I have a different perspective on the craft. There are three abstractions on how the logistics chain of a particular are explained and how it coorelates to resources of money...
My point isn't really so much about money rather than the 'last mile' logistics. Whoever you pay for the maintenance has to move shop, plus all the stuff and people on board who also have to have
their admin moved half the world over. You can't just move the end point of your logistics pipeline whereever you wish for zero cost and a few hours of flight time. Modular or no, containerised or no, this stuff just doesn't happen with the snap of some fingers, as much as one might wish it did. All the more if you live in a bunker that's smack in the middle of the Amazon or some desert hellhole that hasn't even heard of UPS.
in otherwords, you are already paying for the cost of transfers of men and material by buying, renting, or building a craft...
Given I don't really use the transfer trick, I'm feeling mighty ripped off now.
These contractors sure made a sweet deal.
...transactional one with the transfers from base to base abstracted UPS or merchant shipping.
My headcanon is that transfers are still X-Com, or some external division of it, you just allocate some extra money to their budget when you give the shipping order. I kinda doubt a shadow org is just going to UPS their priceless alien plasma guns over.
Maybe they piggy-back on commercial ventures, but with extra security and cover-up shenanigans.
By using a craft to move around cargo like that, you introduce the risk of having that craft be destroyed by enemy action on the geoscape. This is not the case with simple transfers and thus the transactional cost... invisble security lol!
Some crafts are undetectable to UFOs, and UFO aggression radii aren't that big, so most of the time it's just a feeling of security, not actual security. If that.
My bases are set up in such a way as to be able to support each other in moving troops and their gear around to firefight specific situations.
I mean, if it meant you could refuel at your bases a la MOO and derivatives, I wouldn't have much of a problem. Or even run defence missions and then return to the home base. But it's much more than just that.
Aliens attempt a base raid on a listening post and interception base in an activity hot region. Beat them there with two full transports of dudes so instead of facing a few rookies they had over two dozen hard bitten veterans to contend with.
Not sure this is actually an argument in favour, because that's using a questionable mechanic to substitute a quick fix for long-term planning of base defences and even building defence facilities altogether. That is, it just short-circuits a whole segment of Geoscape strategy. Basically, it's the 'doom stack' problem in X-Com flavour.
Everyone one was really wounded at the only base close enough to directly respond to a high score penalty for despawn mission. The party copter visited a few choice bases on the way to assemble the scratch team and then went and smoked it, while the other team recovered.
And that's similar, circumventing the wounded/sanity mechanic via logistics shenanigans. Not quite as bad and somewhat more realistic, though.
Fighter skipping so that a ufo encounter may be over a period of a day or so and can close the noose and deploy a team to rip and run alien goodies.
Not sure what this even means. Tracking a UFO via base-hopping and hoping it lands?
Anyway, I was a fan of early X-Com fanfiction, which mostly had well-defined teams in individual bases and placed quite some emphasis on setting up a local interception and transport network, not to mention nation-based friction between bases. And large lead-ups to multi-base raids on strategic targets. So maybe that biases me here, too, on top of the game design issues.
Edit: Anyway, this is all not particularly relevant since the functionality has been in the game forever, there's no way to turn it off, and I can't really begrudge others for interesting and clever applications of it.
