Actually, I think the whole point was that DS9 handled ore processing for the entire system, not just Bajor. Makes more sense to leave the facility in orbit instead of requiring the ore ships to haul their cargo up from the moons/asteroids, fly to Bajor, then land again, process the ore, then lift it up again and send it to Cardassia.
It was pretty clear to me: ore freighters docked at the pylons, ore was offloaded and pumped through the plyons and processed along the way. Finished products arrived at the cargo bays in the docking ring where they were loaded onto transports and shipped to Cardassia. Those little knobs on the backs of the docking ports (insides of the docking ring) are actually the cargo bays where processed material is stored before being loaded and shipped out; the three big docking ports adjacent to the pylons themselves are actually intended for passengers/transports/military vessels.
I think it does that anyway, since the pylon docking ports are so small and narrow and don't really connect to a cargo bay when you go through them. I actually think that most of the ore gets transported around through a replicator-like system that sucks it out of the hoppers on the freighter and materializes it directly into a processing bay in neat little chunks for Bajoran slav -- or -- indentured workers to haul around.
You're assuming that enslaving the Bajorans in the ore centers was a means to an end. These are Cardassians we're talking about; they probably DESIGNED the ore processors to be as labor intensive as possible just to give those workers something sufficiently humiliating and difficult to do. Terok Nor's labor pool was probably drawn from political prisoners and/or petty criminals sentenced to hard labor for various minor crimes and the vindictiveness of Cardassian bureaucrats; that a lot of them died while doing this kind of work has to be seen as intentional.
True that. My point is, there's no TECHNICAL reason for making Bajoran workers do it by hand. They mainly did it because they were assholes.
I have a vague recollection of some kind of industrial pollution on at least one of Bajor's moons caused by Cardassian mining. All that aside, though, considering basic planetary physics, it's a given for a system like Bajor that heavy metals and elementals would be easier to mine from asteroidal bodies and small inner-planet rocks, while more exotic hydrocarbon and exotics would be plentiful in comets and gas giants. The latter might explain DS9's lower pylons; frozen ices brought in from comets might be boiled away in the lower pylons while the valuable vapors rise to the top to be collected and condensed.
IIRC, they were describing how it was being used by the Federation. The Cardassian model was pretty straightforward (and was explicitly described in "Civil Defense").
In light of the horrific working conditions the Bajorans were said to endure, not to mention the rather elaborate and draconian defense mechanisms the Cardassians installed in the event of a revolt, I highly doubt those workers were there voluntarily.
Doesn't seem like they CAN chose the direction of gravity at will, considering the layer-cake deck layout of the station; even with artificial gravity, building in concentric rings with "up" placed at the center of the core would enable them to double the number of docking ports, make the docking pylons considerably more accessible and would allow all six pylons to have a "downhill" run for ore processing.
I'm talking about the movement of goods and products, by which time the Federation was using the facilities originally devoted to ore processing for merchant storage and scientific equipment.
Sisko made a number of references to the ore chute (though which they later climbed) being full of "molten uridium" which flowed downhill into the ore processors from the freighters at the top of the pylon.
But even in capitalism there's a relatively thin line between wage slavery and ACTUAL slavery, and it has a lot to do with your relationship with the boss, especially whether or not you are getting paid to work or ORDERED to work.
Direction of gravity isn't a factor in the internal arranging of the roughly spherical core, or the narrow inner ring. And for all we know, all six pylons indeed provide a "downhill" run towards the middle. Or towards the top, whichever works better. From "Crossfire", we know long vertical drops exist, and like you say, this may be because local sharp variations may be difficult to do. But it doesn't follow that a long vertical drop from bottom to top couldn't be arranged for a pylon that stands far apart from the other gravitated decks.
I'm not sure they ever were. Merchant storage would have been an original Cardassian functionality, and there should have been plenty of overcapacity for managing the later Bajoran needs without modifying anything. In contrast, "Civil Defense" is the first time we hear of our heroes tampering with the original ore processors, and it also sounds like this is the first time they are doing so.
He says once that there was a flow from their original location to a secondary refining facility at "level 33"; he then said that "This is where the uridium ore was separated from the rock. Then it would be dumped down that chute to the processing facility.". The source of the ore (freighters, transporters, beanstalks?) was not mentioned as such.
I'd think occupation would make every Bajoran citizen a slave in that respect - but everybody onboard Terok Nor who wasn't a comfort woman was in fact indicated to be either a privileged collaborator or (like Kira's alias) somebody who was free to come and go.
Only because their gravity plating is arranged in a strict "down" direction along with the rest of the station; this constitutes a highly inefficient use of their internal space considering the way it was designed.
I'm 50/50 on this one. Cardassians don't seem to have any spacecraft of the right size and shape to justify those pads, but other people -- Ferengi shuttles, commercial transports, etc -- might find them useful.
If this is meant to be consistent with the tech manual, it meshes nicely with the description of the ore processors in text.
Doesn't fit in what way?
I think you're hanging way too much on the phrase "up to ops" in civil defense. I've had people tell me to meet them "down the street" but that doesn't mean they intend for me to physically travel underground.
That is mathematically disprovable. A 100 meter sphere, divided up into 33 decks, has exactly half the deck space as the same sphere divided into 16 layers. Granted, some of that deck space is going to be too curvy to be really useful, but being a hollow pit in the middle of the core, that makes an ideal space for machinery anyway.
Concentric rings with the decks angled "outwards" from the core so that the docking ports are on the sides of the rings instead of the outward/radial axis. You could fit twice as many docking ports on the same station, plus the window view would be a lot nicer.
Their freighter/transport designs seem to fit the bill perfectly.
It's a lot more likely to be semantics, Timo, unless the pylon they were in actually some unseen structure directly below the core.
