#### Trade (gold $) #####
Most trade missions consist of bringing a bunch of wares to the station you accepted the mission from. You MUST deliver these PERSONALLY (ie be in the ware carrier ship) for the goods to register as part of the mission. The easiest way to get around this is to have a freighter (or several later on, when you get asked for huuuuuge amounts of stuff) jump in with the goods & dock with the station, then you can hop from ship to ship delivering however much cargo is asked for. You don’t have to deliver all the cargo at the same time: piecemeal is fine provided you get the total amount delivered on time. In fact piecemeal may be better if you haven’t a hope of delivering the total: you’ll still get paid top credit for what you do deliver, & provided you can suffer the rep hit for a failed mission you may still come out financially better off. [needs checking]
Passenger missions: these appear under ‘Trade’ if you’re flying a bus, not a passenger transport.
All you need other than CLS is a), the room for the passengers (often ‘military personnel’) & a ship capable of getting to the destination in time. Each being takes 6 [corrected - thanks again Kirlack] M-sized cargo spaces, so be careful if you’re flying a small ship: many’s the time I’ve taken the mission only to find I’ve not enough room for the amount of people I need to transport 
The passenger pickups (& dropoffs?) must be done personally again; if you’re in a hurry to do something else you can offload your passengers into another ship (make sure it has CLS, or you won’t be able to transfer them) & send them on their journey.
Be careful not to swap out the CLS if you’re swapping cargoes after you’ve taken the passengers onboard: you’ll kill the passengers & fail the mission instantly! Obviously a jumpdrive & enough fuel is a priority here, else a ship with the speed to get to the destination on time & cargo capacity to take your passengers (if in Terran sectors, for instance). These missions pay very well once you’ve ranked up, & present no more danger to you than if you hadn’t taken the mission, just like the ‘Think’ version above.
Also,
| Catra wrote: |
| prioritizing taxi over all else is a pretty good idea, as it: - is spammable. in 1 sector patrol, you can have multiple taxis going that'll most assuredly gain you more cash + rep than that 1 sector patrol will. - requires nearly 0 commitment: (dock, switch ships, order ship to dock, done.) - requires almost no investment ( most starter ships can do taxis, and a CBLSS is only 3k, which is considerably cheaper than what you'd need for most other missions (1 IRE is 4.6k, mineral scanner is 37.8k). see, the issue with taxi is that its not tied to trade or fight ranks, so it can jet ahead of either alternatives rather quickly until you can actually outfit a ship to quickly roflstomp through the alternatives, at which point the whole argument is moot. |