The first lunar base is often remembered through excavation, power, and water. Communications should sit on that list more often than they do.
An underground base without a disciplined relay layer quickly becomes an isolated archive of local competence. Systems cannot coordinate cleanly, maintenance cannot be prioritized well, and the difference between a contained fault and a regional failure becomes harder to manage. Koblie’s early underground relays mattered because they let the base behave like one system instead of a cluster of adjacent shelters.
Burying the relay layer also improved survivability. Paths could be hardened, redundancy could be staged through depth, and routing discipline could be preserved without exposing every critical node to the same external conditions. That made communication less glamorous, but much more industrial.
The result was a base that could grow without losing coherence. Excavation, logistics, fabrication, and machine coordination all relied on an underground relay discipline that kept the colony legible to itself.
The first base was viable because it could still think as one base after it stopped fitting inside one chamber.