Outright failure = you're 28 million in the red!
The fine might be commensurate to the amount of goods to be delivered, however when the fine exceeds the actual mission value by a factor of 3 it seems excessive. It's the first time I've noticed a fine being larger than the actual value of a mission, and given you have 23 hours to complete it (even with a wing) it's a lot of transport for a measly 13M reward.
FD pre-quarter rewards for wing missions. So the reward is actually 52m total, putting you 10m in the black in total... you just need 4 wingmates to get that. It's how FD incentivise doing these as a wing.
Alternately, don't fail the mission? Or don't pay the fine[1]? Or if you get ganked, do a partial-hand-in, you'll still come up black.
I get what you're saying, but delivery missions are all cack-about anyway. Reward is based on value of the cargo, not the volume of it, so a mission to deliver just 600t of Performance Enhancers will pay out
more than a mission to deliver 5000t of water, which'll pay maybe 3m? So for me, that's the tradeoff you face; ship lots of low value goods, with not much impact if you fail, or; run a mission whose payout is
substantially larger[2] for the same, or even less effort, but face greater consequences for failure. tl;dr the reward for 5000t of water and 5000t of, say, Palladium, should be
the same.
Re-emphasising the fact rewards are primarily based on
cargo value, not volume shipped, this seems fine to me.
Back in EVE, players (not an RNG system) routinely put up hauling contracts for a couple million, but with collaterals of up-to hundreds of times the reward; not because they were scams, but because that's how cargo hauling normally works. Only difference in Elite is that instead of players, it's an RNG system, and instead of up-front collateral, it's a retrospective fine you cop for failure. Personally, a collateral system would actually be much better for Elite, but I digress...this actually leads neatly to my footnote...
[1] Not paying the fine is entirely valid, and I do this regularly. Flogging goods from factions you have no intention of ever coming in contact with, or doing business with again, is a really powerful way to make credits... especially if the victim faction owns no assets. There's almost 30,000 populated systems and 77,000 factions. Having 50-100m in outstanding fines with a handful of those is no biggy. There has to be some counterbalance, and that's what the fines are.
[2] You'd have to do the same 5000t delivery for something with less risk, such as Water, about 5 or 6 times to get the same reward solo. So, your choice. Big fine vs Big wins, or small fine vs small wins.
)
