Something about a Freighter

 Josh was celebrating. He’d found the cat-like female who hand’t flinched when she looked at him. His morph suit showed an expensive pattern. A finely coutured arm held a glass (real glass) filled with a not-inexpensive bottle of Terran whisky. The whisky bottle, a second glass, and a tray of hors d'oeuvres rested on his deck table which he had pushed to the end of his deck that was closest to Javian’s deck so that Javian, when he arrived, could reach it. 

Except that Javian was late.

Josh was into his second glass of whisky when Javian finally arrived.

“Where have you been?”

“I spotted a ‘jeep 9’ hovering over the west bottoms. You just don’t see those any more.”

“What’s a ‘jeep 9’?”

“It’s the successor to the ‘jeep 7’.”

“I don’t know what that is either.”

“Seriously?” Javian was genuinely surprised. Josh was not surprised that Javian was genuinely surprised.

“Nope. Not a clue.”

“They’re short haul freighters for high density cargo.”

“Well, who could forget that.”

“Exactly. Their heyday was about 70 years when they mostly brought precious metals out of the Anaran asteroid belt.

“Mostly?”

“Oddly, some were pressed into troop transport service during the Aldebaran conflict.”

“Seems like you could turn one into a pleasure yacht.” 

Javian seemed to no longer be listening. He was now lecturing on the relationship between cargo density and the energy required to overcome its inertia. 

“In the days before the Park inducer, the intrasteller freightliners needed something smaller than the SD class for certain kinds of cargo.”

Josh let the speech roll on, assuming it would come to an end of its own inertia. It was when Javian began discussing the physics of Park inducers that Josh reengaged. 

"So you can repurpose them as pleasure craft, right?"

Javian didn’t notice the question.

"Now after the so-called ‘Park revolution’--oh, don’t get me started on the so-called Park ‘revolution’. It changed a lot about short haul space faring, but ‘revolution’ was mostly marketing BS.”

“Or maybe it won’t fly, so I can’t use it for a pleasure craft.”

“It wasn't a true revolution in the same way the Molari drive opened up interstellar travel to the masses and opened the door to multi-species societies such as our own.”

“I can just set one down in the Paganos somewhere and run a dance hall or music venue out of it.”

“After the so-called ‘Park Revolution’ the older SD freighters were retrofitted with Park drives.”

“Oo! Better yet, I could make it a brothel. I’ll keep it in orbit. ‘The Docking Port.’ Get it? All the birds will wear feathers. Get it?”

“But the GP class were relegated to transfer orbit work: correcting satellite trajectories, bus service between interstellar passenger liners, that sort of thing.”

“Javian?”

Josh’s friend paused for the first time in several minutes. “Yes.”

“Are you even listening to me?”

“Of course I am. Now as I was saying…”