[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Bengt

To provide a counter example, Afghanistan has plenty of mineral deposits, but no one is eager to develop them because it's land locked and doesn't even have rail roads (and they'd probably get blown up every other day if someone would build any). The typical petrostate on the other hand can cheaply ship their stuff on tankers and buy as many solid gold toilet seats as they want.

That's partly cost of transport, and partly a security issue. Navabharata doesn't have a security issue such as that. The places that do have even less trade and an even worse real exchange rate.

Now from reading the description so far it doesn't sound like there are cheap-to-orbit facilities all over the place (are there?).

Not all over the place. There are ground facilities servicing a permanent fleet of orbital lighters. You could land such a lighter on and take off from anything in the nature of a regional airport. Demineralised water will do for propellant.

So is there cheap interstellar travel in this particular setting? Or is it left open?

I prefer not to get too specific about spaceship operations, since that would tend to draw attention towards what I want to draw it away from: space-operatic stuff like spaceship and space travel. Interstellar transport in the setting is economically like steamer transport c. 1890; cheap enough that there is commodity trade, slow enough that they is no mass tourism.

Another (rather cliché) way of motivating trade is to give a planet unique unobtainium deposits. Would that mesh with the setting?

It would do if I wanted create just a few such planets. I'm not keen on rubber science, but it's a price I'm prepared to pay if I get something I want in return. In this case I'm creating a setting for, as Ze'Manel† puts it, serial planetary romance. I want to be able to send PCs again and again to worlds that the players haven't seen before and that it is reasonable that the characters aren't familiar with. Planets that you can get to have to have a cognitive weight, a prominence, a salience more like Bélem than Brazil. I need hundreds of them. Giving each one a handwavium resource to justify a spaceship service would be less appealingly parsimonious than building trade into the setting structurally.


Edited to add:

† It was combatmedic who put it like that, not Ze'Manel Cunha. Sorry, guys.