Why do most commodities weigh so much? It just artificially limits what things are viable to trade.

[DemiserofD]

For example, Food Canisters. Because they take one cargo space each, it means that even if there's a huge price difference between buy and sell, they'll almost never be worth trading in, simply because you can never carry more than ~750 at a time.

This artificially limits what commodities are actually viable to trade, which seems very silly. What is the rationale for this limitation? From a gameplay standpoint, that is.

Wouldn't it make more sense for commodities to take far less space, so you could carry, say, 500 in a type 6, or 5000+ in a type 9? That would significantly increase the number of commodities that would be viable to trade with, as well as increase the potential risk in trading.

Right now, a very rich player faces very little risk in trading. Worst case, they lose ~50m, which they'll make back five times over in a single trip.

But if instead your profit margin were 20%, but you could carry 5000 of a commodity, you could conceivably carry a billion credits in commodities alone. The risk, and therefore excitement, would be much higher.

And players wouldn't be limited to trading 1-3 of a huge list of commodities, most of which end up completely ignored.

 

[Vahnkiljoy]

Everything weighs the same, 1 ton, so I'm not sure where you're getting some magical extra weight....

 

[DemiserofD]

I meant that EVERYTHING weighs too much.

Because your cargo capacity is so limited, it means you can never economically trade in lower-value goods like food canisters. Or, in reality, 98% of all goods in the galaxy.

 

[Vahnkiljoy]

Everything weighs 1 ton and 1 cargo space, you don't consume any extra cargo space for anything so I really still don't get your complaint.

 

[DemiserofD]

My complaint is that the limited cargo space available means most commodities aren't ever worth trading, so they might as well not even exist. Perhaps I phrased it poorly.

SOME commodities have high value, so their weight is acceptable. But MOST have low value, so their weight, despite being the same, makes them unaccepable.

 

[Dillon Fallon]

Depends on the state of the system you're selling to.

Any cargo is worth a good amount of credits if you consider what might be in demand. Sell food to famine states, medicines in outbreak states etc and you make decent money.

 

[Pristine_Bump]

Water to Drought Weapons to Civil Unrest

 

[Vardaugas]

I remember in the first Elite gems would weight 0.01t. Made them usually the most profitable thing to trade if you had the money. Though there usually wasn't much supply. I suppose that was abandoned for simplicity's sake.

 

[fennster]

The runs I was making between RBS 1843 and ABI a few days ago was tritium out and food cartridges back in. I was buying the food catridges at 31cr and selling at 3,100 cr per unit, that was an extra 2.5 mil credit on the return trip.

Some traders also like to do multi hop routes too, rather than 2 hop loops to stop it getting stale. Some of the lower priced commodities might be the best you can do on some of the intermediate jumps.

 

[DemiserofD]

The runs I was making between RBS 1843 and ABI a few days ago was tritium out and food cartridges back in. I was buying the food catridges at 31cr and selling at 3,100 cr per unit, that was an extra 2.5 mil credit on the return trip.

Some traders also like to do multi hop routes too, rather than 2 hop loops to stop it getting stale. Some of the lower priced commodities might be the best you can do on some of the intermediate jumps.

That's a great example, a lot of those commodities SHOULD be worth trading for their own sake, but atm they're only worth it if you have a dead leg of your run to fill. And even then, often not. It makes a tiny fraction of your total income.

Wouldn't it be more fun if commodities took far less cargo space? After doing so, you could remove the extreme outliers like Polymers or Tritium entirely, and still have a very engaging trade system with hundreds of potential options, rather than 2-3!

For example, say you multiplied the cargo space on the T9 by 100(bear with me). So rather than 750 cargo space, you've got 75000 cargo space. So first of all, you have to go find a station with a huge supply just to fill yourself up. Once you're there, you have to buy 75000, say Advanced Medicines, with an investment of nearly 100m! Now your heart is pounding, because you've got a serious investment to worry about! Then, you can't just unload all that at one station, because nobody will have anywhere near that much demand, so you've gotta stop at several different stations along the way, but by the time you've unloaded it all, you've made 400 million credits in profit!

And as you go along, since you're unloading commodities, and since every commodity is a potential for actual legitimate profit, you actually have incentive to pay attention to what each station is selling! Maybe they're selling Domestic Equipment for 500 credits below the galactic average; right now, that's not worth bothering with, but with actual significant amounts of cargo space available, that's a potential for serious credit investment!

I dunno, I just think it would really make the trading experience a lot deeper.

 

[Sysmon]

Freight companies today use weight-to-volume calculations. We could use some of the same in ED: Everything has the same volume per unit, as the unit is the space in the cargo pod loaded onto the ship. But the weight would be different based on what is place in the pod.

That would add a bit of thinking to cargo running, as the ship owner would need to balance the volumetric carrying capacity of a ship with the actual mass of the cargo: Clothes and consumer stuff would be relatively light, at 200 - 500 kg per cubic metre. Water is 1 tonne/cubic metre. Ore is anywhere from 2 to 8 or more tonnes per cubic metre.

So if a 64 m3 cargo capacity ship was loaded with water, it would handle very differently and consume fuel very differently compared to it being loaded with, say, scrap metal or mineral ore. In fact, it would change fuel use and handling quite a bit.

This might add some depth to the game play that most people don't want as they just want to sit in their own little sandboxes and watch cr/hour ratios (it seems). But it would be hilariously fun to watch someone load up their ship at a mining hot spot, supercruise to a station, drop out into real space and realise they have no brakes because they overloaded their ship beyond thruster capacity...

S

 

[Pristine_Bump]

My new ship has 25000 T

 

[jacozilla]

My complaint is that the limited cargo space available means most commodities aren't ever worth trading, so they might as well not even exist. Perhaps I phrased it poorly.

SOME commodities have high value, so their weight is acceptable. But MOST have low value, so their weight, despite being the same, makes them unaccepable.

like the other respondent, i‘m not sure understand your complaint either.

1 ton of food weighs same as 1 ton of diamonds....food has relatively low value compared to diamonds, hence a ton of food or any other low value commodity will never be anywhere near ballpark profitable as trading ton of diamonds.

it sounds like what you are asking for is an impossibility - e.g. You would like to be able to somehow carry more of the much lower value item in order to make a reasonable trade profit, but haven‘t explained how you would fit that larger quantity into the same tonnage limit. A ship with 400 ton capacity that can carry 400 tons of diamonds can‘t magically carry 4000 tons of food.

what you would need is a 4000 ton rated ship, which even if became available as new ship class added to game, you’d be back to same problem of most players would just carry 4000 tons of diamond or whatever higher value trade item.

i get the merit of what you are trying to say, but I don’t think you are fully grasping the common denominator of shipping freight is the tonnage. The real problem you should be asking is why there are no bulk carriers for players - despite the cutter and T9 being much larger tonnage carrying than say an adder, it is still in the same class - e.g. relatively small freight

basically our player ships are trucks or big rigs - IRL low value per ton but necessary for life/economy goods are shipped via huge 1000+ container ships or giant natural gas ships. You can’t make a reasonable profit per 1 trip with basic commodities bc there is no class of ship that mimics a giant grain ship, Panamax container ship, etc vs the relatively tiny player tonnage limited ships. So by design, we’re limited to profiting from high value per ton items.

 

[Sysmon]

More modifications could be made, such as giving the supply-demand part of the game-play some teeth: The low value goods, as @jacozilla mentioned above, are moved in very large quantities in todays' terms. That should not be possible for the most high-value commodities, as they simply are not generated in high enough numbers. Also, mineral commodities often are very dense, so you wouldn't want to fill up your "rig" with ore unless you have a very specialised one that is basically all engine and suspension.

Gold is another great example. Density is close to 20 tonnes per cubic metre, but even if you could fill a freighter with gold, we currently have a world-wide issue of just not enough gold in circulation to be actually able to buy physical gold.

I'd love to see these kind of cargo hauling issues in the game. They would certainly place a dampener on credit earning ability, as well as add a bit of complications (which some of us call game play).

S

 

[Old Duck]

Everything weighs the same, 1 ton, so I'm not sure where you're getting some magical extra weight....

Everything also has the same volume, which means everything has the same density. So either the 1 ton of tea is highly compressed, or the 1 ton of palladium is a small nugget in the middle of a whole lot of packing peanuts.

So I agree with the OP, more from an immersion point of view, because density should vary. For example, I should be able to carry more tonnage of diamonds than water, as neither are compressible.

 

[jacozilla]

Everything also has the same volume, which means everything has the same density. So either the 1 ton of tea is highly compressed, or the 1 ton of palladium is a small nugget in the middle of a whole lot of packing peanuts.

So I agree with the OP, more from an immersion point of view, because density should vary. For example, I should be able to carry more tonnage of diamonds than water, as neither are compressible.

yes and no. tonnage would be same but everything would not have same volume. For some things sure, could see how advanced form of compacting could allow much lower cubic meter volume needed for any given ton of that item. But for many items, no - they are either not practical to compress by much or can’t be.

so volume would definitely not be the same. In ED the devs i assume decided to focus only on Tons for simplicity, but while I am no expert on space, I can talk about maritime shipping which I believe some physicist should be able to confirm is reasonably similar for limitations on space hauling.

in maritime shipping, every nation uses the same standardized shipping container specs - there are number of different spec containers but 2 most common are 20 and 40 foot containers. A 20 foot container (aka TEU) can hold ~33 cubic meters volume and is ,ax rated for 28 tons. If your freight consigned for that container takes more space or weighs more, it doesnt go.

for simplicity, most ppl refer to container ships by # of containers it can carry - a Panamax container ship can carry 5000 TEUs, the more modern New Panamax can carry 13k TEUs, which can then be translated into total cubic meters and tonnage of freight it can carry. But regardless the total cubic meters of cargo carried, the weight (or mass in space) is the real limiting factor - based on weather season and fuel range, it can be foolhardy to carry above a certain total weight / mass. The engines can only drive so hard and i would assume in space the mass would be the main limit (aside from the physical matter of fitting the freight into whatever max volume is available). Higher weight / mass = lower speed (or thrust in space).

aside from safety factors, speed = life and death profit for container ships, a few days late penalty is massive for shipping much less the profit per idle day loss. So what we are talking about here is in ED we ought to have both a cubic volume rating AND tonnage or mass rating per ship to determine how ’much’ cargo we can carry. Every cargo item ought to have both a cubic meter value and tonnage value - and whichever limit is hit first, then no more cargo can be loaded.

just like IRL container ships, either you carry a whole lot of volume that weighs very little, or a relatively small volume but highly dense cargo that weighs a lot. (Or some combo of the two with neither limit being reached, or 1 limit of cubic volume or mass being reached first). In ED terms we either carry 500 tons of ore that fits in relatively small cubic meter space in just 1 cargo hold, or fill every cargo hold to the brim with some low mass cargo like feathers.

this still doesnt help OPs request though, b/c without much larger bulk carrier ships being available to players, he could fill a Cutter to the brim in terms of max cubic volume with food cartridges but the total tonnage would be low (and hence sell only a few tons of profit) or it would be some super special magic compressed food nutrient cartridge like gold bars but would then hit the total tonnage / mass limit far before cubic volume of cargo capacity was used up.

the only way OP could get what he wants is if ED ignored tonnage / mass completely and just used a cubic volume limit only rating - which would then allow a whole lot more food cartridges to be shipped. But hate sounding like a loop recording but this would also put us back to square one - why ship a whole bunch of small volume food cartridges when you could ship almost just as many gold bars?

the solution, if we need one, are classes of ships that can carry a much higher volume of low mass cargo, aka grain ship or bulk food carrier. Put in ED terms, a cutter that can carry 500 tons of any cargo as we do today, or the new SuperBarge that can carry 5000 units but only from this list of low mass cargo - food, feathers, blankets, etc

 

[TiberiusDuval]

You don't buy single food cartridge you buy a ton of food cartridges. And likewise for other stuff. And well a ton is a ton.

 

[Hopix]

What's heavier, a ton of bricks or a ton of feathers?

 

[Morbad]

Everything also has the same volume, which means everything has the same density. So either the 1 ton of tea is highly compressed, or the 1 ton of palladium is a small nugget in the middle of a whole lot of packing peanuts.

The latter. A container is a 1*2m cylinder with about 1.5 cubic meters of useful internal volume, that's loaded to one ton mass of whatever, with packaging or ballast making up the difference, as required. Ballast would very rarely be needed as there are very few commodities that would rationally be below .67 tons per cubic meter. Even hydrogen fuel would be best to package as hydrogen compounds of that density or greater.

Having a canister as a fixed mass would greatly simplify cargo transfer, loading, manipulation, and balancing.

For example, I should be able to carry more tonnage of diamonds than water, as neither are compressible.

Mass is the only limiting factor with most ships. If one third of the internal volume of a python could be dedicated to cargo, a python could be filled with almost nine thousand tonnes of water...which is far in excess of the mass any thrusters you could put on it would be rated for, possibly more than the structure of the ship could handle without imposing further limits on acceleration.

 

[DemiserofD]

Well, the thing about diamonds is you have to mine them yourself. I don't really see a problem with letting ships carry an arbitrary amount of diamonds, since most players get bored before they fill even a medium ship, let alone a large one, not to mention the increasing risk as they accumulate more and more. Dying with 300 diamonds is one thing, but can you imagine dying with three THOUSAND?

As far as trading is concerned, sure, you should still buy the more valuable trade goods, but if you just eliminated the few outliers that currently exist - the ones with dramatically larger income than the rest, like Tritium - then the rest would naturally fall into balance almost automatically. In fact, you might not even need to eliminate them if you consider supply limits. It doesn't do you any good to have 75000 cargo capacity if your supply station only has 5000 palladium, for example. So you might buy 5000 Palladium, and then 25000 Food Cartridges, and another 25000 water. You'll make four times the income per unit on the palladium, but you'll actually make more money on the water and food cartridges. And, of course, a larger ship requires a larger investment, and therefore a larger risk. Remember that those commodities aren't insured.

The key aspect is it actually takes THOUGHT. You can't just buy one commodity and ship it over and over, not and maximize your income, you need to consider multiple factors at once.