Hello Commander Spiral 0ut!
Hi Sandro! Thanks for the reply!
In general, the ability to fly back and pick up a ship has a few issues: that you are doing the journey twice (even if the first journey is in a faster ship) and that you are forced to leave a ship at the pick up location. In addition, your time is completely filled by the logistics task. The ability to have ships delivered, even at non-optimal jump rates, is arguably better.
That makes sense, and I can see how it has some advantages. I just worry that the trade-offs, as you sketched out in your original post, would prohibitively outweigh those advantages in most gameplay situations.
Secondly, just because we currently don't have bulk freighters in the game does not mean that we won't have things like this in the future (regardless of whether we have timed or instant ship deliveries) or even that they don't exist in the lore already (I believe the concept of mega freighters has always existed in Elite lore in some way).
That would be really neat, and I look forward to seeing them eventually! However, more to the point: We have plenty of large transport vessels in real life, both ships and cargo planes, that are capable of transporting disassembled F-16s in bulk (for example). However, when governments in real life need to transport F-16s over long distances, they typically choose to just pilot them. Those big freighters can be used for other types of cargo, and since the F-16 is capable of high speed flight, it makes little sense to go through the trouble of packing and shipping them in a container for slower transport. It adds time and cost with no clear advantages. Source:
http://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/8633/how-do-jet-fighters-get-to-war
I understand that there are certain locations (talking about Elite now) that outright cannot be reached by some ships, and in those cases it would plausibly take longer to transport. But if you're going to err to one side or the other for the sake of mechanical simplicity, it would make sense to me to err in the direction of convenience for the player and hand-waving the edge cases, as opposed to making the edge cases plausible at the expense of player convenience. But maybe I'm missing something.
It just seems to me that this feature was originally intended to add convenience and allow players to be more flexible and spontaneous in their playstyles. I worry that, given the proposed changes, it would do little to serve any of those purposes and would not end up being very useful.