Your Saurus example is a good one.
I have my moments.
In my opinion, it's also a way to fill staterooms that you know will otherwise be empty for a couple jumps. Imbalance shipping, in a way. I guess you don't want life support costs to meet or exceed the cost of passenger tickets.
It's quite literally what I did in the Race To Profitability™ exercise in my
Spinward Flex Courier thread.
At Lanth, I had the captains determine what cargo and passengers originating at Lanth would be bound for Tavonni, with any excess capacity available for booking to Saurus. On the return leg of the race back to D'Ganzio the same thing happened in reverse. Cargo and passengers originating at Saurus bound for Tavonni were booked first, with any excess unused capacity available for bookings to Lanth.
It was a little bit more complicated than nominal (and honestly, I should have done the same thing for the Margesi - Choleosti - Garda-Vilis segment of the run too in order to get "past" the economic "dead zone" of Choleosti better) but basically something that can be done if you've decided where your ship is going for its next 2 destinations in advance.
So, what I'm saying is that the rules don't talk about that.
Not explicitly, no.
But it doesn't take all that much reading between the lines to figure out.
You just need to have the capacity to "look beyond" the mere letter of rules as presented on the page.
Fair point, because it is.
Although, to be fair, putting the trade rules as written into practice using starships capable of more than 1 parsec range gets exponentially more complex at an almost logarithmic rate of increase. It gets "messy" REALLY FAST.
They directly support one-jump == next port of call, and (as you also said) that's because that's typical. It seems clear that multi-jump is atypical, but not against the rules.
Single jump is the default assumption, because it will often times be the usual/typical/only case available.
Multi-jump is possible, but more complex and requires a greater understanding of the local map and the capabilities of the starship involved. Multi-jump is merely an obvious extrapolation/extension of the single jump rules, where the only difference really comes down to "what is within range" to be able to get to. Whether the economics make sense for multi-jump destinations is an additional layer of problem solving when it comes to running a profitable transportation business, contingent upon the specifications of the ship and the expenses it needs to pay for.
Sometimes, the most expensive ship you can buy/own/operate is going to be the cheapest to have delivered from the shipyard.
Cheap starships lack drive capacity (jump, maneuver, power plant) which can limit their options for where their next port of call CAN be located. With minimal drive capacity, the choices of "where to go next" will sometimes be made for you simply by the arrangement of star systems on the map ... but if you had more drive capacity and/or multi-jump range you would have more options available to you and are less likely to find yourself "trapped" at an economic "dead end" of systems that cost more to visit than simply turning around and going back where you came from.
On a spreadsheet, all else being equal, Jump-1 is the most "efficient" option in a vacuum that ignores subsector maps.
In actual gameplay, having Jump-2+ available to you can sometimes mean the difference between an empty manifest bound for 1 parsec away versus a full manifest bound for 2+ parsecs away. I just really depends on the ebb and flow of the availability of cargo and passengers bound for different destinations.
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