Due largely to recent events, I've been thinking more about ED's most important commodity.
Using a T9 at a Large-pad station, I can load a Carrier at around 4,000t per hour (ballpark figure, I haven't actually timed it, but it certainly takes quite a few hours to fill it). At standard prices, that would cost me around 160 million credits. Let's assume it takes me around 2 hours to earn that much (another ballpark figure: Robigo works out at around that, I gather mining can still pay more post-nerf, but that is somewhat unreliable and requires good markets etc). So if we add the earning time to the loading time, that's about 3 hours per 4,000t, or around 1,300t per hour.
Cheap tritium costs a tenth of normal tritium, but hasn't been available in significant quantities for awhile. A few days ago, some did appear at outposts: but even though the credit cost is effectively negligible, the loading time is roughly tripled (Medium pad). So "cheap tritium" from an outpost isn't really cheap, it costs about the same as expensive tritium from a Large-pad station (3 hours to load 4,000t).
Genuinely "cheap" tritium hasn't been available since the tritpocalypse hit. With negligible earning time, the cost would have been the loading time, around 1 hour per 4,000t, a third of the cost of regular tritium (not a tenth, as its credit value would imply).
Mined tritium has no earning cost, but a much slower loading cost (the yield per hour, basically). I've seen 200t/hr quoted as a good result, I gather it's usually somewhat less. Compared to 1,300t/hr for standard station tritium, that's about 6-7 times more expensive. However, two factors complicate things. One is the fuel efficiency for "travelling light", a Carrier mining as it goes will need about half as much tritium as a fully-laden one. The other is the likelihood that the miner could be making money at the same time by gathering stuff that's more valuable than tritium (though I'm not sure what the overlap would be: handy if he's getting both from the same rock). But if he does that in the black on a long voyage, he's adding mass to the Carrier and decreasing his fuel efficiency as he goes: but on the other hand, someone burning stored tritium is increasing his fuel efficiency as he goes.
There is also the use of tritium-tankers. Tritium from a tanker needs to be both loaded and unloaded, doubling the loading-time cost. And if you're hauling it into the black, transferring some to another Carrier, and leaving enough to get back... then you're maybe burning half of it to deliver the other half as payload (depending on the distances involved, viability tapers off beyond 20,000ly from home, and the tritpocalypse has nuked Colonia as a base for this). It definitely helps to use cheap tritium, so the tritpocalypse will have hit this hard. You could arguably decrease the transfer-time cost by flying both Carriers on a parallel course and transferring tritium between jumps: with one jump every 20 minutes, even a single player could fly two Carriers along a route at the same time for awhile, and fly a refuelling ship between them, without slowing the Carrier's progress towards its destination. Not quite "free refuelling time", as you'd have less time for exploration or whatever.
Of course, if you're fortunate enough to have billions of spare credits with nothing else to spend it on, some of the above will not apply. All tritium is "cheap tritium", the loading-time cost is the only real cost.
Using a T9 at a Large-pad station, I can load a Carrier at around 4,000t per hour (ballpark figure, I haven't actually timed it, but it certainly takes quite a few hours to fill it). At standard prices, that would cost me around 160 million credits. Let's assume it takes me around 2 hours to earn that much (another ballpark figure: Robigo works out at around that, I gather mining can still pay more post-nerf, but that is somewhat unreliable and requires good markets etc). So if we add the earning time to the loading time, that's about 3 hours per 4,000t, or around 1,300t per hour.
Cheap tritium costs a tenth of normal tritium, but hasn't been available in significant quantities for awhile. A few days ago, some did appear at outposts: but even though the credit cost is effectively negligible, the loading time is roughly tripled (Medium pad). So "cheap tritium" from an outpost isn't really cheap, it costs about the same as expensive tritium from a Large-pad station (3 hours to load 4,000t).
Genuinely "cheap" tritium hasn't been available since the tritpocalypse hit. With negligible earning time, the cost would have been the loading time, around 1 hour per 4,000t, a third of the cost of regular tritium (not a tenth, as its credit value would imply).
Mined tritium has no earning cost, but a much slower loading cost (the yield per hour, basically). I've seen 200t/hr quoted as a good result, I gather it's usually somewhat less. Compared to 1,300t/hr for standard station tritium, that's about 6-7 times more expensive. However, two factors complicate things. One is the fuel efficiency for "travelling light", a Carrier mining as it goes will need about half as much tritium as a fully-laden one. The other is the likelihood that the miner could be making money at the same time by gathering stuff that's more valuable than tritium (though I'm not sure what the overlap would be: handy if he's getting both from the same rock). But if he does that in the black on a long voyage, he's adding mass to the Carrier and decreasing his fuel efficiency as he goes: but on the other hand, someone burning stored tritium is increasing his fuel efficiency as he goes.
There is also the use of tritium-tankers. Tritium from a tanker needs to be both loaded and unloaded, doubling the loading-time cost. And if you're hauling it into the black, transferring some to another Carrier, and leaving enough to get back... then you're maybe burning half of it to deliver the other half as payload (depending on the distances involved, viability tapers off beyond 20,000ly from home, and the tritpocalypse has nuked Colonia as a base for this). It definitely helps to use cheap tritium, so the tritpocalypse will have hit this hard. You could arguably decrease the transfer-time cost by flying both Carriers on a parallel course and transferring tritium between jumps: with one jump every 20 minutes, even a single player could fly two Carriers along a route at the same time for awhile, and fly a refuelling ship between them, without slowing the Carrier's progress towards its destination. Not quite "free refuelling time", as you'd have less time for exploration or whatever.
Of course, if you're fortunate enough to have billions of spare credits with nothing else to spend it on, some of the above will not apply. All tritium is "cheap tritium", the loading-time cost is the only real cost.
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