Heh, I've been thinking of writing something from the perspective of one of hte Inner Sphere visitors considering what this tech would do for the IS and why it's a good thing it doesn't exist. Anyone interestested?
On another note, I'm not certain if the ships are practically slower than IS ships in FTL, which is to say:
An advanced skipcore is 4ly/day. A KF drive can do up to 30LY (without batter), BUT, it has to charge, generally 7 days. So an advanced skipcore is only slightly slower than a KF drive--and we have another advantage.
Once insystem, the jumpship is anywhere from 7 to 10 days away from most habitable zones, unless it wants to try for a more risky jump to a pirate point (and if you run the numbers on the possibility of a problem, anyone trying to do this on a regular basis isn't likely to make it for very long before an oops occurs). A skipcore ship, the aforementioned advanced core does 176 AU per turn. Pluto is 39 AUs from the sun, meaning that once in system, a skipcore drive ship could make it to port in negligible time, eliminating both transit and docking time for a dropship. Granted, at busy ports, there are probably dropships waiting to dock as the inbound droppers leave, but in any case, at max speed, and presuming say a tramp freighter, a skipjump ship could head in system, get the cargo, zip out and go back into FTL long, long before the jumpship could, while also refueling, since they could just purify some hydrogen from local supplies.
