HAULING AND PASSENGERS — the quiet money
Two companies pay you to move cargo, and a third pays you to move people. None of it needs a gun, and all of it can be done in the ship you started with.
Ashar Haulage — where you begin
Small parcels, 15 to 40 units a run, paying anywhere from a few hundred credits to around 42,000 on the longer hauls. That fits comfortably in a Starter Marauder’s hold with room to spare.
If you are in Feris, every single Ashar contract stays in Feris. Not one of them sends you through a gate. That is deliberate, so you can learn the job without worrying about fuel or what is waiting on the other side.
Move further out and that changes fast. In Ethan, 56 of the 70 Ashar contracts leave the system. In Descarte it is 47 of 50, in Errat 39 of 40. Same company, same office, completely different proposition, so read the destination before you accept.
Wesbec Industries — the step up
Bigger loads, 50 to 130 units, paying 14,000 to over 156,000. Every single Wesbec contract crosses systems. There is no such thing as a local Wesbec run.
Worth knowing before you sign: the largest Wesbec loads are 130 units and a Marauder’s hold is 100. You will want a Sparrow or an Atlas for the top end of that work.
How many you can carry at once
You start able to hold five contracts from each company, and that grows with your Haulage skill:
• Haulage 10 gives you a sixth
• Haulage 20 a seventh
• Haulage 40 an eighth
• Haulage 60 a ninth
• Haulage 80 a tenth
The limits are separate per company. Ashar and Wesbec each get their own allowance, so a captain at Haulage 80 can be running ten of each, twenty contracts at once. Stacking several runs that share a destination is where the real money is.
Passengers — Galactic Passenger Lines
One passenger per contract, paying from 250 up to around 22,400. Third class averages about 5,000, second class about 6,900 and first class about 7,300, so a full ship of first class fares is a serious payday.
How many you can carry is decided by your hull, not your skill. The Providence takes twenty, the Peregrine ten, the Atlas eight, and both the Marauder and Sparrow take five. Miners and warships take none at all, and neither does the Shuttle, which is a personal runabout by design rather than a bus.
Roughly 60% of passenger contracts cross systems, so the same fuel warning applies.
Jump fuel, and why you should check before you accept
Flying inside a system costs you nothing. Crossing between systems means a jump gate, and every gate has its own fixed fuel cost.
Those costs range from 4 units on the cheapest hop up to 51 on the most expensive, averaging around 22. Most hulls carry a 900 unit tank, with the Marauder, Shuttle and Hawk holding 1,000 and the Prospector only 700.
So a full tank is roughly forty average jumps, which sounds like plenty right up until you accept four contracts heading four different directions. Check the route before you accept, not after you have loaded. Stranded with a hold full of somebody else’s cargo and no fuel is an expensive lesson, and the contract does not care that you meant well.
The practical rule: take Feris work while you are learning, then when you start ranging further, plan your runs so several contracts share a direction. Fuel is the real constraint on hauling, not cargo space.