Planning Ahead

With the next shipment is waiting to be picked up by one of my associates and my new employee familiarizing herself with the nooks and crannies of her brand-new Drake, it's time to evaluate the current status of my ventures.

The salvage business has so far proven to be a bit less successful than I had estimated. After triaging all of the parts, the junk container seemed too full. Even though I have good relations with the local Brutor brokers and can run proverbial circles around Republic accountants, some items are just too cheap to sell. One of the brokers "helpfully" suggested that I reprocess the junk into minerals. However, the neglected to mention that the Tribe would receive all scrap metal that my butter fingers couldn't reprocess. So, the junk container keeps filling for now. Fortunately, some of the rarer items did sell for a rather nice price. Some of my customers are gear heads who want to squeeze the last bit of performance from their ships, others are simply people who equate cost with quality. Naturally, the latter are my favorite customers.

While following a random discussion about missile shortages on NeoCom, I noticed that the prices they're citing for certain types of missiles seem awfully high, sometimes even three or four times higher than usual. So I bought some missiles and contracted them for transport. If the demand continues and this is not just a short-term shortage, I may need to find a subcontractor or get into manufacturing myself. However, the manufacturing costs are not really the issue. In order to justify the jump fuel costs and hazard pay, the profit from a shipment needs to go past a certain threshold. There's no point in hauling stuff halfway across the galaxy for pocket change, when daytrading can accomplish the same with less risk and much less hassle.

I take another look at the titanic container labeled "Junk" and start browsing through my list of associates. Surely there's someone around who would be interested in a small joint business venture..