Stellar Shipping
With the movement to space the RSF couldn't handle all of the shipping that was required. The UK and her new commonwealth countries, required more ways to ship items. BAe had a few designs that were ready to be licence built by private companies.
Concept
To move an item from one planet to another is not simple. It requires many different means of transportation. From the initial packaging, palletising, Ground transportation, orbital transfer, intra-system movement, inter-solar movement, and then the reverse. The system proposed to British interstellar by the Danish shipping company Maersk was a simple one. To use a standard ISO container that has been modified for the rigours of space travel. Having the standard 2020 ISO fittings meant that it could be transported by regular ships and trucks, as well as being handled by standard ship side cranes and carriers. The corten steel used in a standard containers construction was easily capable of modern day space transportation. A few new designs were required for loads that needed an atmosphere or refrigeration, etc. These racks are moved into orbit using heavy-lift EG shuttles.
Items destined for transport are loaded the same as they have been for hundreds of years. The carrier arranges shipping and the cargo is moved to a port for departure. The containers are moved to a rack that is capable of holding up to 16 TEU fully loaded containers. That is 16 x 20ft containers or 8 x 40ft containers or a mixture of both. The racks can also carry oversize cargo on specialist pallets. The heavy-lift Hercules, EGdrive powered lifter, can easily pickup up 390000 kg which is the maximum of 16 fully loaded 20ft containers @ 24000kg each, plus the weight of the rack.
The Hercules is actually five EGdrive saucers linked together. The control cabin is at the center with four additional EGdrive saucers connected by Nano carbon extendable girders. Oversized twistlocks are used to connect the Hercules to the racks making connection and lifting relatively easy.
Once in orbit these racks are moved by orbital tugs to a large container 'tree' or a container spacecraft for onward transportation. Trees are nanotube constructed and hence have massive load carrying capabilities. Container trees are pulled around the cosmos by interstellar tugs. The interstellar tug 'Hector' regularly pulls container trees weighing around 1,000,000 metric tons. Later scraft tugs like 'Rogue's Lance' for instance can tow loads in excess of 10 million metric tons. In fact they are really only restricted by the load carrying capacity of their nano carbon tow lines.
Shipping Lines
British Commonwealth Shipping
BCS was formed in 2039 to help fund the UK. Their surface shipping fleet use some of the latest technology to transfer cargo around the world. It is the commercial arm of the Royal Navy. BCS runs surface ships in a similar fashion to Russian Aeroflot aircraft. The income from this trade shipping is used to fund UK services in place of taxes.
As the UK moved in to space BCS was the first to obtain space capable craft from BAe - Space. These craft were predominantly container, bulk, and passenger capable Scraft. Again this side of BCS was run by the Royal Space Force and provides funding to the British Commonwealth.
Cunard Lines
The first passenger service scraft was the RSF funded Queen Catherine. A luxury liner used on a regular passenger service between Earth and Mars. Later Queen Anne carried out regular routes to Jupiter. Both spacecraft also run irregular routes to Alpha Centauri and other stars.
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