Is early trading worth it?

[IceSerpent]

A maxed out Lykon Type 7 with 208 cargo hold trading standard commodities makes ~1.6 million credits/hr.

Your math is way off. First, maxed out Type 7 carries 232 tons of cargo. Second, that maxed out Type 7 normally makes between 2.6 and 3.6 mil /hr (depending on how good the trade route is).

Commodities cost are very expensive with a high risk typically a 5:1 ratio between cost versus profit.
It is a slow, poor manuvering with less weaponry one will probably never get on target.
It requires constant flying.

This part is true, freighters are just freighters - they are not very good at fighting.

 

[RedWizzard]

Your math is way off. First, maxed out Type 7 carries 232 tons of cargo. Second, that maxed out Type 7 normally makes between 2.6 and 3.6 mil /hr (depending on how good the trade route is).

Shield-less, sure, 232. But then a lot of that extra profit can get eaten up in repair costs. 3.6m/h would be exceptionally high, I doubt that's realistic over any length of time. It would require 11 trips per hour making 1400 per ton.

 

[Blast Hardcheese]

I am making 20k credits in my hauler, tbh it seems very slow. Should I do other stuff such as missions/bounty hunting until I can afford a better ship?

Hauler as a complete waste of money to me, got an adder and bounty hunted and traded till i could get a Cobra, then traded to a type 6
so to answer your question, in short no.

 

[IceSerpent]

Shield-less, sure, 232. But then a lot of that extra profit can get eaten up in repair costs. 3.6m/h would be exceptionally high, I doubt that's realistic over any length of time. It would require 11 trips per hour making 1400 per ton.

Repair costs are actually surprisingly low on that thing - I've had my fair share of bumping into sides of "mail slot" and into landing pads when I first got type 7, but repair bills were not high.

3.6 mil is high. The trade route I am working right now is 10 min round trip with 1300 profit one way and 1000 the other way, so I basically calculated 10 mins round trip with 1300 profit each way for a "maximum". A more realistic figure would be somewhere between 2.6 and 3.6 mil.

 

[terminatahx]

Thats not really true. Just do them when you know where to get the stuff. They are usually the best paying missions for a long time. I usually do those bulk-wise. For example run a trade route between a high tech and a refinery station and collect all fetch-food missions. Then when you have enough do them all at once. After that go back to the normal trade route.

Exactly what Ive been doing.

Yesterday, I queued up 20 slave missions from systems 1 jump apart. The profit was a mix of rep gain and cash. Cash alone paid netted me about 250k profit.

 

[BillD]

+1 for trading rares

There is a nice big thread on here dedicated to rare trading.....

That's one disadvantage of being way way out, 250LY away from SOL. Great for mining and never seeing another player but also never see rares. I am also about 10 jumps away from the nearest empire system, have hundreds of K of empire bounties to hand in, but its a day trip (well not really a day but its a big round trip)