It was the same for ships at sea. No ship ever had literally every port in the whole world. They may make stops, but you had to catch connecting ships at various hubs to reach other destinations.
But that's not how it worked. You didn't catch another ship at a "hub", you caught it at a random node in a net of equal routes. And while the cargo of a ship might get distributed into barges at a port, and then to smaller boats later on, passengers would not travel by such barges or other successively lower-hierarchy ships to lower-hierarchy destinations. They would switch traveling modes altogether, or charter a direct boat in an at most two-level hierarchy of shipping. (In a different traveling mechanism altogether, barges would indeed be used by passengers as an expedient if slow method of travel. But not in feeder traffic.)
Pre-steam shipping by and large resembled ring routes touching each other at various, often multiple points. Direct tither-and-yon "packet" services came later; steamship services meant sticking to coaling ports at regular intervals and and thus basically equalized the ports along the route, making the concept of hubs and hierarchies untenable.
For all we know the daily volume might be far higher than the current airlines deal with. Or possibly not.
Well, in the Federation we see, we really can't tell. The closest thing to onscreen passenger services are those military transports of
Sydney class (or her upside-down counterpart) visiting Bajor/DS9, but we get little idea of the actual passenger volumes or schedules involved. What we do learn is that the station is always pressed for evacuation resources (suggesting long intervals between ships) but always manages to evacuate anyway (suggesting low volumes). But we'd need more data on Bajor's status in the hierarchy of worlds and colonies to get useful information out of that.
But hub and spoke is how it would work, even if ships made stops, because hub and spoke isnt based on volume, only on the idea that no single bus, train or ship stops at literally every possible stop in the whole world.
Why wouldn't a bus stop in every possible stop in the world? If it were fast enough, it could; if it were expensive enough, it would have to, because there would be no buses to spare for feeder routes.
Starships are fast (Kasidy Yates' old tramp served several star systems on a circuit taking mere hours in "For the Cause", and passengers might demand even better and get it). But starships are expensive, too. Even if the Fed sphere of influence featured a thousand ports of call, those might be best served by a thousand liners that operate on ring routes of equal-value ports, rather than by the tens of thousands of ships needed in a hub-and-spokes setup.
Today, hub-and-spokes uses dissimilar vehicles, the feeders often being cheaper out of necessity of quantity. Cheaper in practice means slower, at least for aircraft and ships. Why would there exist a market for slow starliners? A fast one could trump those with a direct service that flexibly responded to an increased volume on a particular route or node.
The number of flights leaving per day would vary considerably no doubt from place to place.
But that doesn't mean hubs and spokes. That only means that some nodes in the network of equal ports are "multiply degenerate", that is, several equal routes go through them while fewer go through other locations. Such a network could be argued to consist purely of feeders, really.
Timo Saloniemi
