Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Spaceships missiles pretty nearly act in accordance with the usual Guided weapon rules. The launcher doesn't have to continuously focus on guiding them for the entire flight time (in the version of the system where they have flight time), but other than that I can't think of significant divergences.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Is it possible that the difference in cost of missiles vs ships is because the listed cost for missiles is retail and ship cost are manufacturing costs? Retailer markup vs paying the shipyard directly can make a difference.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Right. I'd forgotten "Guided" and "Homing" were different. But my point was that most modifiers for missiles and ramming are the same, except missiles add sAcc and kamakzi drones and Hnd. Since the former will almost always be higher than the latter, missiles have a significant advantage, if you view things purely in terms of game-balance, ignoring what's "really" going on underneath.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Spaceships series vehicles are much cheaper than other most vehicles in Gurps books. So it is not consistent even within Gurps.

Examples:
The alpha shuttle at $743K scaled up 1 SM would be 2.2 mil and the corresponding campaigns shuttle is 25 mil.

Trying to build a starship ship with the specs from campaigns ens up at about 25-30mil and not 100 mil.

The flying things in UT are very expensive. Compare a SM 4 flying van built using spaceships (1 Light Alloy armor, control, fusion, Standard thruster, cg, 7 seats, 8 cargo) at 5k+20k+100k+10k+35k at 270k compared to the smaller cg jeep at 400k and such.

If using non standard SM 3 components instead to make it car sized and switching to limited range version with mhd and smaller cg would make the cost 48k for a 1+3 seater

Also the thing flies faster than the 2 million grav speeder and is lower TL...

And so on.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Do not expect consistency between things made with a specific system (Spaceships) and things where prices were just pulled out of a hat (UT, Basic) because there was no system.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Realistically, there's a three way tradeoff between price, performance, and reliability; spaceships are cheap and reliable, which is okay as long as their performance is unimpressive. Real-world spaceships can't make that particular tradeoff because low performance spaceships are unable to actually reach orbit (something already in space can make that tradeoff, but usually doesn't because you have to pay the cost of getting it into space in the first place). However, in a setting where the performance requirements are modest relative to what the technology can do, cheap spaceships are perfectly plausible.

Now, it's possible that spaceships are too good for their price, I haven't checked that. However, cheap spaceships are not inherently unrealistic.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Agreed, but they have implications: if spaceships are cheap, vehicles must be really cheap. If I look at VE2, assuming even remotely RL like costs for cars and airplanes pretty much rules cheap spaceships. Hulls, drives, power plants and sensors must cost something, and the smallest spacehip will still be far larger than a car. or most airplanes.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

In a thread a while back I built a sedan using space ships.

it cost $11,200, weighed a little over a ton when loaded, and had a 7 gallon tank that will last for 8 hours. Move is 4/52 (ie, can reach 104 mph and gets to 60 mph in 8 seconds). Not too bad in the grand scheme of things. Then I looked at the gas mileage: fuel costs $6 a gallon, but gets 100 mpg: That's quite high.

That's going into a lot of rather official additional rules rather than simple the base spaceships rules though, and its using TL8 stuff.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Vehicles can be really cheap. We don't usually make them that cheap because cheap = cruddy. Bear in mind, spaceships actually operate in a very forgiving environment.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

On a tangentially-related note, I think that including kind of generic vehicle-design system similar to GURPs Spaceships would be a good idea. There are already seeds of it in the Spaceships system, they just need to be generalized better and cross-checked to make sure that a space-fighter isn't cheaper than an air-fighter.