Another year, another booze cruise (organized differently this time)
27 Jan 2022Netchild
Last month, we (the PTN Sommelier team) didn't do a booze cruise. Off course there was a public holiday at the peak, and some commanders went up and made profits. The Sommeliers on the other hand took the opportunity to spend their time with their loved ones during December 3307 (and old tradition from earth called Christmas, for those of you which weren't interested in earth-history classes). As such I don't have any numbers to provide for the booze cruise in December, but I've heard some nice profits were made.After the time-off in December, we (Sommeliers) sat together (virtually speaking), and discussed our stance with the special parking arrangement for carriers at the Peak. The arrangement the Pilots Federation made at the Peak together with a lot of abandoned carriers up there, put a major workload on the Space Traffic Control (STC). We don't want to abandon the booze cruise, but we think that the STC under those circumstances during the 48h of the public holiday was an effort we didn't want to invest. As such we decided to give it a try without the STC, but provide the independent carrier owners which usually come with us access to our long range communication infrastructure in a way which allows them to coordinate the traffic on their own. An experiment, if you wish to say so...
... and what result we got on this booze cruise (the public holiday is about to end as I write this)!
34 carriers delivered 746,802t of Wine in 43 carrier runs. That's about 22kt of Wine per carrier, or about 2700 runs in a Booze-Cruise-Python to unload them. We are talking about a total profit of about 207.5 billion credits, or about 41 carriers you could buy from this profit. -- For those interested, it's less than half a billion credits (200-300mil) of investment for a carrier owner (who needs to sell some wine to the station themselves if they want to at least break-even), to be able to transform that load into about 5 billion credits to be made at Rackham's Peak. As usual, we had a lot of carrier owners which just participated until they broke even and then have spread the wealth to the independent pilots which came up with us. The generosity of the PTN spreads also to independent carrier owners which only liaise with us during the booze cruise.
More or less that's a normal booze cruise.
As a Sommelier with the experience of a lot of booze cruises and the memories of galaxy-wide broken carrier jumping, downtimes of the Pilots Federation infrastructure, and malicious carrier owners, I expected hick-ups. What we got was a smooth cruise... partly due to no hick-ups of the Pilots Federation (although they made an update to their infrastructure during the booze cruise, non of the reported problems with that update affected us), and partly because of the fantastic coordination of the independent carrier owners. We monitored off course our long range communication network and jumped in with some helpful hints and tips&tricks, and in the beginning it was a steep learning-curve, but all in all they did very well.
For the next booze cruise, we will discuss what we could improve. Some of our booze-cruise-tooling we already provided. We may or may not be able to provide a little bit more of that to make the coordination more easy. Time will tell...