Posting this here per
request.
So I certainly oversold my pithy couple of tweaks to Smugglers. I've just got RH beacons at 87 (
391 at RH) and Smuggling Compartment upgrades at a far more wallet-crunching 650 (
2925 at RH). I'm a math guy and a formula was drawn up for this, which I no longer have.
Justification:
1. Beacons are forever, and knowing that a RH is over there by the sun represents a course change that the commander will likely take every time because snatching up the kgs of cheap goods is (a) guaranteed to fit in his ship and (b) guaranteed quick and extra profit, every time. Therefore buying a beacon takes away all future need to explore for that system's Hermit
forever, so average profit was taken into account. I wanted it profitable as of the first return trip, and since I personally like exploring (and incentives to explore), I like the idea that you sometimes buy the beacon and the RH was along the main spacelane anyway -- d'oh!
2. I was making an absolute sultan's fortune on any system that outlawed smaller commodities (kgs or g). Not to mention, there is no reason not to go around in circles buying and selling again and again and again and again until the ban is lifted. Eventually I had to just
honor code my way out of that behavior but the cost to profit ratio of smuggling was highlighted, and my reprice of the upgrade had to take in an irritatingly inconsistent mean of average G, KG and T profits.
3. I have a little sticky note full of Oolite To-Do's, with two points on this.
(a) I've got to implement a 10% price variation, which I'm too lazy to have done yet, but that's just because blackmarkets generally work as a chinese negotiation (Least I'll go is 100! 75? 90! Sold!) as a guy that has been to asian blackmarkets. Criminals just want the product off the shelf for a profit and I like random variation in dockables. This was more an Anarchies (Salvage Gang) idea because I like the idea that sometimes the cost of a thing makes you go, "
hmmm... not right now. I'll wait until the price is better." -- which relates back to this because, again, I like having to explore around.
(b) Second point is to make GalCop raids on GalCop blackmarkets more frequent, because the idea of a "blackmarket" functioning in a space warehouse/copshop with any police-evading longevity is ridiculous to me.
EDIT: no, those RH multiple values aren't right (I checked) and they didn't seem right when I wrote them. Oh well, base values correct.