I really like this mod! After playing with it for some time to make it even better, I have a few suggestions/questions.
Getting money is too easy.
With the default settings a "expanded cargo holds" Atlas full of transplutonics shipped 15ly allows you to buy another Atlas, snowballing rapidly. I ended up with 20 Atlas freighters quickly, them and two tugs being the only ships in the fleet. That barely uses any supplies and fuel. No combat ships needed, because the relation bonus on delivery makes all factions friendly towards you anyway. A trip from one end of the core worlds to the other end and back nets a few million credits. That's pretty much a cheat.
Sure, I could reduce the payout slider, but then it would just make it tedious, not more challenging. To create a challenge for example, accepting contracts should spawn bounty hunting fleets with the strength depending on total shipment's worth (above some lower limit). Maybe make contracts cause inspections that reduce combat readiness (you could hide some contraband in that large shipment, right)?
Contracts come too easy and don't seem to be based on sector economy
I don't know how the contracts are generated, but they are not econimically "logical". I can pick up tens of ks of transplutonics on a colony to ship it to planets close together some 15 to 20 ly away. It's almost a given that in one of the destination systems is another colony that also exports transplutonics, which allows me to pick up tens of ks of transplutonics again to ship them back to colonies very close to the starting colonies. That doesn't feel right. Raw materials shouldn't pay by the distance travelled. They should not pay much more than it would, if the shipment would have been picked up from one raw material exporting colony closest to the destination. One could argue that goods like machinery, luxury goods aso. scale with distance as they are "unique", but raw materials are interchangeable.