No you not getting it, still.
How does it affect BALANCE. I'm not interested how it affects you personally. As this is the 3rd time I've asked and you still can't I'm going to assume you don't know therefore why you said it's for balance to begin with I don't know.
So since it doesn't really matter, who cares if your ship does 10 ly or 20ly - at the end of the day, when you get into a system you're presented with exactly the same options you had in the last system give or take a CZ or 2.
You literally asked me out right how a longer jump range would affect me...
Balance - If you want to defend a system, tank up.
If you want to strike out at another system, you need to take your fuel range into consideration and adapt accordingly. That's balance.
Giving with one hand, and taking with the other, is balance.
I'm not speaking to the quality or logic of using jump range to balance ships, but making combat ships cumbersome to travel with, while making less combat oriented ships easier to travel, is a form of balancing. That means that if you want to build a strike fighter, you need to build it with range considerations in mind.
Where that falls flat, I think, is that in PVP, people are hull tanking/scb tanking, so you really can't compete in anything but a fully combat fit ship.
It is balance. It's not good balance.
On a side note, I just read that the mount speed for Rogues in World of Warcraft will be reduced to half. After all, they do more damage, which needs to be balanced by letting them arrive late to raids.
I lol'd.
And that's exactly what I'm saying. Yeah, war ships have to have a draw-back for the sake of the game. I would "less cargo," but that's not what happened. FD hammered the jump range so that it takes twice as long to get somewhere, which is ridiculous. 20%, or even 30% longer, would be fine. 100% is heavy handed.
What if we founded a pvp system. Something anarchy with a good outfitter. And advertised all PvP ers to home base there?
Would they, though?
Consider how PVP tends to work in Elite - you have CG/barancels/n00b system, with defensless commanders not flying combat ships.
Que the griefers/gankers, destroying the ill-defended exploration/n00b ships.
Then you get the influx of white knights to come and...
So you'd need some baby seals in that "PVP" system for "Pirates" to come club.