In regards to piracy

[beunt]

But sacraficing about 20~50 of your profits isin't that much. You still get money don't you?

Right, if you keep in mind that 50% of the profit is not 50% of the cargo, especially for high investment / low margin commodities. Considering a single commodity, let X be the initial quantity, Y the initial unit cost, X' and Y' the same terms at the selling point. To barely recover his investment (i.e. no profit at all), the trader must deliver a ratio R = X'/X = Y/Y' of his initial cargo.

Now what happens if the initial unit cost is 1200, the selling unit cost is 1800 and a pirate asks him for half of the cargo ? The trader actually looses money : he drops 1/2 of the cargo when he had to deliver at least R = 2/3 of it. If the pirate only wants to charge half of the profit, he sould ask for (1 - R)/2, in this case = 1/6.

However this is the trader's problem only, the pirate is not expected to be nice and kindly do the maths:)It's up to the trader to carry only low R commodities like neon, carbon-stuffes or tobacco bought in the right stations. The time consumption is then another problem...

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