Spaceships Seem Pretty Cheap

[VonKatzen]

I posted this on another thread, but it's really beside the point of the original so I'll replicate it here with a few other comments:

One thing I thought was weird was how cheap huge battleships are. I know GURPS $ are less debased than USD, but IIRC most cutting edge stealth bombers, fighter/bombers and cruisers like the Zumwalt cost $1 billion to multiple billions each. I can build a SM +12 spaceship with superheavy hardened armor, spinal laser, missile tubes and dozens of huge rail cannons for about the same price in GURPS (2-4 billion). That not only is vastly more firepower than anything built by any army in the history of the world but it's also as large as the largest naval ships ever built - which didn't have to be built in space. Seems a bit low to me, even accounting for better technology. I mean is it at all plausible that in 2040 one can build a nuclear powered space cruiser that dwarfs the Japanese superheavy battleships for the same cost as a modern airplane? I don't think you could even build a WW2 Japanese superheavy battleship in the ocean for that price today.

Even as an abstract unit it doesn't work: the USP in High-Tech (a gun I bought) is at $770. That's a reasonable price for a new one, I purchased one for $550. So the price of small arms is basically correct to modern day bucks, but the price for spaceships is ridiculously cheap. You can buy a TL8 NASA style space plane for a few millions! The Endeavour shuttle cost $1.7 billion. Even accounting for government inefficiency that seems on the order of silly. Either that or pricing is wildly inconsistent between books.

Basically, no one in the real world except for major nations and maybe mega-corporations can possibly afford to buy battleships and aircraft carriers. Space just octuples+ the cost and difficulties of all this, even at TL9 (which isn't that far ahead of TL8). Even most reasonably developed nations with good naval and aerospace industries (like Latin America) don't even bother to buy spaceplanes and battleships because it would eat up most of their military budget. If the pricing of spaceships were as realistic as the rules it would mean that you'd need like a dozen levels of multimillionaire or a Patron (NATO) to get your hands on one. That might militate against 'everyone has their own spaceship' themes in sci-fi but that's also almost certainly the case for anything below TL10 superabundance worlds. Naval combat vehicles and fighter planes are among the most expensive things in the world, and combining the two plus the added cost of having to build it in the most hostile environment mankind has ever encountered and the most expensive place you could possibly go should put even small, unarmed spaceships into the billions of dollars each - which is about how much space shuttles cost. A space battleship - even for a TL space-faring civilization - should cost on the order of tens - more likely hundreds - of billions of dollars.

The same could be said for fuel - it is enormously expensive to launch five thousand tons of hydrogen into space (and almost as expensive to keep it from blowing up on the way there). Refueling a SM +10 or larger ship once should probably cost hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. You'd have to burn an entire fleet of launch vehicles just to get the gas to the ship!

The Spaceships book seems to assume a level of economic development and prosperity that does not at all square with the average wealth levels and prices at TL9 overall (or even TL10+). Even assuming you have space-stuff already up there it's still extremely expensive to get fuel and parts into orbit. There's no place you can get them except Earth! Bringing gas from Jupiter would be even more expensive, by a factor of hundreds. Every time you put a piece into space for your spaceship parts or fuel it takes spaceship fuel to get it there. Using a rail cannon launcher might make it cheaper, but certainly not that cheap - and even if it made it dirt cheap the construction costs, life support, hazard pay, difficulty of working in the environment, and overall expensive/pain-in-the-butt nature of building what is basically a jet-fighter the size of an aircraft carrier would be absurdly expensive.

Basically, the cost of everything for TL7-9 space vehicles (barring some probably unrealistic assumptions about a huge level of space infrastructure, and really even granting that due to distances and environmental factors) should be 10 or 100 or 1000 times greater than it's listed as. At higher tech levels maybe you can offset this by a combination of better technology and more infrastructure development/more plausible avenues of getting parts. But as long as you're talking about building vehicles from Earth in the solar system with realistic TL9 stuff it ought to cost you two billion bucks just to make a space plane that can spend a couple of months in space. For a huge war machine with state of the art weapons, armor, computer systems, fusion power, nuclear engines, etc. you're talking something approaching the decabillions or trillions for such a civilization.

Of course this would basically keep most spaceships out of the hands of most PCs, but you don't see many civilians walking around with fighter jets or fission-powered cruisers, either.

[David Johnston2]

That's because if they accurately represented how impractical space travel is, you run into the problem that people just won't be doing it.

[Phantasm]

One thing to remember is Spaceships gives a mass production price, as if the ships were coming off an assembly line. This works alright for the SM +4 to SM +7 designs, but for larger ships you may want to increase the price by a factor of x10 to x100 for limited production runs. In the real world, remember, each naval carrier and battleship is essentially commissioned and built as a unique vessel, even if they're built on the same blueprints; minor technological advances make it into the newer ships of the same class that weren't in (or even yet invented) in older ones. Those minor advances are probably beneath the GURPS level of resolution, though.

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by VonKatzen

You can buy a TL8 NASA style space plane for a few millions! The Endeavour shuttle cost $1.7 billion.

That's the difference between a theoretical production run space shuttle and taking all of the R&D costs of just 5 prototype vessels, only 4 of which were flight capable, and spreading that cost across the prototypes.

Still, yes, spaceships costs are probably at least an order of magnitude too cheap. Maybe two orders of magnitude. However, it's also designed to create spaceships that players have a chance to own, and if your average vessel costs $1.7 Billion then the players are never going to be able to own one.

[VonKatzen]

For a SM +12 Battleship:
Using the costs for an aircraft carrier (too small, but the closest)
Plus the cost for a Joint-Strike Fighter (to represent 3D navigation and other electronics similar to space ships, but too slow/primitive/limited for a real space fighter; and ignoring R&D costs completely)
Plus the cost for a nuclear submarine (to represent pressure, life support and nuclear engine, but too cheap because it's too small, reactor is too weak)
Plus the cheapest estimates for launching stuff into space (too cheap because it ignores large pieces that cost more and can't be launched with small vehicles that are cheaper per pound overall)
Using conservative estimates in every metric for production-cost vehicles (not prototypes) and ignoring construction costs/crewing in freaking space, which is basically Hell:
I came up with $498.72 billion for a single space battleship.

It would actually be more expensive if you add in the unique technology it would need, the vastly superior and higher tech weapons, and the difficulty of manufacturing anything in space (either having to launch and assemble or build there, an environment which requires completely different techniques than earth-bound factories where we have air, mines, roads, easy resupply and gravity-based technology). The same ship can be built in Spaceships for about seven billion dollars with far superior weapons and armor than anything that any of these vehicles have.

So for a TL7-9 civilization space vehicles are at least 100 times too cheap.

If the pricing is that cheap for player purposes it creates other problems: why ever build a tank when you can build a nuclear space vehicle with reentry capability that can nuke people from orbit for the same book price? It makes land-based stuff far too expensive by comparison.

Also, since GURPS makes Wealth so cheap and tends to veer towards realism I think they ought to have included a price hike by default in TL7-9 just for realism. Maybe TL10 civilizations are practical space colonizers and it's excusable, but it's just absurd for a meager billionaire to be able to buy a nuclear space battleship out of his pocket below that level of technology.

[VonKatzen]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

That's because if they accurately represented how impractical space travel is, you run into the problem that people just won't be doing it.

Space travel is practical if it's low-key and local, or you have magic technology. Otherwise it's pretty BS. Space is pretty much the worst place you can possibly go and nothing you would find in it would be close enough or valuable enough to make it worthwhile (excluding near-Earth orbit, where you're really just building stuff to help you mine/communicate/travel on Earth)
Even if there was a platinum ball the size of Jupiter in the Kyper belt it would cost you more to get there and bring it back than it would ever net you in value. You basically require magic tech to make space anything more than a big bunch of nothing and death.

Going to space is like going to the Gobi desert the size of the solar system, except with no air. Or sand. Totally pointless, and it will kill you. You might do a little for Science! or whatever, but it has a completely negative economic value in all likelyhood. In order for any venture to be sustained it has to be economic - it has to either support itself or come from surplus elsewhere. This is not a social limit, this is a physical limit - even if everyone wanted to it's not physically possible to expand into the solar system and keep the people necessary to do it from dying from starvation and other deprivation. Limited resources and all. Space is so big, and so useless, that I seriously doubt anything beyond near-Earth/Luna will ever be traversed except for one-shot 'let's find out' missions. Maybe AI robots (much better suited to space than humans) in a thousand years will form hordes of matter-eating locusts across localspace, but just as likely not. Space fiction is basically fantasy with technobabble replacing magic. FTL travel is about as realistic as warlocks and elves. Probably less so.

For the amount of energy/resources/time/human effort it would take to 'colonize mars' you could build enormous spin-cycle colonies in NEO that could house millions of people. I do not think most sci-fi authors know (or care) about the issues involved in long-distance space travel or understand that literally all life, factories, supply chains and usable resources known exist on Earth (nor do they understand how big the Earth is). Colonizing Mars would basically only occur after so much NEO and Lunar stuff had been built that it was cheap to build in space and from asteroids - if ever. Colonizing Mars is probably further off than antimatter reactors, whereas most Sci-Fi puts us in Alpha Centauri before 2100. You would need stupid cheap energy and stupid cheap plastic and stupid cheap radiation shielding to make space travel possible, and before it became profitable (which is what drives 99.99% of all human beings who ever have or will live, for very good physical reasons mentioned previously) using that energy on Earth would remain vastly more useful. There is literally no plausible, human-useful reason to colonize Mars, much less further, that anyone has ever come up with - even if you could. And if people ever live on Mars the same economics will make it so that about 90,000x as many people live on Earth - and live better. No matter how much pollution, weather change, overpopulation etc. happens on Earth it will remain more hospitable than a cold, dead planet a bajillion miles away. You would literally need non-human robots to make solar system colonization - much less interstellar- at all practical. You need something that was not evolved to live on Earth and which is not biologically dependent on its cycles and resources - human beings are trapped here. Moving from Earth to Mars - or even Luna - is not remotely comparable to moving to the Americas. It's like comparing the Ritz to a volcano in terms of suitability for habitation. The moon is a half-frozen, half-burning radiation scarred meteor-attracting hellscape covered in razor glass dust with no atmosphere and almost none of the mineral resources of the Earth. It's useful as a launch platform maybe, but it's no place to raise a kid - and there'd be no one to raise him if you did.

I wish I could live to the year 2300 just to see the butthurt nerds complaining about how nobody lives in space. I take joy in such things.

[Rupert]

It would actually be more expensive if you add in the unique technology it would need, the vastly superior and higher tech weapons.

This is either prototype gear, with the suggested vastly increased cost, or it's mature TL9 tech, in which case it shouldn't cost vastly more than we pay for mature TL8 gear.

Spaceships 6 has rules for making new components for ships, and variant spaceships, etc., which will push the price up.

If the price of building a ship still offends you (and note that not all need be built in space), apply the costs for ground to orbit lifting from Spaceships 2 to the mass of the new spacecraft if it's all being lifted from planetside. At TL9 without super-science that'll add $50 billion to your SM+12 ship, right there.

[RogerBW]

Also, when you build a space-Zumwalt in GURPS Spaceships, it actually works, rather than being designed round a specific weapon which is then cancelled. If your space carrier's fighter launch systems break the fighters, you probably don't finish building it before you have a fix for the problem. Defence procurement (especially in the US, but everywhere really) is much more about transfer of funds from government to favoured companies than it is about producing actual working hardware, and therefore isn't much of a guide to what things would actually cost if built honestly.

In any case, this is GURPS and Rule Zero applies. It's not as if a player can rock up and say "I bought Multimillionaire 3, so you must let me have a space battleship as starting equipment". If the cost of spaceships is too low for your campaign, change it.

[VonKatzen]

Originally Posted by Rupert

If the price of building a ship still offends you (and note that not all need be built in space), apply the costs for ground to orbit lifting from Spaceships 2 to the mass of the new spacecraft if it's all being lifted from planetside. At TL9 without super-science that'll add $50 billion to your SM+12 ship, right there.

Even so that seems pretty cheap, though possible if you have stable coilguns as launch platforms (real coilguns blow themselves apart so they're kind of expensive in terms of maintenance).

Much of it depends on time/infrastructure. If you have a TL9 civ that's been around a long time you can build space factories, develop space-based manufacturing techniques, have people raised in space so you don't have to train astronauts for every single job (as it is, even a plumber has to be an Astronaut/Plumber), finding resources and building extremely long and expensive supply/population chains to them gradually, etc. But in the more conservative (and I think realistic) case almost everything ever is going to be on Earth, which makes space travel/construction uber expensive compared to everything else.

At TL10-12 you get way more options. But TL10-12 may be - IRL - superscience. Mass produced synthetic diamonds, fusion reactors, etc. may actually be impossible in real-world conditions, and TL10 (much less TL11-12) may actually never happen. TL9 with super-expensive TL10 may be the realistic limit of human production capacity for hundreds of years.

Also, when you build a space-Zumwalt in GURPS Spaceships, it actually works, rather than being designed round a specific weapon which is then cancelled. If your space carrier's fighter launch systems break the fighters, you probably don't finish building it before you have a fix for the problem. Defence procurement (especially in the US, but everywhere really) is much more about transfer of funds from government to favoured companies than it is about producing actual working hardware, and therefore isn't much of a guide to what things would actually cost if built honestly.

Yeah, I mean it's a fair assumption that everything most governments build is 2x-100x more expensive and probably a bad solution to the problem in general. Which means you can reduce to price for rationally built SpaceZumwalts, or create SpaceZumwalts that are broken and cost 100x the book price anyway. However, most battleships are built by the SpaceEmpire which is some sort of hellish Commie-Nazi war machine that runs half a galaxy that would be even more inefficient, corrupt and oblivious than the current Earth bureaucracies.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by VonKatzen

Even so that seems pretty cheap, though possible if you have stable coilguns as launch platforms (real coilguns blow themselves apart so they're kind of expensive in terms of maintenance).

That's the price for TL9 interface lifts, assuming reaction drives ($50K/ton). If that's too low, assume TL8 prices and multiply by ten. OR don't, because I failed at maths and already did, by accident.

Much of it depends on time/infrastructure. If you have a TL9 civ that's been around a long time you can build space factories, develop space-based manufacturing techniques, have people raised in space so you don't have to train astronauts for every single job (as it is, even a plumber has to be an Astronaut/Plumber), finding resources and building extremely long and expensive supply/population chains to them gradually, etc. But in the more conservative (and I think realistic) case almost everything ever is going to be on Earth, which makes space travel/construction uber expensive compared to everything else.

In this sort of case, everything will be costing as a prototype/limited production run. Spaceships assumes that this is not the baseline case, so it's not surprising that the prices seem a bit low.

BTW, a TL8 100,000 ton carrier built using Spaceships and the optional rules from Pyramid costs $2-2.5 billion, not counting air group. The biggest single expense is the Tactical array at $1 billion, followed by $600M for the fission reactors.

Yeah, I mean it's a fair assumption that everything most governments build is 2x-100x more expensive and probably a bad solution to the problem in general. Which means you can reduce to price for rationally built SpaceZumwalts, or create SpaceZumwalts that are broken and cost 100x the book price anyway. However, most battleships are built by the SpaceEmpire which is some sort of hellish Commie-Nazi war machine that runs half a galaxy that would be even more inefficient, corrupt and oblivious than the current Earth bureaucracies.

They'd possibly be cheaper, though. Bad in all kinds of ways, but cheaper. Also, military procurement, while always prone to corruption and cheating (like any really big contract tends to be), wasn't always as badly padded as it tends to be today.