Question regarding ship building and game mechanics

[Shurimal]

I'm going slightly against the grain here and suggest a Dolphin--small, incredibly fun to fly ship and of the small ships has the most cargo space (but it's obviously not a bulk trader).

Here's the basic setup with grade 1 engineering by Felicity Farseer for delivery missions--long-range ones that take you to places a few hundred lightyears away can pay quite well.
For salvage/megaship scan/courier missions and general frolicking around I suggest this setup.

When buying, shop around in Li Yong-Rui systems for 15% discount. Inara outfitting search is an excellent tool!

 

[Kayvan]

No, I mean the straight old fashioned way, buy stuff at one station, ship it 1, 2 systems over, sell it at another station, no carriers involved.
Finding a trade route per https://inara.cz/elite/market-traderoutes/

 

[husky of snow]

Today I learn3d maxing out the rating for limpets of the size you want doesn't max out range

 

[Northpin]

Today I learn3d maxing out the rating for limpets of the size you want doesn't max out range

Yeap, collector limpets are funny
They are not simply better at their intended role as the their rate increase, like the rest of the limpet types, but... different

A-rated collectors have longest running time, but B-rated have the biggest range while D-rated have rather short range but medium duration while being the lightest
However, for most intent and purposes - A-rated are the best with the rest having niche roles (D-rated if weight is important, B-rated if range matters, E-rated if nothing else but power draw matters)

 

[Brrokk]

I'm going slightly against the grain here and suggest a Dolphin--small, incredibly fun to fly ship and of the small ships has the most cargo space (but it's obviously not a bulk trader).

Here's the basic setup with grade 1 engineering by Felicity Farseer for delivery missions--long-range ones that take you to places a few hundred lightyears away can pay quite well.
For salvage/megaship scan/courier missions and general frolicking around I suggest this setup.

When buying, shop around in Li Yong-Rui systems for 15% discount. Inara outfitting search is an excellent tool!

Good call. In fact, at the OP's stage I made a lot of credits doing passenger sightseeing missions. I don't think they're as well paid these days compared to transport missions, but still worth a try to vary activities.

 

[Felix DiCestria]

258 tonne Python
No engineering on this one, I'd suggest a trip round Li Yong Rui space for ship building.
Assuming the OP is having issues in combat I've used gimbals and seekers on the build.
Silver has decent profit margins, as do Pyrolite and Cryolite.
As for deciding where to go, back when I started I simply went off economy type in galmap possibly also referencing population size.
Never been a fan of the 3rd party tools for trading thing.

 

[husky of snow]

I'm starting to dabble in combat. Just turned on a bounty for just under a mil. Was doing salvage mission, security showed up, decided to stick around. Got some extra commodities as well

One thing I noticed in that interaction. One npc died, no commodities dropped. Other died, commodities dropped, and given that I only got one bounty, and you need to do damage to get the bounty, does a ship shot by security not drop commodities?

Also, YouTube brought to my attention there are places you can buy stuff with a 15% discount, yes please, it's where I got my lasers and multi cannons

 

[Felix DiCestria]

Sometimes they do drop cargo when Authority vessels shoot them, though what determines it I don't know.

 

[Shurimal]

NPC-s drop their cargo if they have any and if their cargo hatch gets damaged in the fight. It doesn't matter if a player or another NPC does the damage.

NPC-s drop engineering materials if a player destroys them. If one NPC destroys another no engineering materials are dropped.

 

[Darkfyre99]

No, I mean the straight old fashioned way, buy stuff at one station, ship it 1, 2 systems over, sell it at another station, no carriers involved.
Finding a trade route per https://inara.cz/elite/market-traderoutes/

You know, I fondly remember when 1000 credits/ton was considered a huge profit to make trading, and could only be acquired by camping one station for a dozen or so gold canisters to spawn. Most “best” routes according to the best profit calculator of the day quickly saturated to 200 credits/ton, so you really had to pay attention, know how the economy worked, and adapt if you wanted to maintain 600 credits per ton. This amounted to about 320k/hour in a Cobra III, if you also knew how to gravity brake at your destination.

I had a rare two session day yesterday, and if my logs are to be believed, despite:

• Flying a Cobra III equipped to do many different types of missions
• Selecting reputation rewards each time
• Scanning a wake on the way out of a station
• Paying attention to station info, and bookmarking any station with notable services
• Dropping into any “good” USS on my path to the station, including two HGEs
• Checking Pioneer at each new station I visited for any good G3 equipment

I still averaged over 1.6 mil credits/hour, while also earning a ton of reputation with the Alliance, and acquiring some G5 data and materials. No oppprtunities to do bounty hunting, though. All using the in-game tools, while not focusing on credits at all.

Most important of all, I enjoyed myself immensely, because I rarely visited the same station twice. Makes gravity braking tricky if you’re not familiar with the approach.

If I’d used that online tool, I apparently could (theoretically) make 10 million credits/hour in the same ship fitted for cargo only. Doing ABA cargo runs. Avoiding that monotony is why I focused on the BGS side of PowerPlay when not out exploring.

Edit: as @Jmanis pointed out below, the default Inara "trade" function isn't very reliable. More appropriate seach parameters, with reasonable supply and demand minimums, yields about 4 million credits/hour.

 

[metatheurgist]

When I did trading it was all opportunistic. I'd arrive somewhere and check where I was and where I was going and see if there was a chance of making a profit. Made getting Lei Chung's requirement easy. I don't see ABA "trading" as trade, it's transport. No company would be dumb enough to let someone else make that profit if the profit was sustainable and qtys required in bulk.

 

[Darkfyre99]

Exactly. All the trading I did yesterday was to fill my ship's meager hold while, since the choice of destination was up to my passenger, since that was my primary reputation provider and credit earner. Very rarely did I get any synnergistic small hauling missions, since I wasn't planning on doing any fetch and return missions that day. Didn't use my SRV for anything either, since there were no synnergistic ground missions. Did get some courier missions in. Since they inevitably provided the "get there under two minutes" bonus, and I know how to Supercruise efficiently, I could turn those in for the rep and still make nearly 100k.

edit:
This is my ship's build, for those who are curious.

Coriolis EDCD Edition

A ship builder, outfitting and comparison tool for Elite Dangerous

s.orbis.zone

 

[Jmanis]

No, I mean the straight old fashioned way, buy stuff at one station, ship it 1, 2 systems over, sell it at another station, no carriers involved.
Finding a trade route per https://inara.cz/elite/market-traderoutes/

Does that actually work?

All the ones i could see that come close to 30-40m/h for a python wouldn't work because they're dependent on a low-supply source which Inara has miscalculated as being able to fill a full ship, where there's actually only 20-odd tonnes of cargo available.

The only routes i could see that could reliably be run turn only a quarter of that profit, maybe a half if lucky.

 

[Darkfyre99]

Does that actually work?

All the ones i could see that come close to 30-40m/h for a python wouldn't work because they're dependent on a low-supply source which Inara has miscalculated as being able to fill a full ship, where there's actually only 20-odd tonnes of cargo available.

The only routes i could see that could reliably be run turn only a quarter of that profit, maybe a half if lucky.

A fair point, and one I hadn't considered when I just put in the C3's cargo capacity (with shield attached) without changing the supply and demand. Adding reasonable supply and demand minimums brought the credits/hour down to 4 million/hour. Which I added to my post above.

Still an obscene amount of money IMO. Especially since they pretty much rely on only one high value cargo for the outgoing leg, and barely any profit for the return leg. IIRC, yesterday I was finding 10k/ton trades fairly often, and even the worst "blind" trades were around 1.5k/ton. All in space I was unfamiliar with.

 

[Jmanis]

A fair point, and one I hadn't considered when I just put in the C3's cargo capacity (with shield attached) without changing the supply and demand. Adding reasonable supply and demand minimums brought the credits/hour down to 4 million/hour. Which I added to my post above.

Still an obscene amount of money IMO. Especially since they pretty much rely on only one high value cargo for the outgoing leg, and barely any profit for the return leg. IIRC, yesterday I was finding 10k/ton trades fairly often, and even the worst "blind" trades were around 1.5k/ton. All in space I was unfamiliar with.

Oh yeah... especially when you consider this was what good looked like in the past...

(And lol, this comment from 8 years ago... "Easy money is doing an Altair to Delta Phoenetics run takes around 8 minutes each way in an Asp with the 5 mill Fsd. I am making 250,000ish profit each way now that feels like cheating but I can't find anything that gives that time/profit ratio so I'll be milking that cow. Only downside is if you have to wait for respawns.")

 

[Darkfyre99]

Oh yeah... especially when you consider this was what good looked like in the past...

(And lol, this comment from 8 years ago... "Easy money is doing an Altair to Delta Phoenetics run takes around 8 minutes each way in an Asp with the 5 mill Fsd. I am making 250,000ish profit each way now that feels like cheating but I can't find anything that gives that time/profit ratio so I'll be milking that cow. Only downside is if you have to wait for respawns.")

And the sad thing is, the trade in the video wasn't even that good, since he was buying from a low supply station. It looked like a lot of money, but IIRC even "mid priced" tier commodities were producing more than that, as long as you went from high supply to high demand, and 1000+ trades were fairly common for "high priced" commodities. Those were the days...

 

[Kayvan]

Well, it worked for me when I last did it, a couple weeks ago with my Alt. Yes, you need to keep an eye on supply and demand, and changing prices.
It certainly works a lot better than many other "get rich quick" activities that depend on the availability of just the right missions in just the right systems, or simply random chance. Typically, most of those "XXX million credits per hour!" claims totally omit all the overhead. That's kinda like an estate agent only timing the actual signing of the contract and boasting "I made a 5000€ commission in five minutes!".

And sometimes you can also opportunistically grab a piece of the cake when some player group is rigging the BGS. But if you're not rigging yourself, those are just windfall gains and nothing you can plan for as an independent player. And of course the rigging itself takes time so I'm not sure under what circumstances it's actually worth it.

 

[Darkfyre99]

And sometimes you can also opportunistically grab a piece of the cake when some player group is rigging the BGS. But if you're not rigging yourself, those are just windfall gains and nothing you can plan for as an independent player. And of course the rigging itself takes time so I'm not sure under what circumstances it's actually worth it.

Speaking as someone who actually did that sort of thing before the big BGS revamp, in a low population, no traffic (besides me) system, I could create a “gold rush” in about 40-60 hours of play IIRC, and I was in a Cobra III at the time. I’d then “leak” the system’s info to 3rd party sites, sit back and watch my chosen faction’s influence skyrocket from the sudden influx of players, followed by the combat junkies who’d hopefully flip control of the system to that same faction. There were a lot of anti-fed/pro-independant BGS groups out there. Either way, it also meant that the Fed’s PowerPlay BGS groups were kept busy putting out the fires I’d light.

It wasn’t very profitable at first, but once passenger missions were a thing, I was soon swimming in credits. More importantly, I was having fun role playing an Imperial agent who was preying on the corruption inherent to Fed society while helping brave freedom fighters earn a chance at freedom.

My biggest disappointment with the BGS revamp was changing “criminal” missions to always have a “positive” effect on a faction’s states. It made much more sense for illegal missions to negatively affect security, and it made BGS manipulation far more nuanced than it is today.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

You know, I fondly remember when 1000 credits/ton was considered a huge profit to make trading, and could only be acquired by camping one station for a dozen or so gold canisters to spawn. Most “best” routes according to the best profit calculator of the day quickly saturated to 200 credits/ton, so you really had to pay attention, know how the economy worked, and adapt if you wanted to maintain 600 credits per ton. This amounted to about 320k/hour in a Cobra III, if you also knew how to gravity brake at your destination.

I had a rare two session day yesterday, and if my logs are to be believed, despite:

• Flying a Cobra III equipped to do many different types of missions
• Selecting reputation rewards each time
• Scanning a wake on the way out of a station
• Paying attention to station info, and bookmarking any station with notable services
• Dropping into any “good” USS on my path to the station, including two HGEs
• Checking Pioneer at each new station I visited for any good G3 equipment

I still averaged over 1.6 mil credits/hour, while also earning a ton of reputation with the Alliance, and acquiring some G5 data and materials. No oppprtunities to do bounty hunting, though. All using the in-game tools, while not focusing on credits at all.

Most important of all, I enjoyed myself immensely, because I rarely visited the same station twice. Makes gravity braking tricky if you’re not familiar with the approach.

If I’d used that online tool, I apparently could (theoretically) make 10 million credits/hour in the same ship fitted for cargo only. Doing ABA cargo runs. Avoiding that monotony is why I focused on the BGS side of PowerPlay when not out exploring.

Edit: as @Jmanis pointed out below, the default Inara "trade" function isn't very reliable. More appropriate seach parameters, with reasonable supply and demand minimums, yields about 4 million credits/hour.

1000 credits/t - almost impossible back then. That's why I would rate anything done with the puny cargo sizes in ED ships as unfeasible.
When they introduced the planetary bases it took another one or two updates until system states started to generate decent margins. Thorium was a good commodity and medical item wosname.
Then you have items like printed food. Worth a penny. How much is max cargo space? 280 tons? 300 tons? You know how much the margin on those food cartridges is? One penny? A tenth of a penny per ton? 300 tons * 1 penny = 3 credits.
THAT is bulk trading. Having a means to move these penny articles in bulk so you can earn cash per hour. There is no reason to ever ship most of the crappy commodities without having bulk storage capacities.

 

[Darkfyre99]

1000 credits/t - almost impossible back then. That's why I would rate anything done with the puny cargo sizes in ED ships as unfeasible.
When they introduced the planetary bases it took another one or two updates until system states started to generate decent margins. Thorium was a good commodity and medical item wosname.
Then you have items like printed food. Worth a penny. How much is max cargo space? 280 tons? 300 tons? You know how much the margin on those food cartridges is? One penny? A tenth of a penny per ton? 300 tons * 1 penny = 3 credits.
THAT is bulk trading. Having a means to move these penny articles in bulk so you can earn cash per hour. There is no reason to ever ship most of the crappy commodities without having bulk storage capacities.

Which is why I keep calling the vast gulf between larger ship and module prices and their utility ED’s “original sin.” A ship that hauls six times as much cargo costs 40 times as much, with operational costs scaling similarly? That was the problem, not income. But because they scaled up income instead of fixing prices, we get a situation like the OP’s: too much ship for their ability to maintain it. Meanwhile, I’m routinely seeing milk run missions that offered me half the price of my A-Rated, heavily armored Cobra Mk III, even in totally unfamiliar space.

It’s madness!