Planetary Trade Routes
08 Jan 2016Cavan
I had taken a break from trading about four to five months ago and went purely combat in my Anaconda. I kept just enough cargo to do some Power Play supply runs, but was purely in it for the undermining / 50 mil. a week.Once the Corvette came out, I jumped on board immediately. The problem with the 'Conda is the slow kills on bigger ships and getting the smaller ships to play nice and stay in your front sites. The corvette has better weapon placement and dual huge PA's, make short work of large ships. Firepower on the corvette is not an issue. In fact, it's possible to run a trader with overwhelming fire power. I simply submit to interdictions, kill, and move on. Much faster than trying to avoid the interdiction. All that and 500 tons of cargo? OK, I can go back to trading then. It's more lucrative, private contracting always pays better than working for the Feds. or Imperials.
So, I spent a day or so running station to station trades, it's as profitable as it ever was. What about these new fangled planetary bases though? Like everyone else, once I got Horizons I played around in the SRV, landed out in the wilderness, messed around with "crafting", etc., etc.
Then it dawned on me, Wait! There are a ton of new commodities, and what about surface to surface trades? Surely those would be at least as lucrative as the station trades to which I was accustomed would they not?
I still don't know. I've tried out all the tools, run the EDMC, looked at all the trading websites. Anything and everything to try and get a better sense of this. So far, I can't see much of a reason to trade on planets.
The first issue is that I can only land at large pads. That's a big issue with both trade and missions. The larger problem to me though seems to be we just don't have enough accurate data on all these planetary bases.
So jury is still out.
Since this is my first logbook entry I will say that this is more of a mind dump for me. I've played ED since the gamma, it's nice to have a place to write down the experiences. That being said this is more for me than anyone potentially reading it. The opinions are mine, your mileage may vary, and so on.
Fly Safe Commanders.
CMDR Cavan