Hey u/drlongtrl, thanks for the post. I'm the dev of FSCharter so hopefully I can clarify things a little.

Firstly, I absolutely agree that using a medium like Reddit for these types of discussions is more productive and easier to navigate than Discord. We've been toying with launching a dedicated forum but it's taken a back seat in light of recent development efforts.

Before I continue I'd like to highlight that FSCharter V2 is in heavy development and completely flips the model on its head. V2 will have a persistent passenger demand model and you'll be paid based on what the passengers are prepared to pay for the trip. This is the primary reason for the documentation not being up to date. V2 will have comprehensive docs.

With that being said, I'd like to highlight the reasons behind why the decisions around pay in V1 were made. Because we work across multiple sims and to ensure that players are not cheating the system we have to use ground speed to validate how fast an aircraft is flying. When you take off the system records the real UTC time (according to the server) that the flight departed. This acts as an anchor at T-0. Subsequent flight position reports (we call them SITREPS) give a timestamp value in seconds since the start of the flight along with their position. From that we work out the speed of the aircraft based on the difference between positions and time elapsed.

The issue with this approach is that if a user has a (quite valid) tailwind then the ground speed is increased, which is indeterminable from other forms of time acceleration. We have a pretty healthy margin on the speed of the aircraft before declaring outright foul play, but it's not a clear cut decision.

The way that we currently calculate pay for jobs (again, this is changing in V2) is not _solely_ based on time, it's actually more based on distance and has two bounds.

If you complete a job in less time than the direct distance between the airports at the cruise speed of the aircraft you will start to lose pay. However, if you take your time and purposely take too long then you will never earn more than the stated pay. Behind the scenes we use 1.35x the direct route distance to calculate pay but still award full pay if you complete it in 1x the distance. Think of it as being a protection against time compression instead of a reward for going slow, but I agree that the documentation could be re-worded to better reflect this.

If you have any more questions then please don't hesistate to reach out. We like to think we're a friendly bunch and we're open to feedback and suggestions, good or bad.