One may well ask "Why don't the orbiting ships send their cargo direct to the city that needs it?" As always, the answer is money. Not that fuel or time is particularily expensive, but the cost of preparing the landing site is quite prohibitive.

Anyone who has driven a car over soft ground will know that it's very easy to get stuck. Now imagine that your car is over thirty thousand tonnes and has all that weight concentrated on a few small supports. It would simply sink into the ground. Which isn't a big deal for the shuttle, but if you have dozens (or hundreds!) of shuttles landing and taking off every day then the area that they land on will quickly become impossible to traverse by ground vehicles.

On a developed world, they avoid the whole problem alltogether by simply building orbital elevators (imagine a railway running vertically from the surface to orbit, with a counter weight on the end - usually a conveniently placed asteroid). This allows large quantities of goods and personel to be transported up and down quickly and easily.

On Svarr, only one space port was built and there are no orbital elevators. So everything goes through the (very busy) space port and is then distributed through a large network of roads that criss cross the continent. Only two continents have large-scale population centers on them and they are connected by several bridges.

Felines don't (and never have) used boats, prefering land vehicles or aircraft. Everyone knows that cats don't like the water.

Narration: The long convoy sets out, various trucks mixed with armed and armoured vehicles ready for the long, lonely drive.

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