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[LucusLoC]

I am sure someone has though of this before, but tariffs should be tied to faction rep. The higher your rep at that market the lower the tariffs should be.

Another thing I would like to see is the ability to bribe your way into an open market after coming in secretly. This would let you get full reputation for trading there "openly" while still letting you come in secretly. Maybe instead of seeing a greyed out "open market" button you instead got a "talk to the port authority" button instead. That would open up a interface that lets you talk to the various station administrators and lets you offer them bribes. Some would be more loyal than others (to either you or their faction), and your individual reputation with them would also impact the price and success rate. Successful bribes would build your rep with that administrator, but not with the faction. This means you could be super friendly with an administrator, even if you are at war with that faction. A failed bribe would immediately alerts all faction fleets in the vicinity of your ID, almost like you had just flashed your transponder on and off.

Expanding on the market access thing (and also something I suspect has been suggested), we should have a way to spoof our transponders, setting up alternative IDs. I am not sure if the best way to balance that would be to require a "spoofer" module on each ship, or if it should be a fleet level skill for the player, but the general principle is you would have access to a number of different IDs to build reputation under. There would always be a risk that these IDs would get associated, with negative reputational consequences, but this would let you maintain the ability to trade with factions your real ID was not on friendly terms with. This would obviously need to include things like being able to see the reputation of each ID with all the various faction, and which IDS they know are associated with each other. Such a mechanic may even allow you to spoof IDS that belong to a specific faction, letting you seed hostilities under a false flag (though it should obviously be very difficult and unreliable to get and use such IDs).

[bobucles]

I'm not sure if Rep should necessarily change tariffs. High reputation already opens up a market, makes patrols non hostile and in general makes black market trading easier. It might be nice if cargo scans will "look the other way" if they like you well enough.

Signing on a commission absolutely should help with tariffs. You're officially working for their military and sacrificing potential markets, so there should be good trading incentives to go with it. The military store should definitely have a major tariff reduction, but the open market bonus can stay unchanged or slightly boosted.

[Q8]

I would guess, that tariffs are there, coz from the mechanics point of view, if they werent, there would be no reason for existence of a transponder. And yes, that creates stupid moments like paying a tariff on your own planet, but whatever.

You know what could be done tho? "Tariff" could be renamed to "buy/sell tax", "vat tax", or just "tax". And everything would fit. I honestly dont know why were they called tariffs in the first place.

[LucusLoC]

But the high tariffs basically mean it is nearly impossible to make a profit doing legal trading. You need to trade at a nearly 100% profit margins just to break even (30% both coming and going).

(simple math time. At 30% tariffs 100 credits worth of good costs 130 credits to purchase. But now need to make over 130 credits to make a profit on the sale, and to get 130 credits in return means you need to sell the goods for ~190 credits with a 30% loss on the sale. In effect you need to sell 100 credits worth of goods for 190 credits just to break even.)

Legal trading should be a viable gameplay option. Yes it should still be less profitable than illegal trading, but that comes with increased security for your reputation. Legal trading should be fairly profitable so long as you put in the work to maintain high rep with all the factions you trade with (and not all factions have a military market, at least that I know of). So long as the tariff is fixed at 30% (again, at both ends!) legal trading will never be viable as anything but a way to build rep. This may be all well and good if you are in the doghouse for that faction, but they should not be looking to screw you so much if you are friendly with them.

[Q8]

This is actuallly pretty realistic, since i(for one) never been to, or read about a government, that wouldnt want to screw me, if it could.

[Goumindong]

But the high tariffs basically mean it is nearly impossible to make a profit doing legal trading. You need to trade at a nearly 100% profit margins just to break even (30% both coming and going).

Yes. That is the point. To make it so that there are very few to none simple/safe/borning trade routes that can be done without interacting with the dynamic structure of the game. (There are a few already but those are more like stable points in the dynamic system than true static effects)

It is not intended for players to be able to go outside of the core gameplay cycles (explore, combat, smuggle) which have active cognizant components for significant periods of time. 

[bobucles]

It's not unfair to say that if there is a boring, perfectly safe, easy profit route, chances are an ordinary trader already jumped on it. You might even find them wandering the map now and then. The real money comes from taking jobs that no one else wants to do, that means taking some risks and generally getting in trouble.

Profitable ordinary trades do exist. I've seen marines in particular gain huge margins even after the double 30% tax. Trade commissions automatically ignore the much more punishing sales tax (big sale price = big tax), so you only have to pay the much smaller 30% penalty on cheap goods. Trade missions in bars also skip the tariffs on top of giving boosted profits. It's very easy to build up early game without touching the black market, but the pirate resources do let traders push things to the next level. The limits of trade seem to be just around the point that colonies become viable.