This is probably one of the main reasons why I don't fly anything smaller than a gunship on this server: Low mission rewards but high risk. It's bad enough that the upper tier npcs are armored and regen and rarely miss, but when an Osiris or 4 joins in the fun, it's an uphill battle. When I finally got the money scraped together for a gunship, I said hasta la vista to my VHF and never went back.
On the other hand, most players need an incentive to trade, so trading should be more profitable. Trading, for the most part, is boring and time-consuming drudge work. Sometimes it's fun to trade in pure, unadulterated rp-mode (i.e. running a rp trade route that yields low profit), but most of the time people trade with the intention of getting a maximum profit on their run. Armor, munitions, weapons and ship purchases demand a medium to large investment.
I should quickly add that this kind of "power trading" isn't necessary in conflict with good rp. RL comes first (at least it should), which means many of us have to optimize our game time. After some research and asking some of the veteran players, anyone should be able to find a route that yields good returns but is within the realm of plausible rp for their character.
Disco needs traders to maintain the atmosphere of reality. A server full of combat ships is a pretty unrealistic and frankly boring situation. Been there, done that.
I agree that mission payments should be raised, but not to the point to where trading becomes a fairly pointless exercise. I'd say a top level mission could be 950k - 1mil. That sounds like a boatload of money for a mission, but such missions would be somewhat rare. All other mission payments could be raised accordingly, say +100k - +150k.
