It makes perfect sense to have instant diminishing returns for bulk. Think about grocery shopping today: if you buy one dozen eggs, you will pay more per egg than if you go for the 18 egg carton. This is a real-life principle that has been introduced to the game.

Yes but they don't let you pick how many eggs you want, you either have 12, 24, 36, 48, and so on. Each set of eggs already has a set price for that lot, of course the fewer eggs per carton the more each egg will cost.

I'm talking about those same principles where there is a threshold between two prices on the same item.

For example, the station requires 500cus of purified water at 30c per cu. You bring the 500cus of purified water and get 30c per cu resulting in 15,000c. The station's requirement is now filled but they can still take in more purified water for reserves, so they offer 20c per cu for the first 250cus of purified water and 15c per cu for the next 250cus.

This is to show how a station would handle required resources. However, if the items are of a 'luxury' nature to the station, a constant diminishing return is best set for non-essential items.

I'm just suggesting that stations offer price sets for certain bulk sizes on items they need. This would making trading key resources more profitable than bringing 'luxury' items to a station that requires water.

It can't model reality perfectly. As a friend of mine said (referring in this case to climate models, but it applies universally), "no model is perfect, but some are useful." You can select what quantity you buy, and the set prices are pre-determined because there's no one present to adjust prices on the fly. So the prices are based on historical expenses and profits, etc. To make that work in the game would be more complicated, but not impossible; this is a step in that direction.

"I'm just suggesting that stations offer price sets for certain bulk sizes on items they need. This would making trading key resources more profitable than bringing 'luxury' items to a station that requires water."

This is a good idea, for sure. It would also make it interesting in that stations close to capitals, including capitals themselves, would be the biggest and have the highest max capacities, meaning to make a good bulk trading profit would mean being universally liked and able to travel between nation capitals.

At what stations can I buy those eggs?

You can buy eggs and egg launchers at most Serco stations, just so long as you launch the eggs at Itanis. Also, you can get more lethal weaponry to use on the same Itanis.

If you really wanted to make the economy realistic you could have stations only have a limited number of cu's per item. A station could max out a neccessity at 10000cu or something high so it won't run out easily, while a luxury could be max out at between 500cu to 5000cu. Adds some buying strategy to the game. These limited items could have a regen rate of XXXcu per hour.

Regen... no. The station would require resources to manufacture those goods to sell.

Hopefully the Nation space profits diminish driving traders into grey space. Perhaps this is what fluffy experienced.

I think the main problem is that the VO currency is too inflated, and everyone is used to the easy money. It is somewhat unrealistic to expect high profit on every other trade route. For an average trader, the profit would likely be just enough to buy food, fuel and other basic necessities, and to stash a little bit of money away. Luckily, VO avatars don't eat and their ships don't have depletable fuel.

Now, we can all look forward to working a bit harder to get the same luxuries ($myfavouriteship, $myfavouriteweapon), instead of waving a magic wand for money to appear.

Oh wait, there are still those broken trade missions, as well as escort missions without risk, aren't they? Let's hope they will be fixed soon.

Farewell and good riddance, spacequake! I can't wait for next good stuff future brings for non-combat side of VO.

Death Fluffy: glad to hear trading is more fun. I am acutely aware of the issues facing newbies, and will be adding more trading-related tools to make life a bit easier for them.. without making it too trivial. At least, that's the goal. The tools have been in the pipe for awhile (years, actually), but they were kind of silly and pointless before this demand change. It'll all require more tuning, but I think we're headed in the right direction.