CMDR Eldrich Thames Logbook, Entry #43, August 28, 3306
28 Aug 2020Eldrich Thames
Colonia Galleon Project Progress Report #17
This week the Colonia Galleon Project reached its conclusion.
On Tuesday the Urca departed Omega Mining Operation for Hillary Depot, the leg split into two parts with another field stopover. Docking at Hillary occurred on Wednesday August 26, after 6 hours and 48 minutes of travel, during which the ship made a total of 100 jumps and travelled 3,652 LY of hyperspace.
The following day, Thursday August 27, the Urca departed Hillary with a course laid to Abraham Lincoln, Sol system. Departure hour was logged as 19:37. The final leg of the journey had 60 jumps in total, a hyperspace distance of 2,174 LY, which were covered in 2 hours and 59 minutes, the docking time registered as 22:36.
Once safely docked at Abraham Lincoln, the 65 tons of Jaques Quinentian Still were sold, thus bringing the CGP to a symbolic end. The rest of the cargo, however, was sold at different starports where the price for the minerals were at its best. These additional legs will not be computed into the project’s final statistics.
After the Urca’s cargo hold was empty, a course for Ali Ring, Kokojina system was laid in. Happy to be back at my home base after six months!
Now that the CGP is over, it’s time to report its final statistics, starting with the financials:
Overall CGP profit: 509,268,188 Credits
Trading Profit: 68,181,349 Credits (13.39% of CGP profit)
Phase 2 (Sol-Colonia) Profit: 9,773,696 Credits (14,33% of trade profit)
Phase 4 (Colonia-Sol) Profit: 58,407,653 Credits (85,67% of trade profit)
Exploration Profit: 441,086,839 Credits (86,61% of CGP profit)
While the CGP ended up being a profitable venture, if we consider the effort of collecting a total of 673 tons of rare goods and hauling them back and forth between the Bubble and Colonia, it was basically a total waste of time. Any half-competent pilot mining the most valuable minerals would make this amount of money in just a few hours. Again, I was expecting these results, due to the way rares trading works currently. Which is really sad, come to think of it.
Also notice the huge disparity between the trading profits made during Phases 2 and 4. This is due to the fact that on Phase 4 I was only hauling 65 tons of rares, the rest being mined goods, which were sold at the most profitable markets at the moment. This makes the current rare goods selling price cap imposed by the Pilots Federation look even more ridiculous.
Example: I bought 10 tons of Personal Gifts and sold them at Jaques for a total profit of 297,570 Creds. This was the item that produced me the highest single profit of all 112 rares I was transporting. In contrast, 10 tons of Painite I sold at Cyllene Orbital in Atlas yesterday netted me 9,548,100 Creds. I mined this Painite in Colonia, but any Painite would’ve been as valuable.
How come a luxury item produced at a single market in the entire Milky Way ends up being less profitable 22K LY from the source than a mineral that you can basically mine anywhere?
The other thing we can gleam from these results is that while the CGP was primarily a trading venture, the bulk of the profit actually came from all the exploration done during both halves of the project. In this regard I deem the project a great success, as I ended up staking discovery and mapping claims on many worlds of interest - including one Earth-like planet - despite traversing regions of space that, in theory, had been visited by explorers going to and from Colonia over the years.
In any case, I’m not regretting doing this - although I won’t definitely be doing something like this ever again, at least not at this scope. It was an amazing journey, though, made more special by my Twitch viewership. We all had fun as we traveled over 45K LY back and forth!
Speaking of travel, here are the final travel statistics of the project. These only cover the time spent actually travelling between Sol and Colonia and back. Still, very impressive numbers!
- Total Hyperspace Distance: 47,160 LY
- Total Hyperspace Jumps: 1,311
- Total Flight Time (pad-to-pad): 3 days 8 hours 17 minutes
- Total Interdictions: 5
This will be my last logbook entry for a while, as I’ll be taking a long, well-deserved vacation.
CMDR Thames Signing Out!
