In my mind, this clearly delineates multiple roles for jump drive equipped starships even outside the realms of surveys and the military. For example, one could design starships for the purpose of opening portals large enough for task groups to travel to connected solar systems, courier starships for the purpose of carrying communications from distant solar systems to more civilized areas or to transport personnel between connected solar systems, or even very small starships for the sole purpose of establishing communications chains between task groups and headquarters during military campaigns.
Any thoughts or interpretations from other players?
This is what I do, although there have been two rules changes that make this simpler:
1) The new "standard transit" rules. From my point of view, a jump ship now holds open a 2-way wormhole - this is because it doesn't matter which side of the wormhole your jump ship is parked when you're using it in "bridge" mode (see the recent "automating jumps" (or whatever it's called) thread over the last day or two in this board). Jump gates are still 1-way (in my opinion), though, because you need one on each side.
2) You can now build "single ship standard transit" small jump drives - this allows one to make small (1kton) "jump scouts" (or even jump if you replace the sensors with an engine). It used to be that the smallest jump engine you could build was for roughly 3kton ships, so it didn't make sense to build small jump ships.
So what I used to do is park a jump ship on the WP, that acted both as a "bridge" and as a link in the communication chain. I then pretended that the jump ship was jumping back and forth across the WP on some sort of regular communication schedule that I wasn't tracking (e.g. every few hours). I now do the same thing, except that I pretend that it's simply keeping a wormhole open.
I also like to park a small, cheap, picket on the "inside" (closer to homeworld) side of every warp point. These jump ships accumulate messages from the pickets and relay them in to the HW.
John
John