To date there has NEVER been an update that is only for solo players.
Passengers? Really very little a friend can do to help you with those. Maybe distract security scans on your final approach, but with careful timing you can get NPCs to do that too.
I'm not sure how an update
could be "only for solo players", though - Engineering for example your engineered ship is exactly the same whether you're on your own or in a giant squadron, and makes it easier to do certain tasks solo which otherwise would really need a wing, but it's not "only for solo".
And if I’m selling commodities, what’s stopping players from buggering off to the lowest buy price on EDDB instead? If I’m BUYING commodities from people, and actually want to make a profit from it, why would anyone stop at my carrier instead of just loading up their own and taking it to the highest sell, again on EDDB?
Well, if you're doing something with the carrier that people find useful, they can use carrier services to give you a bit of money towards the upkeep. So e.g. if you're shipping bulk cargo out to repair Witch Head, your colleagues can sell the cargo to the market, buy it off at the other end, and the taxes you charge pay for the jump - they get the cargo moved into place more easily, and you're not funding the whole operation yourself.
That said, there are some opportunities for more direct profits from people you aren't working for, because you can play with time and distance as well as raw costs in a way that you can't with a conventional ship. Stick a carrier next to a refinery port, buying insulating membrane (typically sells for 10k) at 12k/tonne. That's 2k/tonne profit without even leaving the system, so people will take that up as easy money. Once the carrier's cargo holds are full, jump it to an industrial system in Infrastructure Failure - ideally an isolated one - where the Insulating Membrane will sell for 20k/tonne. Stick it up for sale on your market at 18k/tonne, offering people again the chance for 2k/tonne without leaving the system, and you've made 6k/tonne profit on it for the cost of one jump and without having to haul any of it yourself. The people using your market are making a tidy profit too, so it's win-win.
Same sort of thing would apply if trade CGs ever come back - stick the carrier in a system with lots of the right goods but too far away for direct CG haulage to be practical, pay people 1k/tonne to load it up, then jump near to the CG station and set a price above normal market rates but below the local selling price.
Or - going back to station repairs, buy a bunch of Beryllium yourself at normal prices, stick it on the market at cost, then jump next to a repairing station and put it up for sale at just short of the local sell price - people will snap it up just to avoid having to travel for it.
The bonds service could be very useful in systems with all stations owned by the same faction, so that people fighting against them can cash in despite being hostile. Popular demand, now there's a way to do it.
Outfitting/Shipyard people might well pay a little bit extra for the convenience, if you were in the right place - head out to Explorers' Anchorage and sell some modules the local station doesn't, and you can probably stick a 20% markup on them easily, maybe more.
500LY of ship transfer costs is pretty expensive for big ships, so maybe there's a market there for undercutting the NPCs but still charging something?
People keep saying that there should be a megaship ferry to Colonia and back, so maybe they'd pay you to run one?
Wait for someone else to get their carrier stuck in a system they can't refuel it from, fuel your carrier up to jump in and out, put a load of Tritium on the normal market at a 5x markup for them to buy?
I've probably missed plenty of options.
Why no universal cartographics for a fleet carrier?
An exploration carrier without that is pretty useless.
I think people are underestimating the potential uses of a deep space repair, outfitting and shipyard service for explorers. Sure, it would have been extremely powerful to include UC as well ... but the rest of the services are pretty useful in the right context. (And funding such a remote carrier might keep the logistics fans from the First Great Expedition happy, if any of them are still about)
While I am on the fence about it, and certainly anticipated a UC: Exploration is nearly risk free, even more so with a carrier nearby. This low-risk is offset by having extreme losses when it does go wrong. If you can sell all your data whenever you want, there is almost no risk of something going wrong and no real consequences when it does go wrong. Not sure about that from a balance perspective: low-risk-low-consequences isn't the usual target.
For a start, you could have exploration content which wasn't nearly risk free even to a paper ship. If you can refit your ship out in the black, then they can start adding hazardous environments and environments that require specialist equipment, that yield valuable exploration data (and you
can sell Codex vouchers to a properly-fitted carrier), which you wouldn't necessarily want to haul all the way from the bubble just on the off-chance you might need them.
At the moment it's not worth the risk, so there's not much point in them adding really dangerous content. If later on you can land at a deep space carrier, sell it a bunch of mined goods to help pay its operating costs, then load up on HRPs and a big shield generator - again, for a cut to the operator - to go poke the Angry Lightning Bark Mound or Thargoid Ruins or whatever it is, that opens up a whole range of exploration possibilities. (Big hope: this is why the Codex rumours never showed up - they have some content of this sort that's been stuck since 3.3 waiting for the Fleet Carrier to provide the other half. You never know...)
I've been on expeditions where just having a Restock depot following us around would have been handy, never mind the rest of the services, so we didn't have to be so cautious with our SRVs, so formal expeditions - which are generally slow enough that the carrier's speed is fine - should get some nice benefits from this, too. Even if the carrier doesn't have Repair itself, in the worst case a badly damaged exploration ship could be rescued back to a port by the carrier.
Seriously, what would an Elite Commander be buying one for?
