Pilots Trade Network Elite: Dangerous

FLEET CARRIER TRADE MISSION GUIDE

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Overview

Fleet Car­ri­er trade is sim­ple because it works on the same prin­ci­ple as nor­mal play­er trades: buy low, sell high. The dif­fer­ence is that Fleet Car­ri­ers can hold tens of thou­sands of tons of a com­mod­i­ty, park right next to their tar­get sta­tion, and trav­el across the entire­ty of human-con­trolled space in a sin­gle hyperjump.

What’s more, because they can park in-sys­tem next to almost any sta­tion, you can trade between a Fleet Car­ri­er and a Sta­tion with just a few sec­onds in super­cruise each way rather than a long jump between sys­tems. This makes turn­around for Fleet Car­ri­er trade mis­sions extreme­ly fast for haulers and is what makes the credits:hour ratio so lucra­tive (and the game­play loop so chilled!).

The Basics

Fleet Car­ri­ers func­tion much like nor­mal space sta­tions. When they’re in the same sys­tem as you, they appear in your Nav­i­ga­tion pan­el (left-hand cock­pit MFD, first tab) and can be flown to in super­cruise. Once you arrive and have dropped out of super­cruise, you can request land­ing at 7.5km in the same way as a nor­mal sta­tion. All Fleet Car­ri­ers have Large land­ing pads avail­able, and all P.T.N. car­ri­ers will have at least Refu­el, Rearm and Repair ser­vices avail­able as well as the Com­mod­i­ty Mar­ket. You can access the Com­mod­i­ty Mar­ket just like you would from a sta­tion, only the menu lay­out is ever so slight­ly different.

Loading Missions

P.T.N. Fleet Car­ri­er load­ing mis­sions require pilots to fly to a near­by sta­tion and buy as much as they can car­ry of a spec­i­fied com­mod­i­ty from the sta­tion’s Com­mod­i­ty Mar­ket, then fly a brief trip in super­cruise to the Fleet Car­ri­er and sell it to the Fleet Car­ri­er’s Com­mod­i­ty Mar­ket. Every mis­sion advert will tell you the fol­low­ing information:

 

  • The name of the SYSTEM to go to
  • The name of the STATION to buy from (and its pad size)
  • The name of the COMMODITY to buy
  • The PROFIT you’ll receive per ton for sell­ing it to the Fleet Carrier
  • The name of the PTN FLEET CARRIER to sell your com­mod­i­ty to
  • The total amount of the com­mod­i­ty the Car­ri­er is buying

Load­ing a Fleet Car­ri­er is as sim­ple as doing this trip from sta­tion to Fleet Car­ri­er, buy­ing low and sell­ing high, as many times as you like until the Car­ri­er is full. All P.T.N. Fleet Car­ri­ers guar­an­tee at least 10,000 cred­its of prof­it per unit that you haul so a full car­go Type 9, able to haul 784 tons, would earn at least 7.84 mil­lion cred­its per round trip. Fac­tor in the fact that trips between the Sta­tion and Car­ri­er usu­al­ly take less than a minute (because Car­ri­ers are able to park so close) and you can see how easy it is to make mon­ey quickly.

Unloading Missions

Unload­ing is the same as load­ing except you buy from the Car­ri­er and sell to the tar­get Sta­tion. Also, unlike with load­ing, you earn trade rank for sell­ing from a Fleet Car­ri­er to a Sta­tion. Often if you find an active PTN trade mis­sion and are around when the Car­ri­er fin­ish­es load­ing, you can ride the Car­ri­er’s hyper­jump to its unload­ing sys­tem – ask in the Car­ri­er’s chan­nel on our Dis­cord serv­er or in the Red­dit com­ment thread to see if this is a pos­si­bil­i­ty. Fleet Car­ri­er hyper­jumps take 15 min­utes to com­plete and will car­ry all ships (and CMDRs!) on board with them when they jump, so this can be a great way to get your big heavy Type 9 halfway across the Bub­ble even with a 10ly jump range and no fuel scoop!

Profit split

(Or “How can this possibly work?”)

Prof­it split

Our Fleet Car­ri­er trades tar­get com­modi­ties where the mar­gins avail­able on a galac­tic scale are able to sup­port large prof­its for haulers on both ends of the jour­ney (load­ing and unload­ing). The most com­mon com­mod­i­ty is Agro­nom­ic Treat­ment. Let’s say one sta­tion is sell­ing Agro for 5,000 cred­its per unit, and anoth­er one a hun­dred light years away is buy­ing it for 30,000 cred­its per unit.

The Fleet Car­ri­er would set its buy price when load­ing to at least 15,000 cred­its per unit. You would buy at 5k and sell at 15k, which is 10k profit.

The Fleet Car­ri­er would then unload and sell for 20,000 cred­its or less. You would buy for 20k and sell to the sta­tion for 30k, which is anoth­er 10k profit.

The Car­ri­er’s own­er would earn the 5k “in the mid­dle”, i.e. the dif­fer­ence between the 15k it bought for and the 20k it sold for.

Oth­er pos­si­ble com­modi­ties include gold and sil­ver, but these are hard­er to find and often rely on our team of scouts and BGS wiz­ards to pro­cure. We are also able to pay far high­er mar­gins for load­ing the Car­ri­ers that sup­port our WMM oper­a­tion: even if you don’t par­tic­i­pate in the WMM oper­a­tion your­self, you can still make a lot of mon­ey load­ing the Car­ri­ers that do.

How to get started

Head to our Dis­cord serv­er or Sub­red­dit to find trade adverts.

You can find builds for com­mon car­go haulers suit­able for any CMDR (from “brand new” to “rich super-engi­neered vet­er­an”) in our Out­fit­ting section.
 
You can also feel free to ask for help in our HELP or TRADE DISCUSSION chan­nels. There’ll always be some­one around ready to help you get started!
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