Affording a spaceship?
 

So, the average character in a Space campaign has no way of ever affording a ship without spending 100 points (or more) for wealth and then blowing it all on a ship...

So, how are you supposed to allow for players in a space campaign to have a ship?

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

They have a wealthy Patron who lets them use a ship? They belong to an organization that allows them the use of a ship. Or perhaps they stole the ship and now have an enemy who is chasing them. OR perhaps they all pooled their resources and own the ship collectively. Perhaps their ship is heavily mortgaged or financed.

If the ship is a necessity for the story, then include one. There's lots of ways to get it.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

There's always Rev. PK's "Ship Owner" advantage: see http://www.mygurps.com/t_spaceships.html

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

I like defining ship as a HEADQUARTERS (Supers p.85) and apply "Special Abilities, +100%" for a Starship (+50% for space, +50% for Mobile).

Look at the status level that gives you the size "ship" you want (on page B266. the table will say Mansion) The effective status for a headquarters is in no way connected to your actual wealth or social Status. It is only used to determine the size of headquarters, based on the table (on page B266). You do not have to pay the cost of living to maintain the status of your Headquarters (Supers p.85)

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Hmmm... not bad, always like RPK's stuff (heck, so does SJGames, heh)

Not a bad idea either...

What I CURRENTLY did, but I was looking to see if there was a better way, is I just gave the character the ship, but she also has Wealth (Wealthy) and -20 Debt.

However, if I went with RPK's Ship Owner... then she could have a really nice ship with that 30pts... but then rightfully be greatly in debt to crime lords, kinda like Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon :)

EDIT: Wait Wealthy is 20... hmmm so that's not as good...

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

In general, a ship is a plot device that lets the GM move the players to where he wants them to be, and is thus not worth points by itself. I'd only charge points for the other things a ship can do for you -- if it provides an income or has useful facilities you have to pay for those things.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Agreed. If, as the GM, I wanted the players to have a ship and there to be a captain of that ship, then one of the players would take that role.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Yeah, actually the Captain is an NPC, and she's going to be hiring the players to work for her, but I was thinking I should be somewhat fair and make her "pay" for the ship, but now that I think about it, especially as you guys say that a ship should be plot device anyway, that's actually somewhat cool, since I gave her 20 points in debt, so she'll need the PCs to help her make lots of money to keep the crime boss she knows from taking her ship... or worse, taking her.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

A big question is indeed whether this is the reason for wishing to afford a ship.

If it is indeed a 'move from A to B' purpose, with no other uses whatsoever, then yeah, just let them have it like Anthony says. Personally, if I were willing to spend points and cash on a ship, I'd very much expect to get benefits other than just having an excuse for moving from adventure to adventure (because it's perfectly fine to have all adventures of a campaign in the same city!). So, we move to . . .

. . . A useful investment. This is the sort of ship that can be used both to earn money (assuming interplanetary transportation is profitable) and derive other benefits. It's essentially 100% adventuring equipment, giving both a source of income and a way to solve some of the problems in an adventure. This usually makes sense as Wealth, which indeed provides both.

OTOH, if it's a matter of being in command of a ship, then you might want Rank. A Dominant or Unique organisation with Large Resources (×10) can be willing to temporarily (×10) hand over up to 5,000% of Starting Wealth worth of assets at Rank 4 [20], (which also provides 2 levels of free Status!). Multiply by 10 for each extra 2 ranks, or by 3 for extra 1.

Now, if it's about being The Self-Reliant Captain, and outright 100% owning the ship instead of just being able to use it, the GM should think whether this is an acceptable set-up for the whole group. It might be, or it might not. You may in fact rule that being The Self-Reliant Captain is a highly-respected social position, and allow the PC to buy sufficient Status and replace the house-and-car (or whatever) that buying Status gets you with an equivalent-Status spaceship. With non-stellar Wealth, this tends to produce struggling-but-proud captains who fight day to day to keep their ship running.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

I've always thought in terms of low-quality, used ships that are almost an adventure to keep running...
Headquarters... brilliant idea - now to play with numbers:D

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

If you want the PCs to be wealthy ship-owners, give the players enough points to generate wealthy ship-owners. Or just give them a ship.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

If you want to pay for the ability to command her Crew, that's Rank. the level is based on how big the crew is.

Also note Han's ownership of the Falcon is one of the canonical examples of Signature Gear. Han doesn't qualify for Wealth advantage until after he marries Leia.

Luke's X-wing comes from his Rank in the rebel alliance. it just his Reputation gives him the ability to pick and choose his missions hence it seams like he gets to use it as a personal item.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

It seems sig.gear has really terrible CP tp $ ratio to buy big things like ships.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Patron (6 or less, x1/2; Equipment, +100%; Minimal Intervention, -50%; Secret, -50%) [5, 8, 10, 13 or 15]

... depending on how much the spaceship cost.

A secret patron wishes for them to have a starship for its' own reasons and so arranged for them to have one at its' own expense. They don't know who it is, they don't realize they have one, they don't realize it was done and if they do manage to contact it they still have to make a reaction roll in order to get anything out of it. It interferes rarely; always indirectly, always secretly.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

The trouble with owning a spaceship in GURPS is that space settings tend to treat ships like cars in outer space. Realistically, spaceships are way more expensive than that, and the GURPS prices reflect the realistic cost, not the trope.

If a character takes the usual settled lifestyle of 20% of starting wealth, then you can simply consider a spaceship to be a car in space, and ignore its price as part of the 80%. An Earthbound character of Average Wealth has a car; why shouldn't a spacer of Average Wealth have a spaceship, if they're as common as cars?


If, on the other hand, the character is a wanderer and starts with 100% of starting wealth, then simply reduce the prices of spaceships to that of cars.


Summary: spaceship prices are realistic; expecting ordinary individuals to own them is not. Change to cinematic prices or ignore them.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Which why Spaceships had a large item signature gear variant.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Quoted for Truth. Though I see them more like boats: If you own one just to get around you are wealthy, but there are lots of people who own cheap, rugged versions that provide their lively hood.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Realistically, spaceships as seen in rpgs (and movies and TV series, etc) do not exist and all prices for them are made up. The 10s and hundreds of millions you see some places are just someone's idea of what a ship _should_ cost. It's no more "realistic" than any other number.

Multiple editions of the Star Wars RPG have told us that the price of a used "Stock Light Freighter" is 25,000 credits. Given their commonness in the SW universe this is probably consistent with the prices of comparative items.

Chris Thrash who has worked on the ships in the Serenity RPG tells us that Mal spent the equivalent of a few 100k on hi ship and that this is quite close to what a small used cargo ship costs on 21st century Earth.

If your universe is conciev3ed as a place where small and cheap starships are common then any system that tells you they should cost 10s of millions is _wrong_ (for your universe at least).

Just remember to be consistent. If small starships are cheap then power plants and computers and weapons of that size are cheap too. Perhaps building ships in your universe is 100x easier than Gurps Spaceships seems to think. Divide all prices by 100. Nobody connected with it is likely to complain.

Go through UT and adjust prices downward there too. If a sued ship is 25k then a heavy blaster pistol won't be $5600. Same for armor and so forth. Dividing by 10 looks about right.

If you don't want to reprice everything individually tell your players that the in-game "credit" is actually worth 10 meta-game Gurps $.

So remember, prices in settings not at all like contemporary 21st century Earth are all _arbitrary_. Change what doesn't work in your game.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

If a Spaceship is merely a way for the characters to get about, then having a Patron provide one, or the GM providing one as the common 'package' for everyone is perfectly reasonable.

That does not mean that wanting to treat a Spaceship as a piece of equipment (like a sword, or a horse) for which the PC needs to pay (points and/or cash) isn't a perfectly valid and reasonable option - for which our rules (GURPS) should be able to provide us with an answer. Dismissing this option in favour or just giving them one is not very helpful.

Treating Spaceships like Cars is also not a particularly relevant argument. I can't think of a mainstream fiction setting where everyone of Average wealth owns a spaceship; A 'flyer' or 'speeder' maybe.
Spaceships are more equivalent to Planes or Yachts (larger ones)
Private shuttles might be the equivalent of helicopters, small planes or small boats, but they are still not owned by everyone.

The 'What Cost of Living Gets You' box on page 266 of Basic:Characters puts owning a small yacht into Status 3 (which is basically Very Wealthy), a private light aircraft as Status 4 (basically Filthy Rich) and an executive jet as Status 5 (basically Multimillionaire 1)!

The problem with simply using Wealth to buy a spaceship is they are expensive - not particularly surprising, and Signature Gear doesn't really help either.
I would use PK's Wealth and Signature Gear House Rules, and if a Characters spaceship is basically their home, I would have no problem with using the 80% of Starting Wealth to cover this.

In settings like Traveller, Star Wars or Firefly, where Spaceships are very common, I see no problem with simple applying a divisor to the costs. 10% of the sort of cost from a GURPS Spaceships design would make a 'tramp freighter' or small scout vessel a reasonable point purchase.
Using the 'Cheap and Used Ships' options from GURPS Spaceships 2, p27/28 is also an option. You can adjust the divisors/percentages (cheap as 20%, very cheap as 10% for instance) as above. These options have the added advantage of the ship requiring extra maintenance, which keeps the characters occupied.

The Supers/Headquarters rules suggested by the_matrix_walker are also a reasonable option if the Spaceships is more than just something provided by the GM, but not really personal equipment. The spaceship costs someone points (so it's not a freebie, and means something for the characters to look after), without it being a significant portion of their character points total.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Quoted for truth.
Not sure why this had not made it in the early round of replies.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

This is quite true.

The problem is that spaceship construction rules tend to assume "spaceships are like ironclads, container freighters or jumbo jets.", they're huge, equipped with lots of expensive specialized subsystems - multi-thousand horsepower engines, heavy cargo handling gear, powerful radars, guns - built and maintained by specialists at heavy duty industrial facilities, crewed by dozens, if not hundreds of people, and owned by corporations, governments, or maybe an occasional billionaire.

Spaceship *plots* tend to assume "spaceships are like sailing ships", those are small, don't carry much expensive gear (cannon excepted, and private ships *didn't* normally have more than a couple of those) built of about the same materials and skills to manufacture as a large house, crewed by a handful of people, and affordable by anybody who could pay for a large house. Note that modern yachts, which are still small and don't have much equipment you wouldn't put in a house, are still in the same price range as a mansion.

The two views are not really consistent with each other, you really need to decide which one applies to your setting's standard ships.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

RAW, affording a spaceship means you've invested a significant chunk of points into the necessary advantages.

A TL 9 space fighter clocks in at G$5.31M. Its' adventuring gear and so isn't included in your CoL. This requires Wealth (Multimillionaire 1; Adventuring Lifestyle; Conditional Ownership (20%), -4%) [72] to afford said space fighter. If your characters are budgeted 150/-50 ... Heh.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Because Signature Assets is an enhancement that increases the cost of the Wealth required to afford the ship and Conditional Ownership isn't especially worth taking given the extremely small discount it provides.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

In the campaign I'm running, I think the ship prices work, since owning a ship is a luxury. The average person isn't even a considered a citizen in fact. But, as long as they don't mess with citizens, the police leave them alone.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Yes, and I think I covered that in the rest of my post.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

It's not rail roading if it's your corporate handlers telling you where to go, not the GM directly. ;)
You're the only "asset" in the area and being ordered to take this mysterious delegate to Nowheresville. Then you can get back to being one of our tax write offs.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

In my new campaign I just loaned the characters a ship. One of the characters has a grandfather and uncle who had a space ship. The actual captain is the uncle, but he won't be seen much because for all intents and purposes he is a spirit in a crystal that is linked to the ship's controls.

The ship was designed for the needs of the campaign. It has extremely high stealth and can outrun pretty much any human ship. It has a fighter on board so the ex-fighter pilot gets to show off his skills, and the ship can be used as a spy ship or merchant pioneer. The uncle being on the ship keeps enough strings on them so they won't just turn pirate. (The uncle uses his abilities to run the power supply which absolutely doesn't work without him at the level needed.)

As it is the players get half the shares of any profit and they'll get paid for a couple of things (three of the characters are secret bodyguards for the techie character - a mad scientist who would be rich if she cared about money - who has two disadvantages:
1. Enemy: The Hidden (the secret police of the enemy interstellar polity)
and
2. Delusion: The Hidden are just a myth. Nobody wants to kidnap or kill me.

They also get paid if the ship is commissioned for an investigation mission into enemy territory.

So basically the four of them (five if you count Uncle Jack - yes, "Jack the Bodiless Son of Butterfly" is his official name). While Jack the character has nothing to do with the fictional Jack the Bodiless I just thought the name was cool. Plus as the official Master of this ship he could be called "Captain Jack."

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Which you have to be careful with, or you run into people cornering the ten foot pole market by buying a lot of ten foot ladders and a saw.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Ok, that has to be one of the coolest analogies I've heard in a long time... I get the point entirely, yet it's hilarious too.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Because they do almost nothing to solve any of the problems with large assets.

There's a MyGurps alternate rule for large-scale cash-for-points which actually gives a not-absurd way to buy 'own something hugely expensive that you can't replace out of pocket money'.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

A good comparison! Yes, boats are probably a better analogy for most space settings.


There's real, and then there's realistic. I'm not talking about anything real.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Truckers, Commercial Fishermen, all sorts of people who own large, expensive, specialty vehicles typically have something in common: they don't start out owning their own rigs. They are financing them from a bank or similar credit institution and paying for them on a monthly or annual basis. Ships and aircraft are significantly expensive that to own one outright, you generally do need to be a multi-millionaire.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

I wasn't necessarily arguing with your post; merely adding my own thoughts which used your post as a springboard.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

An obsolete ship can often go for a lot less the it would cost to build. Upgrading to not obsolete costs more then building a new one since you have to dismantle hard to dismantle parts first. Selling for scrap gets very little because of the same so selling it cheap to someone optimistic enough to think they can make money with it is the best bet. Being obsolete to make money you have to take jobs that pay above market rates which means dangerous and/or remote. Which is perfect for many gaming campaigns.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Yes, and likewise playing a SEAL or a cinematic secret agent or a superhero means investing a significant chunk of points into the appropriate skills and advantages. So if the GM wants the PCs to be SEALs or spies or supers he or she sets an appropriate budget and the problem is solved.

Like a SEAL, a spy, or a super, a spaceship owner is not a 150-point character. So if the GM wants the PCs to have a spaceship he or she either sets an appropriate budget and insists that it be spent on the ship, or else assigns the ship and doesn't count it against the characters' build budget — which comes to the same thing.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Well, the issue isn't really what that ship would cost to build, but what a ship of comparable capacity would cost to build -- the value of a merchant ship is basically the amount of money you can make off of that ship (prorated for time) -- so anything that increases the operating costs of the ship or reduces its expected lifespan also reduces its value. If the extra upkeep on an old ship exceeds the interest payments on a new ship, it's basically valueless -- except that realistically different people have different interest rates. If a new ship has operating costs of $100,000/month, and an old ship has operating costs of $200,000/month, a company with a good credit rating that would pay $80,000/month in interest on a new ship prefers a new ship, but a disreputable organization that would have to pay $120,000/month in interest prefers the older ship, as long as they can get it for less than $20,000/month in interest. Also, since insurance/self-insurance costs are based on current value, the old ship is useful to send on risky trips, which is exactly the sort of thing PCs specialize in.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Discounted rather than prorated.

Well, sort of. Discount rates aren't a personal characteristic as is sometimes taught, they're an optimisation parameter, and when various people are in equilibrium with the same capital market the difference between their interest rates is down to a risk premium, which is to say an insurance cost….

… never mind.

Your basic point is correct, that the value of a commercial vehicle is the present value of the expected stream of chargeable transport services it provides minus running costs (plus scrap value on scrapping). Such assets are to be found in the possession of people who can borrow cheaply. An owner who faces high borrowing costs or lucrative investment opportunities elsewhere finds it advantageous to economise current running costs (such as maintenance) at the cost of heavily-discounted operating profits in the distant future, and therefore either depreciates his asset or sells it to someone with a lower discount rate.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

A ship could also be an NPC.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Well, it kiiinda is in that the ship computer contains an AI.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

I've had a campaign where it was a PC.. the AI, had a mana-coroccessor and was a Run mage, the ship was a precursors artificer that was collecting samples (the other PCs) and observing them

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Another option originally posted by munin in a thread I created last year on this issue:

In your case, the Spaceship IS effectively the Patron, and the PC's share the cost of the Patron, and occasionally the ship does something unexpected on its own!

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Well, not quite. As I said in another thread, it's more like Andromeda or EDI in reverse. The first mate of the ship is an AI who uploaded a copy of her mind to control the ship.

The actual owner is an NPC (as is the first mate) and they are going to be hiring the characters, but since they also sometimes will be fighting alongside the PCs (but not always), I wanted to keep their point totals as fair as possible.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

You can build ships as characters, so you could build the spaceship as an Ally with Minion. That does make your ship's potency directly dependent on your character's point total, and things like enhanced move, hyper jump and all it's gadgets can get quite expensive.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

I quickly got frustrated with that approach, as the point totals went Sky high. The ST alone was ridiculous.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Yeah, probably Patron is a better fit for most point budgets.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

I prefer the Mobile Headquarters... the point cost is affordable at most point levels and fixed regardless of your CP total... the only drawback is having to take labs and major systems as perks, but even that isn't too bad.

Even in real life there were examples --
 

The Greek shipping industry was built by guys who got a used Liberty ship cheap -- (Uncle Sugar didn't want to pay the storage costs) and ran them into the ground hauling loads around the poorer corners of the world. See Onassis, Niarchos, and others. If you're willing to buy a ship for scrap prices, fix it up yourself, use cheap parts and cheaper labor, you can get from point A to point B fairly cheaply. But I wouldn't want to ride that barge.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Merely staying afloat is a hell of a lot easier than maintaining livable atmospheric pressure and temperature for weeks or months at a time.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Yeah, like the Firefly episode "Out of Gas"

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

I've never seen the show. I know, don't tar and feather me or take away my nerd card. I can't forgive Whedon for putting 50 some habitable planets in a single star system.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

It's not hard to ignore that, and just assume it's several star systems. In fact, it works better with the stories they tell.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Yes, ignoring what happens on the show does make it easier to believe some of the other details of said show. But really, that doesn't make it more palatable to me.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

No, seriously, the mention of everything being in one solar system is a quick voice over and pretty much never mentioned again. For the rest of the show all you know of their travels is that they travel, there's no real mention if it's FTL, STL, or Magic Flying Carpets. At any rate, if you're going to hate without actually sampling then you're going to hate, and it sounds like you're spending more effort trying to find a reason to hate the show without having actually watched it than it's worth to try to change your mind on the subject.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

It's actually a funky quinternary star system.

http://i.imgur.com/M7HsV.jpg

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Oh dear!

Sometimes when you are in a hole you ought to stop digging.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Are those orbits really as well-synchronised as multiple rotors on a helicopter?

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Very possibly... it's implied that when they first arrived in the system they had terraforming technology and that's why there is so many habitable planets, but as they moved out from the core... it got harder and harder to terraform, since the original people that built the ships that left "Earth that Was" were long dead? I'm not 100% sure as while I am a fan of the show itself, I've not read any of the books and such that explain all the nuances...

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

One school of "thought" is that the GM decides whether the PC party starts the campaign owning a ship, and if so, which type of ship, and what modifications, if any, it has.



My take on it is that it makes sense, in RPG character creation system design, to allow for the possibility of characters starting out with very expensive (and usually large) single items, which are hard to sell, and almost impossible to sell real fast unless you give an insane discount. Examples include owning a home, or indeed a vehicle such as a spaceship or a sea ship. Examples of non-large items include state-of-the-art cyberdecks, and permanent magic items.

If such items must be purchased using the standard wealth/starting equipment budget rules, then they are guaranteed to "happen", in the sense of players voluntarily and freely (without "hints" or more overt pressure from the GM) going for such options. And since it is desirable for player characters to start the campaign owning such items fairly often, certainly more often than once-in-a-hyper-rare-while, it is merely good game design, thoughtful game design, to include such options in the character creation rules.



A third option is for the player characters to pool resources to own a huge item. And by pool I mean non-linear synergies. That's what I opted for in Modern Action RPG, with pooled vehicle ownership, so that the PCs would be able to collectively own a sea ship or similar (or, of course, a space ship for the planned science fiction-themed expansion), with players opting out of it not contributing points towards the vehicle, and thus not having any formal say in how the vehicle is utilized during the campaign.

Here, it makes a lot of sense to provide easy "access" to ownership of off-the-shelf hulls, and charge more points for "modified" or "upgraded" hulls. And by "upgraded", added firepower (or even adding firepower to a civilian hull) is likely to be a very popular option.



A fourth option is to say that the ship isn't actually owned, but is instead mortgaged, and its full cost must be paid with monies earned during the campaign, i.e. over time. GURPS Space 2nd and 3rd Edition has some quick-and-dirty percentage values for that (you pay off X percent over 8 years, or Y percent over 12 years, and it's usually the worldbuilder's choice, as to what kind of mortgages the market will accept). I can't recall if Space 4th Edition has the same material. It doesn't quite fit ind. But if not, it's probably in GURPS Spaceships, either in the core PDF or in the 2nd volume. And if you don't have any of that, then if you ask, some kind person can probably provide you with the necessary figures from Space 2/3 (even me, assuming I notice your request).



A fifth, used in Moongoose's version of Traveller, is to divide each ship up into standard-sized "shares". IIRC MongTraveller uses something like 1 MegaCredit per share, so the cost of one ship might be 52 shares and another ship might cost 131 shares. One of the end-of-career benefits that characters can roll is shares in various ships.

In this way, player characters can own some shares of the ship, while any remaining shares must be paid off with interest, or maybe just paid interest on without any actual paying-down (depending on the financial climate of the world in which the campaign takes place).

So, say a ship costs 120 shares. One PC buys 30 shares during character creation, and each of the other five PCs buys 10. That leaves 40 shares on which interest must be paid, and nominally the first PC has 3 times as much say as any of the others, in terms of what to do with the ship.

With 1 Megacredit per share, a reasonable interest on a highly mobile asset might be 15% per year, or 1.25% per month, so 12.5k credits per month per share. With 40 shares that demand interest, that's half a million per month, or 6 million per year. On a ship costing 120 million, but which is 2/3 owned by its crew.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

As a wise man once said, a ship isn't just a hull, engines, meteor defences and so forth. A ship is freedom.

If you as a GM gets to decide what kind of things the players' characters own at gamestart, why stop there? Why not also decide who they're going to be, what kinds of characters? Why not create their characters for them? Why not play their characters for them too?

Heck, why have players at all? If you want to create a story, sit down and write a novel!

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

The implementation of Signature Gear in GURPS 4th Edition is ****ed up. Stupidly ****ed up.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Okay...

I build a world, then I GM a campaign set in it, and I decide that in this campaign, the players' characters shall be settled by default, and that defines the cost of spaceships in the world.

Then, a year later, I decide to GM another campaign in the same world, taking place in the same time period as the first campaign, but this time I decide that the default for player characters shall be a nomadic lifestyle. So suddenly all the hundreds of thousands (if not tens of millions) of spaceships in the world, owned by thousands or millions of NPCs, get their price reduced to 1/5 of what it used to be.

Then, the year after that, I decide to GM a third campaign in this world, still in the same time period, but going back to settled-by-default, so suddenly every single ship in the entire universe gets its price quintupled.

I'm confused now. I'm really confused.

And not only am I confused.

The billions of NPCs who live in this world are also confused.

They thought that they understood ecnomics and finance. Not perfectly, even though high-TL Economics is obviously going to be at least slightly more scientific than present-day-TL Economics. But they thought they had a rough idea, they thought their experts, professors at the major business universities, had a rough idea of how stuff works, how money works, how and why prices change. Enough to usually be able to see changes coming before they happen (anticipation - a major benefit of living in an actual world is that you can develop a useful sense for what to anticipate), and always foreseee hugely drastic changes (such as prices getting divided by 5 or multiplied by 5) well in advance, when the cause isn't a paradigm shift (typically a major technological advancement, such as the development of fusion reactors), and to always be able to explain serious changes in hindsight.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Nice use of scare quotes.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Exactly. And while it may seem implausible that the InterStellar GigaCorp almost always gives the trickiest jobs to the same group of 4-6 guys, it starts to make a lot more sense of these 4-6 guys are in-world-observably highly competent individiuals - in GURPS terms built on 150 or 250 CPs - while the other crews of the corp's spaceships are much more typical individuals, either without special competences, or else highly specialized competences.

They might have one crew of 100 CP first-in type planetary explorers, and another 75 CP crew of first contact scientist-diplomats, with the other crew being 50 CP normals, but then there's this special crew, a bunch of 200 CP generalists, that get all the dangerous (and fun) jobs.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

I've used it more than once, and it seemed to serve its purpose well when buying iconic personal equipment and software. And it seems okay to represent infallible insurance of stuff. It does kinda break down for larger stuff.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

That's because you don't understand what I said, and I think you're looking for an argument.

Reducing the price of spaceships is a setting-based decision, not a campaign-style one. Either spaceships are as cheap as cars (or boats) or they're realistically expensive and only affordable by countries and large corporations. This does not change depending on whether the characters are settled or wanderers.

You don't reduce the price of spaceships to 20% of their original cost; you reduce their price to the price of cars (or boats), because that's how much people in the world actually pay for them.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

And if you later decide to have some PCsown a ship you arrange for them to have it by one of the methods above rather then cahnge the price of the ship.
Either they lucked into a ship (gifted them points maybe) or they paid for it out of charecter points, possibly using disadvantages.
Changing the overall price of ships is changing the setting which SHOULD be noticed by everyone.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

So what you're saying is that if you want to play a campaign where the PCs own a ship, you should only do it in a setting where spaceships are really cheap?

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

No he's saying if you want PCs to own a ship you should only do it in a setting the supports the type of ownerships that you want the PCs to have.

You have a problem with having to be obscenely wealthy to freehold a spaceship, then don't run it in a setting where you have to be obscenely wealthy to do so.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

That of course completely ignores the fact that owning something very expensive and being obscenely wealthy are quite distinct situations. There are very few settings where you're only allowed to own expensive things if your Wealth level is high enough.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

No it doesn't, that what the word Freehold is doing there is for.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

In any setting where ships are very expensive, anyone who owns one is either obscenely wealthy or incapable of selling it. Which is itself a WSoD issue with certain settings, where a simple economic analysis will show the best way to make money with a ship is to sell it.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Yup. If the average Spaceship is going to run $100 Million of today's dollars then if an average wealth PC owns it his best bet is to sell it, put it in the bank, then live off the ~$300,000 per year interest income he can easily get with that money (which puts him well into the "obscenely wealthy" category). Of course, that leads to a lot less adventuring possibilities, as you can't easily go gallivanting across the galaxy if you just sold your spaceship.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

...where are you seeing the word "freehold"?

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

It's not that hard to make a spaceship not be a highly liquid asset.

The second point comes down to 'don't make a game about spaceship economics and then make the economics rule out spaceships'.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

in my post that that you quoted to say that it's ignoring those conditions.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Ah, I see. Not sure how I missed that.

Don't think it resolves the issue though. Your net worth is theoretically a bunch in that case. That doesn't actually make you obscenely wealthy.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

Realistically, if you're not obscenely wealthy you are going to have a hard time holding onto your extremely expensive toy. Between taxes and fees, operating expenses, and other costs you either need a large cash flow (i.e. wealth) or you will quickly run into a situation in which you cannot pay some part of those expenses and wind up losing the asset. In the real world average people don't own and operate cruise ships, jet liners, or sky rises. It takes a great deal of assets and wealth in order to both own and operate such an expensive toy. Even if you scale it down to an example of something an average person can afford to buy (say, a 2-4 person propeller plane or small yacht) it is an extremely expensive toy to own, and many people who buy one wind up losing or selling it because they cannot afford the upkeep on it while other people don't bother buying it because they don't want to sink that kind of money into it.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

You can also look at the issue from the other side:

Someone who has a spaceship and the skills and allies to operate it properly is likely to be making some money on it. It's funny to see spaceship captains who don't have the cash to buy a single set of clothes.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

And to look at it yet another way, if you have 10 gross tons of Wobbly-Widgets that you need to deliver 'cross the 'verse are you going to entrust them to the guy who can't even afford a new shirt, let alone fuel for his ship, or are you going to send them with Interstellar Deliveries who guarantees it will get there by next month?

In GURPS the Wealth advantage doesn't just represent your current assets or your current job, it also represents your earning potential. If you have a low wealth level then you are going to have a harder time landing the kinds of jobs that will pay enough to keep operating your ship.

Re: Affording a spaceship?
 

The operating expenses of having a ship do vary widely by setting. It may not be that hard to keep a ship flying as a low-productivity asset if you already have one.

But if your (commercial-purposed) ship makes economic sense (sometimes dodged legitimately), and is very expensive, operating it correctly should produce a lot of income. That's quite true.

But having a piece of capital capable of producing wealth, actually producing wealth with it, and being wealthy are separable, even if there is a logical path connecting them.