I'll post the "business plan" soon. My thought was to give the players more freedom in adventuring and less need to get cargo. They are part of a somewhat loose corporation, so hey have a certain latitude to speculate, but will more likely have assigned cargo (still working on details).

The idea for a partly-paid off or completely paid off ship--well, partly this would be as the ship is a corporate asset, not owned by the crew. But it was also partly figuring that (a) an older ship would have more "character" (or quirks) and (b) an older ship might lead to more adventures (e.g., you need a spare part...but your ship is pretty old, so you must scour the junkyards to find that part).

On Fri, Feb 22, 2019 at 5:04 PM Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

On 23Feb2019 0939, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) wrote:
> My experience from CT is that it's not really that hard to make a
> profit esp if there're no payments left to make.'Annual Maint' should
> detect most of the pending problems. Also, take a look at 'Twilight's
> Peak' CT Adv3 for a discussion & example of an old somewhat worn-out
> F'trader.

It's the no repayments part that makes it easy. A Free Trader requires
repayments of CR154,500 per month, or CR77,250 per trip. All-up expenses
per trip come to just about CR100,000.

Most trips will see the six available staterooms filled about 50/50 with
high and mid passengers, and about half the low berths filled. That
covers a bit over half the costs. On most trips you can mostly fill the
ship with freight, which pays the rest and should bring in about C25,000
profit. Of course, the times these things don't happen can swallow that
profit pretty quickly.

The best runs without trying to speculate gross CR148,000 and thus net
about CR48,000. The worst cost you ~CR60,000 as they mean a mostly empty
ship.

When it comes to speculative cargo, unless the crew has high levels of
Bribery and/or Admin it's a crap-shoot. Half the time there won't even
be a cargo available that's worth buying.

The thing is, once you get rid of that CR77,000+ repayment, all this
becomes so much easier - it's almost impossible to lose money just
running freight, with passengers and the odd bit of cautious speculation
being almost pure profit.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief
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