Fwurg

[Mercury]

In Sector 10 -6, the Veolian Commonwealth has a Holonet Base Station. Additionally, the IO Protocol has a Holonet Duplex Station, and two Holonet Relay stations.

The IO Protocol and the Veolian Commonwealth made an arrangement to allow the IO Protocol to hook their stations into the Veolian Base Station to save on upkeep.

There are two main ways to do this:

First, all three IO Protocol stations could hook directly into the Veolian Base Station. I refer to this as the Star solution, as the graph resembles a star graph.

The other way is to Diasy Chain the stations. In this case, the 2 Holonet Relay Stations of the IO Protocol are connected to the Holonet Duplex Station, which is in turn connected to the Veolian Base Station. I refer to this as the Daisy Chain solution.

Obviously the Star Solution is a legal way to implement this situation. My question is, would the Daisy Chain solution also be legal?

Please note that this has no economic impact whatsoever. I am perfectly happy with either solution. I merely wish to determine what shape would be legal.

[Brend]

The upgrade and holonet rules were written with the intent that both topologies are valid. This is backed by the following rule:

"You can always have upgrade stations (or other duplex stations) attached to a duplex station, but note that the top-most station must be a base station or duplex station acting as a base station." (from Duplex Stations in the rules namespace).

Please note that this has no economic impact whatsoever.

If all holonet stations are controlled by the same faction, this statement holds. If the stations are controlled by different factions, the daisy-chain topology and the star topology require different relations. In this case, the relations are ACA -- VC -- IO because of the daisy-chain.

[Mercury]

Excellent! Thanks for the details on this!