Quote:
Originally Posted by RogerBW
There was a proposal a few years ago for an amphibious bizjet; the target market was people doing business in e.g. Africa. Alas, not only did the company fail before producing a prototype, but it seems to have vanished entirely from the memory of the net – and I can no longer even recall the project name.
|
In the 1980s, Kessler might well be in the market for a personal business jet. For most of the eighties, Kessler spent a fair amount of time doing business in various African countries (as indeed he'd done since the sixties), which often included travelling to the sites of remote mining concessions. It's even remotely possibly the he'd buy a new jet in 1990-1995, if the one he was using was unsatisfactory or a new aircraft which added significant capabilities came on the market, but considering other priorities at that time, it's not all that likely.
After 1995, Kessler has not shown any inclination to travel by a modern jet. Some of his staff still do, of course, but in general, among those closest to J.R. Kessler and most familiar with the occult, there is a marked tendency toward the use of simple, robust and even anachronistic technology.
As an example, none of the four PCs in the campaign set in 2018 will step onto a modern airliner or helicopter. So far, they've not been forced to make a decision on whether to fly on a TL6 or TL7 propeller plane, but I expect them to regard the prospect with trepidation.
See, all four PC make use of ritual magic in some way and they know electronics and even mechanical devices are less reliable around them; correlating by the TL8 of the device and the level of thaumatological energy emitted by the PC's gear or recent actions. I've told them that even on a new jet airliner, while the odds of a catastrophic plane crash is undoubtedly greater for them than mundane people, perhaps by orders of magnitude, the risk is still minuscule compared to the risks they run in an adventuring career. Still, the risk of dying in a plane crash they have no control over seems much scarier to them than the much greater risks of dying doing PC stuff.
So, for now, the PCs emulate their Patron, J.R. Kessler, and travel by means of yacht or classic cars. Still, being PCs, the eventuality will assuredly arise when they have to be somewhere 1,000+ miles away,
now. At that point, their options will be anachronistic TL6-7 aircraft like the Douglas DC-3 or some of the models of amphibious aicraft or seaplanes suggested in this thread; or more modern aircraft available from some of their Patron's legitimate business activities (like offshore oil companies), such as TL8 business jets and helicopters.