Editing Commercial Shipping v5.60 (section)

==Commercial Ships and Shipping Lines==
Commercial Ships owned by private companies do not require shipyards, fuel, maintenance, crews or precious raw materials. As soon as a commercial design with freight or passenger capacity is available, the shipping lines will slowly begin building them. If shipping is profitable, more companies will be founded.

Select "Shipping Lines" in the Empires menu to see the details of these companies. You can see how much [[wealth]] they currently own. They will pay dividends to their shareholders from that money and use the rest to buy more ships. To encourage shipbuilding, you can '''subsidize''' them. Each click on the "Subsidize" button adds 1,000 wealth to their coffers. You'll slowly recover that expense, though, because they pay taxes for every shipment they make. The amount of taxes generated by shipping can be seen in the Wealth tab of the Economics window.

* If no civilian ships are built in your empire, make sure that suitable designs are available and that the shipping lines have the wealth to buy them. The cost of a ship is equal to its Build Points.
* To prevent shipping lines from building certain ships, mark the class as obsolete in the design window. 
* You cannot give orders to private ships. To prevent private ships from traveling to a system body (planet, moon, asteroid, comet), click Ban Body in the System window (F9).
* Private shipping lines will never buy a jump-capable ship, nor make use of such ships parked at [[Jump Points]] to reach a colony outside your home system. To enable civilian shipping between systems, you must build Jump Gates. Remember that you need a gate on both sides of the JP, or the ships can't return.
* Civilian ships will slowly be retired after 10 years in service. Remember to update your commercial designs when better technology becomes available, then mark the old ones as obsolete.
* A [[Cargo Handling System]] on a freighter dramatically decreases loading and unloading time. You can see the basic loading time (which can be further decreased by spaceports) on the left side of the design window.
* From a forum post: "Be careful what commercial builds you leave half finished.  They will build something without cargo handling systems and with one engine and 32 cargo holds.  It will travel at 42km/s and move half a colony but take 60 months to load/unload."