The Maths of Diaspora
You have come to this page for either of 2 reasons:-
1. To find out why a Carrier is more profitable than a Seeker
2. To find out why I suggest getting speed boosts rather than cargo pods.
Why a carrier is better
You can buy goods at 48 and sell them at 50 to make 2 profit per unit per run.
In the long run a carrier will be better because it can hold more cargo
but a seeker is cheaper so you can afford to fill it straight away.
To equal the seeker with a carrier you must be able to put 150 units or more of goods into it.
At 48 per unit this will cost you 7,200 therefore to justify buying the seeker first
you must be able to sell the seeker and buy a carrier and still have 7,200 credits spare.
Starting with 20,000 you will have 5,000 left after buying a carrier
thus to equal a seeker capacity in our scenario, you will need an extra 2,200.
The seeker costs 5,800 plus 2 cargo pods (boosting cargo to 150) at 500 each making a total of 6,800.
It's resell value is 5,100, giving an overall loss of 1,700.
If you buy the seeker first, you will still have to buy the carrier later.
This means you will have to make the extra 2,200 profit, plus the cost of reselling
the seeker (i.e. 1,700). This makes a grand total of 3,900 credits needed to be
made before you can buy the carrier, or (at scenario prices) 3,900/(2*150)=13 trips.
Conversely if you buy the carrier first you will have 5,000 spare credits to buy cargo but
this will not fill the cargo bay to even 150 units let alone fill the carrier's cargo bay.
However each run you will be able to purchase more cargo than the last run and if you can
reach the magic number of 150+ units before or equal to the seeker's 13 runs then you
have at the very least broken even.
The following table shows how the carrier pans out (at scenario prices).
| current Cash | Cargo | remaining cash | Run Number |
| 5,000 | 104 | 8 | Start |
| 5,208 | 108 | 24 | 1 |
| 5,424 | 113 | 0 | 2 |
| 5,650 | 117 | 34 | 3 |
| 5,884 | 122 | 28 | 4 |
| 6,128 | 127 | 32 | 5 |
| 6,382 | 132 | 46 | 6 |
| 6,646 | 138 | 22 | 7 |
| 6,922 | 144 | 10 | 8 |
| 7,210 | 150 | 10 | 9 |
| 7,510 | 156 | 22 | 10 |
As can clearly be seen we begin to make a profit after only 9 runs.
This is only one example but the maths can be applied to others.
Trade Ratios
Lets take the Neried Freighter, it illustrates the point nicely
It has a speed of 6
Cargo space of 450
and 6 Misc. pods
If we fill with cargo pods we get a configuration thus:-
(a) 750 cargo, speed 6, this sounds very good for trading.
If we fill with Jump drives we get:-
(b) 450 cargo, speed 18, Not so good??
Lets take a scenario with these to configurations.
Imagine that there are 2 planets that are 1 jump apart
Trading between them we make 1 profit per run
and the speed figure tells us how many jumps we can make per minute
In one run Ship (a) will make 750 credits
Ship (b) will make 450 (obviously losing badly here)
but lets look at a wider picture how much can we make in one minute??
ship (a) can make 6 runs so that's 6*750= 4,500 (Very nice)
Ship (b) can make 18 runs so that's 18*450= 8,100 (Holy smoke where did that come from??)
It is a little more complex than this since the jump ranges of ships are not even
(eg 18 isn't 3 times faster than 6).
For every current ship there is an optimum configuration, which I have calculated as trade ratio
and provided the recommended, cargo pods to jumps drives. The higher the trade ratio figure the better,
so choose your ship and upgrades wisely.
Be warned:- This is an over simplified view of things, some jump speeds (2,4,6 for example are excatly the same)
Please refer to the ship table for a listing of optimum trade configurations.
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