database transactions don't take 15 min to complete for a game that has as few carrier concurrent users active as elite does. it's unlikely that the servers handling the back end are run on old Texas instrument calculators. location updates are little more than coordinates. checking if you are at the location you are supposed to be is basically instant, a comparison between the client and getting coordinates of the player or carrier from the server. something done when you look up items in the galaxy map or even module screen etc.
I'm pretty sure the timers are set the way they are out of laziness to copy the regular ship jump behaviour but scaled to add time sinks to what is believed to be a beneficial activity that many players won't have. the pre jump timer scales with quantity of pending jumps to keep those servers that are also handling transactions not related to carriers responsive because even though they don't take 15 min to do, they do involve a batch of location updates for other player assets and those take longer and can easily lead to blocking (pauses or time outs) for normal jumps players are doing all the time. so the frequency of carrier jumps needs to be throttled to avoid that.
that in mind, it wouldn't make any difference to just combine the necessary throttle timer with the time sink (added for game balance i guess) and avoid the delay in setting up the next jump. that really doesn't hurt anything since setting up a jump doesn't do anything but reserve a destination, and that doesn't involve batch updating locations or anything like that, so doing it doesn't block normal game behaviour.
or that could all be wrong and we just live with the worst coded database ever that takes a quarter of an hour to update a few bytes of text in some tables in a game with likely only a few hundred such carriers moving at a given time. even if it were a thousand, it would be a trivial amount of data that should be measured in seconds or less.
)
