Trade and Commerce

After all this talkingg about how freight doesn't pay I started
playing with the trade and commerce rules.  It finally occured to me
that the profit on freight should be close to the profit on cargo.  If
not, then these things are money machines (but not for the owners).

I looked through my spinward marches data and found two planets that
looked good, Efate and Louzy (sp?) Efate is Hi In Louzy is Hi In Na
Po.  Efate has a type A starport.  Here's the plan: Go to Efate by a
whole lot of cargo (at 1000cr per ton 4000 base -1000 for Hi -1000 for
In -1000 for Type A starport.)  Ship this as freight to Louzy (and
book yourself a high passage) Sell.  Assuming you have broker-4 (why
not, it's not terribly hard using MT advanced merchant character
generation) this sells on average for 14,000cr hey, look, you made
12,000 clean profit per ton.  We'll assume you start with say 30000cr
in initial funds, that's enough to buy and ship 5 tons of cargo and
buy a high passage each way.  Afterwards you will have 70,000cr.  You
make money like gangbusters while the ships captain can't because the
Louzy-Efate run sucks, but you don't have to pay to maintain the ship
on the way back.

If however we raise the price of freight, this will go away.  As long
as freight isn't competetive with trade, people will be able to make
lots of money shipping goods as freight.  If everybody wanted to do
this, the price of freight would go up.

Seems easier to me to fix the trade and commerce rules than to hack
the spaceship rules to make only merchant ships cheaper....

	-Love, Kisses, and a Neutron Bomb
		-Eric the Finn