Many commodities are carried from location to location in space inside
cargo ships,
especially volatile or dangerous goods. Other commodities
can be sent by mass driver or catapult to the location, where they are
decelerated by various means and concentrated for redistribution. This
method of delivery was first used in the Old Solar system when the
first asteroid miners began to send material in streams by solar or
fusion powered mass drivers to the destination. However these
unprotected streams were sometimes perturbed off course by minor
bodies, or as time went by, increasingly intercepted en route by
automated or manned 'pirate' hijackers, such as the interplanetary age
Eurekan Cybercracy. For this reason mined material and other
commodities were either shipped in huge armed freighters. or were
accompanied by small semi-sentient armed guide ships, known as Herders.
Since those early days Herders have increased in
sophistication, and now often accompany streams of ultratech machinery
or nanofeedstock across interstellar as well as interplanetary space.
The LAI herder vecships shown here
ride along with relativistic
neumanns, the boxes in the first picture.. once they arrive at the
destination, the herders proceed to "supervise" the construction of
whatever the neumanns are programmed to
produce.
Arrival
and Assembly
On arrival the first neumanns are shepherded together to produce a
deceleration structure; once the entire stream is on
site (or some times while it is still arriving) the neumanns will
commence the construction of the predetermined structure (in the
picture above a fractaroni matrix) and also forage for feedstock to
supplement any material obtained from the accompanying stream.
Herders accompany most interplanetary commodity streams, to
guide and protect the goods against accidental loss and piracy, and to
supervise the collection process; they are increasingly used to
accompany interstellar packages for similar reasons, especially high
value, sentient or dangerous produce.
