specifically Cardamine ones. see 75th just got back from Gallia and one of our main projected jobs is to escort the cardamine smuggling rings and see they get to their destinations.
but.. ;( there are no cardamine smugglers. or at least ones that dont use jumping barges... :S
Think of it this way, people mostly trade for money. Smuggling is more dangerous and exciting, and more risk/reward right?
Nope, smuggling routes I've seen don't keep up with the best legal routes available. So not many smuggle.
Because smuggling is:
Totally sub-par to even some less profitable house trading...
Riskier that house trading because lawful and unlawful alike wants your already low income or simply destroy you...
Rules allow lawfuls to ban you from lawful bases with zero interaction, based purely on SS of your cargo and id via FR5 or whatever faction rule.
And all of the above。。。
The pick is up to you.
Yeah, even though i smuggle from the other side of the fence(namely artifacts) i have to tell it is severly lackluster.
-The pay is crappy if you stick to inRP pathways(no lanes or gates for a Corsair afteral)
-if you are "good" at what you do you will never ever encounter anyone which makes it quite boring if you have no escort to chatter
So in the end i started to deliberatly smuggle "bad" by crossing lanes, stations and planets which caused me to get caught exactly 3 times in the whole last year- and i do earn my gaming cash either by smuggling or piracy, so i smuggle quite often...
Smuggling: poorly paid and boring, that s why there are so few smugglers out there
New Version gets freighter only smuggling rings and stuff that is specially designed for illegal transporting. I guess that might make smuggling a new trade. I sure hope so. It's kind of cool to smuggle and a lot of traditional space heroes are smugglers.
If Xoria designs routes for that smuggler satellite to be worth 10k credits per second with freighter's hold, I have strange feeling there will be titanics camping it, when freighters unload their cargo.
As for main topic, lawful trading will always be more important for devs than smuggling because it's backbone of traders->pirates->navy activity chain.
Only way to bust smuggling and to keep risk/profit ratio is to increase prices for contraband and also increase profit.
Example-make full trans of cardamine worth say 30 mil,selling price say 60mil,profit-30 mil per cargo.
That way there will be no power-smuggling due to a high cost of goods,
risk will be higher,reward will be higher,more smuggling activity,
more lawful activity,more fun for everybody.
There are quite a few artefact smugglers.
Maybe you could try to give bonuses to cardi smugglers like the sairs do to their business partners.
There's no rule banning artificial profit enhancement.
In .85 I used my old smuggler a lot. Even though it not always was that profitable like lawful trading. On the other hand, I had fun with it. And you know why?
Because of the smuggler ID. Hell, I took the fun out of those situations where I could play the "innocent trader" while the police faction right away know (ooRP ofc) that I was a smuggler. It caused nice interactions.
Since the smuggler ID has been "merged" into the freelancer ID, I dot not use my former smuggler anymore, only log him for smaller flights from base to base but then that's it.