early mass break out into space in the 1970s, and since the planets Mars and Venus were habitable, this led to tech level 8 pre maneuver drive versions of the common spacecraft, which instead of being propelled by maneuver drives are propelled by fusion rockets, a fast one for getting off the planet's surface and a slow one for traveling around in the Solar System. It takes about a week to a month to travel from Earth to either Mars or Venus. Most people who undertake such a journey spend a lot of time on Mars or Venus before returning to Earth. A lot of people use working passage, that is people serve as temporary crew aboard a spaceship to reduce the cost of interplanetary passage, usually the journey is one way, people are migrants rather than tourists, a ticket passage is on the order of buying a new house, and often a mortgage type loan is required for most people to afford that passage. In modern currency this is about $100,000 to $500,000, the low berths are cheaper but risky, and only the most desperate would use them, and they are illegal in the United States due to the high death rates and the liability involved with people dying, but third world countries like China are often seen using them to get their people to Mars or Venus.
It turns out the starship thieves new something about how to build a low berth chamber as well, as their prior business before they stole that lab ship was in people smuggling, and it was easier to do when people were in low berths. One big method for getting to Mars or Venus was to have a large corporation pay for the passage with usually a contractual agreement to pay off the cost during term of employment, labor laws in most civilized countries don't allow for indentured servants, but the salaries paid to employees sent to Mars or Venus were usually low, above minimum wage, but not a whole lot. Most corporations prefer to hire the planet's natives for the low skilled labor, the Earth people brought over usually rate in the mid to high skilled category, that is they have skills that cannot be easily taught to low tech natives of Venus or Mars. Mars has a number of high tech artifacts, some of them ranging from TL 9 to 15, but the scientists are studying those, and can't quite understand how some of them work, taking them apart risks damaging those artifacts, so they do so only in cases where they have multiple examples and can risk destroying one or two to learn something. Archaeology for profit is a big business on Mars. A number of gravitic sail barges exist on Mars, nobody know why they were built, there is some biological component to them, they repel the ground, and can sail over Martian deserts, but they can't ascend too high, so they can't reach orbit as the standard air/raft or grave vehicle can, and their speed is limited to how fast the wind can push them, rudders which cut into the sand allow such vehicles to tack across or into the wind much as a watercraft could. Naturally such land ships leave tracks which could be followed.
