For the blog I have special permission to play around with a second account, going through all the various starting packages. The latest is a Constructor base, which is making building materials. On paper, or rather on spreadsheet, the profits are nice for a starting base, 3k net profit per day. In practice, the thing is rather complicated, because the net profits are the result of 10k revenue per day balanced by 7k cost per day. The daily cost of my Verdant base, which is much bigger and more profitable, is just 1.2k, because I am largely self-sufficient. The shipping activity of Verdant is mostly about exporting, with the most valuable export, drinking water, not even being the one taking the most shipping space. On the return trip, I tend to carry very little, just the few consumables I'm not making myself, the beans I don't grow because they are so cheap, and occasionally some building materials for the next expansion project. On the Constructor base I import more weight than I export, and I make exactly those building materials for base expansion.

Hmmm, about merging those ideas?

So my next expansion idea for Verdant is to build a Prefab Plant MK1 there. While those prefab plants are nicely profitable, in practice I probably wouldn't export much, but instead mostly make building materials for myself for a good deal cheaper than the cost of importing them. The addition of the prefab plant to Verdant would perfectly balance my import and export shipping volumes. That is interesting, because everybody else on Verdant has more exports than imports, so that there are a lot of shipping contracts from Verdant to Moria, but none for the return trip.