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My businesses almost always seem to involve permanently docked freighters being used as ware storage, and it just pains me to buy a perfectly good hull when a battered and beaten hulk permanently retired from flight serves just as well...and fits in my own imagined storylines.

Timsup2nothin wrote:My businesses almost always seem to involve permanently docked freighters being used as ware storage, and it just pains me to buy a perfectly good hull when a battered and beaten hulk permanently retired from flight serves just as well...and fits in my own imagined storylines.

I understand completely - which is why I buy non-perfectly-good hulls to use as closets, at discount prices. In my current game, however, my parked storage freighter (only using one in this particular game - and even this one is not strictly speaking necessary, but might prove handy) is the Enhanced Dolphin left behind by Mahi Ma. If I need more, I will use various unique freighters gifted to me by the corps as rewards - this way I get to both keep them safe AND put them to use. (It's a pity that the PHQ is such a late-game thing in X3TC, as the Mercury Prototype would be an excellent model to produce - for the moment, it's hauling ECs into the Hub until I train up some replacements, and then it will get safely parked and used as a storage bin - oh, the indignity of it! )

Playing the Humble Merchant start implies the player wants to concentrate on trading. So guns are superfluous at the start. There are plenty of other combat-oriented starts for those wishing to go that route. So I don't see the problem. The Disco in the HM start is best used as an explorer to open up new sectors for trading, not for killing things. I think that was the dev's intentions when creating this start.

I always figure that a "humble merchant" that just happens to be operating in Herron's Nebula, of all places, is obviously destined for a career in smuggling, at the very least.

First thing I do in a HM start is get the Merc to a distillery and buy as much as I can afford, then use the Disco to shuttle it past the cops. Every time I come back to pick up, I load more cheap liquor in the Merc.

When some miscreant with a lot of credits comes along and buys the place out, I mark them. Then I deliver all my hooch to the trading station and use the credits to buy guns for the Disco and special command software for the Merc so I can hunt them down like the dogs they are. And the first component in my trading empire in those games is almost always devoted to feeding wheat and e-cells to those stills to keep them in reliable production.

Is your other name 'Speakeasy Sam'?

Yep. And Speakeasy Sam always needs to carry a big stick.