Trading Tips

Considering trade deals get locked in there is very little difference between M ships speed wise since the main sticking point is the gates meaning capital cost and storage capacity are more important. Also there is nothing stopping the player from equipping other faction engines on their traders (although combat is good for escaping the constant SCA harassments).

This page is not factoring in station buy quantities since food wares and medical supplies are often in the <200 range per station (although many stations) making them tedious to trade manually making auto traders and station subordinates the only practical way of breaking into the market. Other wares like field coils, shield components, plasma conductors and drone components do not have a lot of stations that purchase them, let alone in large volumes. Currently Nividium has limited purchasing unless the player actively hacks the station storage to dump it but it is literally mined straight from asteroids making it instantly available. Illegals are good but only reach their full potential after the player has unlocked a black marketer at multiple stations. Claytronics on the other hand has the problem with each load taking up a large amount of capital (1.2 million odd for an M ship) meaning the player needs to build up large reserves to break into that market.

Other factors include how many stations can be supplied by NPC manufactures with food and medical supplies often being saturated by local supply. Advanced Electronics and Smart Chips are less profitable but always in high demand due to NPC conflict while hull parts are in near infinite demand.

Ships with more cargo space can make more profit though because they buy in bulk and sell more of a ware at a high price before the price changes while a ship with less cargo would have to sell a second load at a lower price.