outpost

Another possibility is that it's an outpost used for communication, maybe to hide their homeworld.

If they are a warrior race then do they use the planet as an outpost, with bases strategically placed around the planet?

Now, its just an outpost of 4Chan, at least the main page definitely is.

We are the Seattle outpost of a large company headquartered in another state.

More-so, given that you'd be doing it with a frontier outpost's industrial base.

That said, the US was a sparsely-populated backwater outpost at the time with only about 7 million inhabitants (a million of whom were slaves).

That would make the city their equivalent of a lunar outpost, and it's quite plausible that they simply may not have noticed electromagnetic waves.

A scientific outpost, like those in Antarctica, would be highly appealing.

But more importantly, making regular visits or having a permanent outpost there gives people something to project their imaginations onto (including their political and technological imagination).

Sending back messages isn't very difficult, especially if they only need to travel a few light years, or at least to the nearest outpost they have.

Local outpost of a chain store that doesn't franchise.

Or that it's a punitive outpost - a space-jail, where they work off their debt to their society by mining, or performing astronomical observations, or something else.

The original script was called "Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine".

But apparently the place wasn't abandoned: "the reopening of the embassy on the Malecón waterfront in Havana, previously used as an interests section, a limited diplomatic outpost, ".

The flip side is that it can lead to a certain detachment (no pun intended) from the community because the officers consider it a "tour of duty" to serve at a tiny outpost before graduating to a "real" position.

The problem I see is that it's vastly more expensive than building an off-world outpost and shipping rations there, as we do with Antarctica -- and our economic cost/benefit framework wouldn't show any obvious return on investment for self-sufficiency." I think this is what eventually acts as the great filter.