Business Synopsis and Thoughts
07 Jan 2021Anthony Reeves
I have been flying as a pilot since early December, 3306, and I feel like I ought to write down a few of the things I've noticed, and take a look at how I'll be moving forward from now on. Bounty hunting has been a rather fun source of income since the start of my career. Now, I like to be careful when describing it as "fun", because my job consists of jumping into resource extraction sites and killing anything with a bounty on its head. But if I didn't discover bounty hunting, I'd probably be slaving away in those same extraction sites, praying that one of the asteroids turns out to be full of painite. Not only that, but I'd likely not be in possession of my Vulture, and even if I were, it certainly wouldn't be being put to good use. I suppose what I'm saying is that my job, as brutal as it is, is what's keeping me stable out here in space. But if there's one thing that I've noticed, it's that bounty hunting alone isn't the most profitable thing in the world. If I wanted to simply stay put in my little corner of the universe in Gliese 868, then it'd be perfect. In that lifestyle, I'd already be rich. But the thing is that I don't want this to be all that my lifestyle is. Getting into my ship every morning to go to the asteroid belt and kill pirates is thrilling and all, but if I want to do something else besides killing for once, then I need to find another source of income. Ironically enough, the next best source of income for someone in my field is mercenary work. I'm going to have to kill more people for more money in order to not kill people. As a point of reference, if I go to a resource extraction site to do bounty hunting, then on a lucky day, I'll come out of that site with three million credits in bounties. Otherwise, I'd likely have to go to another site in order to reach that number. Now, in mercenary work, the base payout for someone of my combat rank is three million. The highest I've seen so far is five million. And that's not even counting the bounties you rack up while completing one of those missions. I also know that five million isn't even scratching the surface of what I could earn. I've seen other people in the Federation come home with bounties over ten million. Some of them even over 40 million. In the 200s at most! If I want to outfit my Asp Explorer for exploration, then mercenary work is my best bet. One session of bounty hunting can buy a man a Vulture, but it'll only take someone five mercenary jobs to buy and outfit an Asp. I find it uncomfortable that I'm going to have to do more killing to keep up with what I need to do, but I suppose that's the price I'm going to have to pay.