Somebody said:
And maintenance will have to be done totally by off-worlders making this extremly expensive and problematic(1) so it will likely skip it.
They only have to be offworlder's in the sense they're stationed at the highport, which is off-world. :lol:
Seriously, as TL increases, there can often be a disparity between the tech and skill levels needed to build an item versus those needed in maintaining it. In the real world, we're increasingly moving towards what I like to call black box techs - that is techs/repair people who don't necessarily understand the inner workings of the components they're replacing, they only know enough to isolate the bad module and replace it. Sometimes they don't even know that, they're being directed by someone who does have the knowledge or they simply guess and replace parts.
I know this from personal experience - for the last 11 years I've been doing tech support in an industry where the owners/operators of increasingly high tech industrial equipment are quite often Construction contractors, Doctors, Accountants, Pilots and Lawyers, most of whom are either not making enough money to or are just too cheap to hire properly trained technicians and are doing the work themselves. The company I contract for now deliberately designed it's latest generation of equipment so that it can be maintained by non-experts and it's helped the bottom line overall - ten years ago they had five people handling tech support for half the customers that two of us handle now.
Furthermore, a lot of equipment these days are attempting to become self-diagnosing - as TL and computing power increase, I expect that trend to increase.
So IMO I see no problems with lower tech level worlds maintaining higher tech level equipment in a high port, assuming they have been trained in the routine maintenance and troubleshooting techniques, and have ample spare parts on hand. The bulk of maintenance on a lot of equipment is low tech tedious stuff anyway - checking to make sure hoses/pipes aren't leaking/warn, that filters are replaced/cleaned as needed, that lubrication/fluids are replaced/relubed as necessary, and so on.
Depending on the size of a highport, the offworld experts needed to maintain it would likely be a single person supported by a staff of people with basic troubleshooting skills. The bigger the highport, the more of these offworld experts a port might have - but the ratio of maintenance personnel to experts could be anywhere from 10:1 to 100:1, depending on the exact technologies involved.
(1) I remember the cursing of our mechanics working on the M48A2GA2. Nice mix between german and us parts. Some metric, some inch, some 12V, some 24, some 48 etc. And that was at least "same TL"
Mixing of parts and the areas where two different systems interface is actually more of a problem than low tech people being able to work on high tech equipment. This is something else I see daily - the equipment I do tech support for is all computer boards talking to each other over a network, but the interface between our system and the equipment we control is often very low-tech - relays and voltage inputs.
Most of my customers can easily troubleshoot problems with our equipment - swapping out a board, replacing a display or keypad, but if the problem relies in the interface wiring, that's when they have problems or have to call an expert.
So the world that decides to save money by building their own high port shell and populating it with high tech equipment from a variety of vendors is likely going to have higher maintenance costs and spend more overall than the world who spent a little bit more buying a turnkey solution from a single vendor.
