Your numbers look great, sp00n. It's interesting to note that the Tokyo/Berlin route gives much better capital percent increase (240%) than Roppongi/Ainu (75%), but Tokyo/Berlin also takes over twice as long... I wonder which would be better for "building", then? Dunno. I had seen the Roppongi/Ainu Luxury Goods run, but was afraid to do cardamine... now that I know it's no biggie to smuggle, what the heck

I like your idea of "dollars per cargo minute". It's independent of ship size.

Hey KimK, do you have a roundtrip time for that huge loop you do?

HeymlicH... when are you gonna tell us your 3M/hr run? That's 50k/min, over twice as good as what sp00n just listed.

-- CAPT H

I hunt SPA ships and sell what ever I find...honestly no one hates me that much went I hunt spa ships (weird!)

Detroit Munitions/NEW YORK (Light Arms: BUY@140 SELL@980)

-to- [20 mins, 840 profit per 1 cargo

Freital Base/OMEGA-11 (Diamonds: BUY@198 SELL@1650)

-to- [15 mins, 1452 profit per 1 cargo

Planet New Tokyo/NEW TOKYO (Luxury Food: BUY@1120 SELL@1360)

-to- [5 mins, 240 profit per 1 cargo

Planet Honshu/HONSHU (Engine Components: BUY@150 SELL@1350)

-to- [20 mins, 1200 profit per 1 cargo

Freeport 4/MAGELLAN (empty)

-to- [5 mins, no profit

Detroit Munitions/NEW YORK (Light Arms: BUY@140 SELL@980)
... etc.

Also try in a Dromedary Cardamine from Mactan Base in Magellan to Manhattan in New York. I've done it 8 times without getting caught.[

Knock, knock
Who’s there?
A talking pig.
Pigs can’t talk.
Neither can penguins, but I can’t shut him up[! Wait till you get a load of the dancing candelabra…

Here's my favorite trade route (I don't know if anybody has posted it here or not). I think its excellent especially since it's short. Only catch is that you need to be neutral to Corsairs.

First: Get to Cadiz Base in Omega 5. It's a Corsair base. Buy Artifacts for $135. Leave Cadiz and go to Planet New London (Omega 5 -> Cambridge Jump Hole -> Planet Cambridge Trade Lane -> New London Jump Gate. Then You go to Planet New London). Sell the Artifacts for $1,147, which is a profit of $1,012 per unit.

Then Buy Small Arms from Planet New London for $350. Go back to Cadiz the same way you got to New London. Sell the Small Arms at Cadiz for $840 which is a profit of $490 per unit. What is great about this route is that its really short. It takes two systems and there are only 2 Trade Lanes and about a 50K run between the Jump hole and Planet Cambridge. It takes 6 minutes give or take a few seconds to make it ONE WAY. So its 12 minutes total. If you have a Dromesdary, you can make some pretty quick cash. It holds 275 units of cargo. If you do the math, you make a profit of $413,050 round trip. Not so bad for only 12 minutes. If you break it down, you make $34,416.667 per minute of space flight. The only people that give me crap are Molly's, but I just fly past them.

My method. First I'de like to say, wow this is quite the post. I would like to see a webpage with peoples trade route posts on it. I would do this if I had the resources, but for now if anyone out there is so inclined, I would defently use it as I'm sure many other people here would.
->ANYWAY
I usually make level 10 in about an hour, depending if i mess up and get killed. I trade as follows:
Planet L.A., California (Boron) -> Southhampden Station ($493/unit) -> Planet New London, New London (Luxery Food) -> Planet L.A., California ($768/unit) coming to a total of $1261/unit capacity during through the course of a round trip of 17 "time units" (consisting of trade lanes and jump gates) totalling $74.1/unit for a round trip. I loose about 5 units of Luxery Food on the way back, but it's not enough to be concerned about, especially once u achieve a better cargo capacity. It's long but easy to do at the start of the game, not very many enemies, a few tho. Plus the clydesdale is right at New London, so on your second time around u will have enough money to buy that ship, and greatly increase you profit capability.
Like I said I hit level 10 in about an hour, works for me. P.S. a web page designed for trade route listings would be much easier to look through than the previous mesh.

The Mactan-Manhattan run is utterly ridiculous in SP, since the Magellan-NY jumpgate is opened. You can get a dromedary at level 10 (after first Bretonian mission). Load it up with cardamine, and head to NY. Since the Liberty guys are still after you, you can't sell at Manhattan. Instead, go to Rochester Base and sell it for a 100/unit less, then hack your rep with the Liberty Police. Bring back H-Fuel to Mactan. Then it's 800/unit profit for flying through 2 trade lanes, 1 jump gate, and roughly 20k of open space! (Though slightly less on the way back... feh. Also, keep in mind it's pretty tough balancing your rep so you can dock at Mactan AND Manhattan, but there's always Rochester Base for the less tactful)

Wow, I'm going to have to try that Omega 5 -> New London trade sometime. I thought I was doing good w/ my Ainu -> New Tokyo trading (makes about 22k per minute round trip).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I'm sick of seeing all your signatures and not having one of my own

im adding these tradelanes in an excel sheet.

can make it public if u guys want to

For single player I use the sigma 13, new london jump hole. Makes good money and it only one trade lane one jump hole, very little travle. Anyway, its Planet new london (engine components I think, maybe light arms)-> Yanagi depot, sigma 13(Cardamine or artifacts) -> back to planet new london to do it all over again. I usta make tons of cash with this in single player, been so long since I played single player.

I started a message board to post trade routes on. Its crude but it will work, and when a route is posted I will format it and add it to a list which will be one post always on top. I put some basic instructions on posting, pretty much everyone here already knows what to do. I'm open to a better way of posting routes if anyone else would like to start this type of post. It would be nice to have actuall fields people could fill out to post a route, but for now this board will do. So please come and post your favorite routes and hopefully we can get a good list started.

http://members.sitegadgets.com/purfus/board.html

omega 5 => new london gives about 107 per minute (ive done it in about 14 minutes - rounded up).

new best trade route, congratz!

Edited by - sp00n on 10-04-2003 10:12:11

sp00n, you mean LukeSkyfocker's Cadiz artifacts/London Light arms run, right? Yeah I tried that too... Luke says 6 minutes one way but I also couldn't do it that fast... I called it 14.5 minutes roundtrip (I got jumped a lot), for $104/cargo-minute, or 28.5k/minute in a Drom (1.7 M/hr). Of course, Cadiz is Corsair.

Also I just noticed through FCC that it looks like Ronneburg (Hessians in Omega5) Diamonds <-> N London Light Arms pays less for Diamonds but more for Light Arms, to the point where it's probly similar money to Luke's Cadiz/London run. Is anybody good with Hessians to time it?

sp00n, did you get my spreadsheet in your email? comments? will you show me yours if I show you mine?

purfus, your board is a great idea, but there's a whole lotta ads on that site, ehehe ... I have put together a spreadsheet of trade runs that I can post here or upload to LR. At the moment I'm seeing if sp00n wants to compare notes. He's right though, Luke's run is currently the best (but requires Corsair neutral). Past Luke's run would be either of sp00n's runs; both are 22k/minute in a Dromedary.

re: your site purfus... if you go for it, I wouldn't ask folks to count trade lanes any more... that's something I did very early in this thread when no one had been mentioning timing info. Trade-lane counts were a rough way to estimate time; not always real accurate. But we can now see that it's not so hard for folks to cough up exact times, so there's no need for the inexact trade lane measures. (Maybe unless somebody didn't bother to time it... but if they didn't and it looks like a real good route, others WILL time it, so either way you'll have real times for good routes... and who cares about bad routes, ehehe.) Anyway... I guess something is better than nothing

By the way, for anybody interested... I have found about 400 mistakes in Freelancer Cargo Calculator 1.1.0.7 prices (in LR's Download area), and a half dozen mistakes in the LR prices, and will be sending corrections to both parties in a day or two. (I snarfed and compared the data of the two.)

CAPT Hyberniu T. Rex

I just wanted to add that the route I gave isn't going to be 6 minutes everytime. If you get jumped, or even if they disrupt the trade lane 6 minutes is out of the picture. I also don't think its 6 minutes exactly, but I found that I could consistantly do it in roughly 6 minutes each direction. I just think it's a good route because the "bad guys" in the area really aren't that tough, so you don't need huge shield or anything like that to be successfull. Probably the hardest part about the trade route is getting the Corsairs to be neutral to you, but even that isn't very difficult. Even if you just have a rhino you make 120,160 with it, so its safe to take some new guys with you too.

Edited by - LukeSkyfocker on 10-04-2003 18:58:46