On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 3:29 PM, Christopher Sean Hilton
<xxxxxx@vindaloo.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 10:43:16AM -0700, Kelly St. Clair wrote:

> Also, I would expect some companies would gain a business advantage by
> building small J-3 or J-4 transport ships to move staff from home base
> to hot spot and back as today's companies use private jets and
> helicopters. I'm reminded of an episode of Chasing Classic Cars where
> a business man took the host to Colorado for a day trip to inspect a
> Ferrari Daytona. Via private aviation, that trip probably cost in the
> $10k ~ 50k range but the car in question was worth several hundred
> thousand dollars if not millions and it had special meaning to the
> person paying for the trip.
>

I would suspect that J3 or J4 would likely be quick enough to beat the
X-boats in some routes... which would mean that a business could be
making decisions about an event before the competition even knew the
event occurred.
Sort of like the current High Frequency Trading push on the stock
market to shave microseconds off the communications lag in order to
make a better stock deal, but on a longer time frame.
Knowing the price of ____ is going to skyrocket a day before everyone
else knows could potentially pay for the ship in one use.

Of course, that hinges on the ship being available to carry the
message from the site of "unexpected events" to the center of commerce
in a reasonable time... which could, potentially, make for a PC
Adventure thread. "W-Boats" ("We're there one before X") hires the
players to operate a fast courier that is dispatched to potential
"places of interest" and told to keep watch for "an event", then rush
home to report.