I have one. I wonder what all the decently high end stuff Earth can make can buy it on the wider Periphery and Inner Sphere Markets.
I'd think it would work pretty well. The old joke about hunting your supper with a bow and arrow before riding a horse to the spaceport in order to catch a DropShip off-planet has a certain amount of truth in BT. There's some pretty gaping holes in their consumer goods market, and there is likely to be a good market for cheap sedans, microwave ovens, and TVs even if EndWar technology falls apart in a few decades instead of lasting for centuries. Earth might wind up the "Made in China" of the Inner Sphere.
Shipping is likely to be a bit of an issue of course. I actually did some math on the basic though and found that once you actually have some ships, it's surprisingly profitable. Presume Earth has three
Mules it managed to buy off Kamea somehow, perhaps by selling most of the national store of Germanium and using it to repair her damaged JumpShip, and has a contract with an
Invader JumpShip to haul them.
It costs 50,000 per collar to jump, so each hop is 150,000 Cbills. According to Field Manual: Mercenaries it costs 800Cbills a week to maintain a DropShip*.
We'll presume that for whatever reason, EndWar has an excess of microwave ovens. These tend to weigh between 50 and 80 pounds, we'll presume 75 pounds. Each Mule carries 8500 tons of cargo. The crew will eat 20 tons of consumables every 200 days, so 5 tons of space for 50 days is a reasonable amount of space for that for a 3-jump jaunt, they can always buy food at ye old agrarian planet where people ride horses to the Spaceport. This means each mule can carry 226,533 microwaves. Assume that, being crap that barely lasts fifty years in storage, Microwaves are cheap and sell for only 20Cbills profit each. Note that a pair of leather work boots runs 36Cbills and a pair of pants are 35Cbills so this is fairly low-key and I don't feel unreasonable.
Presume they have to make 3 jumps to find buyers for all of EndWar's spare Microwaves, and being morons they don't think to add any more cargo on those jumps to increase profits.
Expenses:
Maintenance: 800*3*3=7,200Cbills
Jump Costs: 50,000*3*3=450,000Cbills
Profits:
Microwave Sales: 226,533*20*3=13,591,980Cbills
So overall we can presume that there is actually a decent profit to be made in EndWar's consumer goods. We might go more conservative and presume only 10Cbills profit per microwave, and perhaps twice as many jumps, but there would still be a healthy profit to be made, and more reasonably they would want to unload all the cargo in as few jumps as possible and also haul profitable cargo back to Earth. I once did the calcs for hauling only bananas in DropShips (It was for a Tropico/BT crossover) and there was still a healthy profit to be made on 8500 tons of bananas.
Of course, and this is the ringer, they would need to get three
Mules first. If they didn't have that, the
Mules would likely still come, lured by the irresistible scent of highly profitable microwaves. Earth would make much less as the
Mule owners would be gouging as much profit as possible for themselves, of course, but the general impression seems to be that there simply aren't that many worlds that aren't either largely agrarian with their most advanced manufacturing being blacksmiths, or churning out mostly War Materiel at this point in time. A planet dense with cheap consumer goods could be a veritable Germanium mine.
*There are various other books with different ways to calculate but that one is flat and makes this easier than me having to also do all the math to calculate out variable maintenance costs.