If you are happy with a setting spezific setup, someone might have a monopoly on FTL drives, and rents them out to everybody else.
The quadrail series by Timothy Zahn has a very extreme version of this (not vehicle wise, there are no lighters, but the basic political setup).
Basically you need a race, an empire or some sort of guild or order, that is the only source of FTL drives, and they need to be content with charging acceptable fees and imposing only acceptable political measures (like for instance no interstellar wars).
Or maybe there are mutliple star drive developers, but there are still client empires, that have to do with rented star drives.
Or maybe one empire uses an FTL drive monopoly as method of controlling and taxing civilian space travel.
If you have modular FTL pods and can fit more then one in a usual lighter, you could also have the situation that they are prone to failure and there are only few repairstations. If you have a drive failure in the backwoods, you send your drive to the repairshop a few systems farer, and if you have proper insurence/guarantee, pick up a replacement drive right there. I suppose that setup works best, if the drive failures are very unpredictable, and need a complete change of drive.
One mans groundfloor is an other mans earthmissle @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Johannes Trimmel @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
