This much spacetrucking is literally PAINFUL.
Unfortunately ED - from the very first public release - changed up a key aspect of trading compared with how it worked in the old games.
They clearly want it to take about 5-10 hours of game time to build an outpost (depending on how close and reliable your supplies are) either individually or shared between players in a group. So if there'd been a 1500t capacity ship available, all that would have happened would be that the targets would be twice as high to compensate [1]. 5-10 hours isn't an unreasonable amount of time to spend on it in the general sense (and with the size of the bubble having increased by 40% in a week, by Frontier's own figures, not counting another similarly-sized pile of incomplete claims ... hard to argue that it's too long for players collectively even if players individually might prefer it to be a bit quicker)
The problem is that 5-10 hours of hauling can be really boring, because the things which made hauling interesting in the old games (or for that matter in the few other modern space trading/hauling games) generally don't exist in Elite Dangerous.
In the previous games, there was no equivalent of the ability to either beat an interdiction in supercruise, or to submit-boost-low wake to instantly escape the fight. So if pirates intercepted you - and they would, repeatedly, in any but the highest-security systems - you needed to be able to kill them. So in this model, your trade profit isn't the reward for moving the cargo from station A to station B, it's your reward for killing the pirates who tried to stop you (because if the pirates aren't there, an automated drone could have done the job). The actual
bounties for killing pirates were generally therefore pretty small - equivalent to the profits on 1-2t of cargo each.
In Elite Dangerous, you never have to fight, so the most efficient way to trade is:
- don't waste space on defences that could be extra cargo racks
- use SCO and approach angles in supercruise so that you've already reached the station before the NPC can even think about interdicting you
And that leaves very little scope (other than perfecting your supercruise technique) for actual interest. In theory, searching for an appropriate supply source could be the challenge. But as the last week of CMM supply changes showed, that's essentially competitive gameplay: you need to be better at it than at least some of the other players doing the same thing, or you just get the scraps - and not everyone can be a winner. And colonisation by word-of-Frontier isn't supposed to be a competitive feature.
So what it needs is not ways to haul twice as much cargo per trip, but ways to substitute some of that cargo hauling for other options which are comparably time-efficient but add a bit more variety to the job. And that's not going to be a quick fix, even if Frontier want to do it.
[1] As I mentioned in another thread, if you compare the current hauling CG to a comparably popular one held in 2016, the current one has
ten times the cargo delivery rate. The difference is so pronounced that a CG last year which
failed and was widely criticised as an example of bad CG design (poor goods pricing, low turnout, no interesting rewards or consequences)
still had a million tonnes more cargo delivered than that super-popular 2016 one. Because since 2016 lots more people have T-9s and Cutters, there are more powerful and cheaper engineering options, we've got SCO, we've got Fleet Carriers, etc. etc. Lots of power creep in peoples T/hr/LY rates.
This didn't mean that the current CG got completed in three days, because that's how long it now takes to deliver 20MT of cargo, it means that Frontier have had to (gradually, over the last decade) add an extra zero to the CG targets so that they generally still run the full week (or two weeks, in this case).
Any cargo capacity power creep will inevitably need to be responded to by making the
next hauling-based challenge have a difficulty based on everyone flying Panther Clippers with the optional Trailer attachment for even more cargo. It's a tempting quick fix but it doesn't help in the long run.
