I have not yet tried to make any trade or missions with Pioneer (as i'm having more fun exploring and discovering breath taking landscape around) , but if they kept the economy from Frontier Elite 2 or Frontier First Encounter, there was lot of money to make from doing this :

-in a base or space station in the Sol system, buy luxury goods

-jump to the Barnard"s Star system, go to any base or space station and sell the luxury goods

-with the money , buy Computers or Robots from that Barnard's Star base or space station (check the special offers in message boards to get more of them)

-jump back to the Sol system, go to a base or space station and sell the Computers or Robots.

Do that again until you have lot of money to buy more cargo place, to buy ship with bigger cargo and redo the Sol-Barnard's Star cargo run to get even more money, it was even better because those were "safe" system, meaning no pirate attacking you often like in most unlawfull system (as there was a big problem with FFE : if a pirate ship spawned immediately behind you, you could explode before making any kind of evasive move just when you arrived from a jump).

There were some more cargo run , but i always found this Sol - Barnard's Star one to be the quickest cargo run.

Note that this was true for FE2 and FFE, i don't know for Pioneer despite it's inspired by those games, its economy system may be very different.

Not so much very different as not done yet. You can profit by trade, but it's difficult and rather unrewarding.

Do you have plans to reproduce the FE2/FFE economy with prices being different by star systems , or are you going to involve some kind of dynamic economy with price increasing or decreasing depending on the amount of what is bought or sold ?

Cloudy crystal ball, sorry. It will probably be one of those choices, if it isn't something else.

The Sol-Barnard's Star run became a very well known way of getting money early on in the game. So naturally I tried in in Pioneer. It didn't exist! Well, not that I could tell anyway. The trade at the moment is very hard to make any money, especially in the beginning when you have a small ship. There are only small differences in prices and I soon reverted to local deliveries for 25 sqiud.

Some tips:

Do package deliveries to other systems: Sell the missiles, hyper-drive, and cannon. (Keep the scanner, it can be useful, even without weapons.) Buy a class 2 hyper-drive. This will increase range and decrease the time jumps take. Currently, the only consequence of failing a mission is wasted time and fuel. Check how much time you have to complete mission before accepting. Using multiple shorter jumps is faster than a single long jump, but will usually require more fuel. Lowering the mass of your ship will also reduce the time jumps take. Don't forget: you need to allow for a few days to get to the destination station after arriving in the system.

If you want to do local (in system) deliveries: Sell the missiles, scanner, hyper-drive, cannon, and fuel. This will lower your mass, making your ship faster and more likely to be able to complete the mission in time.

For the passenger missions you will want a bigger ship to be able to fit cabins and a fast hyper-drive. You also have to check that you have enough cabins for all the passengers in addition to having enough time. Otherwise, these are much like package deliveries.

Great work done on Pioneer, really captures the imagination.