[Suggestion] Fabrications Carrier Module

[Tividar]

The Fabrications module would house equipment necessary for maintaining life support and other necessary equipment. It's in-game purpose would be to convert the upkeep cost of the carrier into demand for Commodities. For simplicity I'd set the list of commodities and the associated demand based on the modules a carrier had equipped, but the list could be somewhat variable to inject some dynamism. At the end of each weekly cycle, the Fabrications Module would consume some tonnage of commodities held in the carrier's cargo hold in place of the normal CR charge for upkeep. The Fabrications Module would consume stolen cargo before "clean" cargo. If the carrier lacked the appropriate commodities for any given module, that module's upkeep in Credits would be charged as normal.

Example:
Refuel (Advanced Maintenance) - upkeep 1,500,000 CR
Possible Commodity:
Hydrogen Fuel - 50 Tons

To the carrier owner, Hydrogen Fuel would be worth 30,000 CR per ton of Hydrogen per week (Upkeep/Required Tonnage). The Carrier Owner could then place a Buy Order in his Commodities Market or Secure Warehouse based on that 30,000 CR value. You could easily tune the cost by fiddling with the Commodity list and the number of tons required.

Some of the relationships aren't very realistic: 50 Tons of Hydrogen Fuel feels low for providing refueling services for a week. Likewise a profit margin of over 30,000% per ton for the hauler is a bit crazy, but ultimately those are reflections of a lack of realism in the game's economic model. The goal should be to have a Commodity (or Commodities) rationally tied to the appropriate module, and a tonnage requirement low enough such that freighting make economic sense.

If the list of commodities needed included both a minable and non-minable option, it would give Explorers another way to fund the operation of a carrier during deep-space exploration. The use of "stolen" cargo gives another option for the Piracy Game-Loop. Creating a demand point at the carrier also creates more trade options for Haulers.

 

[varonica]

Not sure what you are trying to do here, upkeep is trivial as is and exploration data turned in even for casual exploring exceeds upkeep costs by many times so it seems a rather pointless exercise.

 

[Tividar]

Not sure what you are trying to do here, upkeep is trivial as is and exploration data turned in even for casual exploring exceeds upkeep costs by many times so it seems a rather pointless exercise.

Player driven demand for commodities

 

[varonica]

Player driven demand for commodities

From reading this I'm not sure how it fulfils that demand! So the example of Hydrogen, it's basically so cheap it may as well be free, hydrogen fuel is scooped from every star using a fuel scoop, I have never seen any need or had any desire to actually buy Hydrogen!

 

[Tividar]

I used Hydrogen because its the extreme case. While you can scoop it, you can't sell what you've scooped. Within the game's economy, I don't think I've ever seen a situation where it'd be worth it to haul. There's basically no demand for it (as in no combination of states that make the sell price worthwhile).

If you set the upkeep cost for Refuel (Advanced Maintenance) at "x" tons of Hydrogen Fuel or 1,500,000 CR, then the value of the Hydrogen Fuel becomes (1,500,000 CR / "x") to the Carrier owner. Set the number of tons low enough and the carrier owner can place a buy order high enough to be economically worth-while to traders. A fully equipped carrier might need 800+ tons of commodities delivered weekly.

Using the 50 ton number above, a carrier owner might Import Hydrogen Fuel for 30,000 CR and Export Platinum for 255,000 CR. Round-Trip trade for the Hauler might be as much as 60,000 CR per Ton.

This works for any commodity.
It can't be used for infinite passive CR creation.
It would support the functioning of the DSSA by allowing distributive logistical support.
It gives Pirates/Privateers/Scavengers a useful place to sell "stolen" cargo.

For a dedicated deep-space Explorer with a minimally equipped carrier, the benefit is marginal.

 

[varonica]

I just don't see a use case for it though, it seems an overly complicated system that isn't actually useful for anything.

For a dedicated deep-space Explorer with a minimally equipped carrier, the benefit is marginal.

I can assure you marginal is a great exageration, for the entire time I have owned a Fleet Carrier I have never used the market once and every time I see it I get annoyed that it's even there, why can't I get rid of it and use the extra available cargo space for useful stuff?

 

[Tividar]

I just don't see a use case for it though, it seems an overly complicated system that isn't actually useful for anything.

I get the sense you're primarily interested in exploration...

On the trading side of things, more player agency would be huge. The problem is designing viable market-based interactions that don't incentivize Real-Money transactions.

 

[GroG79]

I like this idea. You put some effort and you get less upkeep. Also I can do something with my pirated stuff.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

So, firstly, I do approve of trying to make more of the commodities more useful, and making the commodity trade more purposeful than simple credit profit. However, I don't think this is going to work.



The problem I think is that maximum upkeep on a carrier is only 25 million per week (and far less than that for many carriers)

That's one high-end mission, or an hour's not-entirely-optimal mining trip, or a bunch of other fairly straightforward things. For someone who obtained the 5-6 billion to buy the carrier in the first place, it's not a big deal anyway. I don't even think about my carrier's upkeep because I know that I'll cover it and more just by normal play.

For someone inside the bubble with a bit of spare capacity inside the carrier, they can just grab the cargo themselves pretty quickly - sure, they could micromanage their offers to encourage other players to deliver the cargo, but the odds of someone actually doing so are pretty small unless you also put effort into advertising the carrier, by the time you've paid them enough to bother you're only saving yourself a couple of million, and by that point you might as well have either got the cargo yourself or covered the upkeep with cash.

For carriers outside the bubble, then it's more of an option to cut upkeep costs in theory - but in practice, even at 60k/tonne dragging a few hundred tonnes of cargo tens of thousands of LY is not really economical, when you can get 40k/tonne from one-hop NPC trading. So, again, much easier to cover the cost with cash - the exploration data someone sells there would be worth more than the cargo anyway.



The only way I think this could work is if you couldn't cover the upkeep with cash - you have to use cargo. Then there's an instant and large logistics requirement to keep deep space carriers operational. Given the complaints about obtaining just Tritium in deep space, the dislike in general for carrier upkeep which has seen it significantly reduced from the original plan, and that being a very tricky thing to spring on people who are already out in the middle of nowhere with a carrier ... no chance, I think. It might have been possible if it worked that way from the start, but it can't be changed to that now. And without changing it to that ... well, credits are just way more convenient.

 

[Tividar]

So, firstly, I do approve of trying to make more of the commodities more useful, and making the commodity trade more purposeful than simple credit profit. However, I don't think this is going to work.

The problem I think is that maximum upkeep on a carrier is only 25 million per week (and far less than that for many carriers)

That's one high-end mission, or an hour's not-entirely-optimal mining trip, or a bunch of other fairly straightforward things. For someone who obtained the 5-6 billion to buy the carrier in the first place, it's not a big deal anyway. I don't even think about my carrier's upkeep because I know that I'll cover it and more just by normal play.

For someone inside the bubble with a bit of spare capacity inside the carrier, they can just grab the cargo themselves pretty quickly - sure, they could micromanage their offers to encourage other players to deliver the cargo, but the odds of someone actually doing so are pretty small unless you also put effort into advertising the carrier, by the time you've paid them enough to bother you're only saving yourself a couple of million, and by that point you might as well have either got the cargo yourself or covered the upkeep with cash.

I don't really disagree with any of what you said, but...
Posting orders isn't really all that difficult, and once they're there you don't have to update them.
Inara isn't perfect - but it will show carrier supply and demand prices if you're uploading.
If profit is the problem, you can always cut the number of tons needed. As long as its less lucrative than the current prime money makers it doesn't really change the economy.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Posting orders isn't really all that difficult, and once they're there you don't have to update them.
Inara isn't perfect - but it will show carrier supply and demand prices if you're uploading.

Those are both true, but with so many thousands of carriers about I think you'd have to get very lucky for someone else to come along to yours. The average Inara-reported market data age for carriers is days old.

As long as its less lucrative than the current prime money makers it doesn't really change the economy.

I think it would by definition be less lucrative than those. (It's fine if it was more lucrative - it's just a transfer of money between players and you can do that much faster already if that's your goal)

Maximum current earnings are well above 150M/hour.
Maximum carrier upkeep is just over 25M/week.

So let's say a carrier owner is willing to pay 25M for you to bring them their weekly supplies (saving themselves an irrelevant couple of million credits a week). If it takes you longer than ten minutes to:
- locate the carrier offering that deal
- obtain the goods
- fly to the carrier
- sell the goods
...you're certainly not being anywhere near optimal. And any disruption - the carrier isn't open to all players, or someone else beat you to it by an hour or two, or the goods required can't all be bought at a single station, and it really stops being profitable at all. (Which is why I think you'd need to be much more proactive at advertising than just sticking something up on Inara - people would want a guarantee of availability)

In practice, I don't think people would agree on reasonable prices, based on what's happened with the Long-range Tritium economy. Most players don't account for opportunity costs and time costs, so there's a few people who haul Tritium up to Colonia on a non-profit basis occasionally (and therefore sell for ~100-150k/tonne) but no-one would be willing to pay the ~400k/tonne needed to make it a reasonably competitive profit opportunity for the haulers or attract people away from other mining types.

 

[Dragsham]

For us on the dark side. Who view the default commodity market as useless, twould be a royal pain to have to micromanage it.
Traders yeah l think they would like a more sophisticated commodity market.
But to us who use carriers for nefarious means... nah!! Soz not selling it.
o7

 

[Misty_Dark]

I don't really disagree with any of what you said, but...
Posting orders isn't really all that difficult, and once they're there you don't have to update them.
Inara isn't perfect - but it will show carrier supply and demand prices if you're uploading.
If profit is the problem, you can always cut the number of tons needed. As long as its less lucrative than the current prime money makers it doesn't really change the economy.

So for this to even work, you would need to rely on a 3rd party site and 3rd party tools to even make this into a somewhat viable option....

How would this work for the console players? do you expect console players to manually update their stuff on 3rd party sites?
On the PC, how many players do actually run the 3rd party tools to automatically upload data?

There is one thing to go to sites like Inara to search for stuff, but another to actually create an account and setup 3rd party tools to upload stuff etc.



And how would this work from an purely ingame perspective? How would other players find out about these orders? without having to resort to 3rd party tools...