[Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Looking at the prices in Spaceships, it looks an awful lot like they make most spaceships unrealistically cheap. Just as bad, from a pure internal-consistency point of view, they seem noticeably cheaper than other things in the game.

One conspicuous example is the relative cost of spaceships vs. missiles, which tends to favor small kamakazi dogfight drones over standard missiles in seemingly implausible ways. The SM+4 drones in Spaceships 4 have the same order-of-magnitude cost as SM+0 missiles, while the SM+5 hornet has the same cost as an SM+3 missile. But it's not just missiles—aircraft in sources like Pyramid #3/53 are much more expensive than if you tried to replicate them with Spaceships. Does anyone know what's going on here?

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

If spaceships aren't cheap than PCs aren't going to be able to buy their spaceships.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Can you actually match the performance with a cheaper spaceship?

Because if you can't, the case that there's a problem is...fuzzy.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

For missiles, the match isn't perfect (in part because there's no "warhead" or "self-destruct" system available for spacecraft), but if you look at the performance statistics on Spaceships 3 p. 17, those statistics are clearly matchable withe the rules for building spaceships, though 32cm+ missiles (which have double the delta-V) will need a multi-stage design in order to replicate. Basically you're looking at two or three engines, and everything else fuel.

For fighters, I won't do a full build, but it only takes one jet engine to get 1G of acceleration, and the heavier fighters in Pyramid #3/53 are only ~30 tons (SM+5 on the Spaceships scale). An SM+5 jet engine is $300K, compared to the multi-million dollar price tag for the fighters in Pyramid. Very few systems in Spaceships cost more than that at SM+5, so you're not going to get a price tag above $6M, the price of the 10-ton "Fishbed" fighter. So Spaceships understates the price by at least a factor of three.

As for David Johnston2's point, I suspect that's the correct IRL explanation, but it's undesirable for groups who would rather have internal consistency than easy access to spaceships for PCs.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

A standard missile "warhead" doesn't have explosives, it's just a kinetic kill, meaning it could be modeled with a ingot of metal - probably a steel armor system on the front hull. Other warheads (such as Nuclear and Antimatter) cost extra anyways.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Actually, it's a smart kinetic-kill, with dual-mode (AP and proximity detonation) capabilities.

OTOH, a bomb with the same warhead capabilities but no significant propulsion is listed in SS4. It's a third the mass of a missile, IIRC. EDIT: And 1/30th the cost!

EDIT: Well, there's hardly anything you could put in your missile that would bring it up to the 1M per ton list price. Almost all Spaceships systems cost less than that! On the other hand, I don't believe you can actually make a HEDM missile that has the required performance if you have to dedicate 6-7 systems to the warhead (even allowing that that includes control systems).

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

But if spaceships are arbitrarily cheaper than anything else in a setting not running on genre convention, you can get clever characters wondering why they can't buy new spaceships and strip them down to sell their more expensive components. D&D's ten-foot ladder on a larger scale.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Well, if they want to build the campain around beeing scrap metal merchants, let em.
Most rolls would be against repair, merchant and the like instead of gun or sword, but what´s the harm?
If they (and you) enjoy the adrenaline pumping world of small business ownership and market observation more than smuggling and dodge-fights, why not roll with it?

Instead of pirates they can fight evil tax collectors and union thugs!

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

The components are larger, though. A half-tonne gun is not a good substitute for a personal blaster, even if the price of a die of damage goes down for the big gun relative to the small one.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

I've been thinking the same thing. Like a small fission reactor (sized to put into a SM+5 ship) is just $100K!

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Now I'm curious if we can actually model missiles with scaled-down SS rules. There are going to be issues with e.g. the fact if the jump in delta-V between 28cm and 32cm is due to more stages, damage should temporarily plateau due to a smaller warhead, but let's see how close we can get.

A 24cm missile, as a spaceship, would a 2dHP impactor, because it does 6dx6 damage and collision damage is 6d x 3 x dHP. It weights 1/4 of a ton loaded into the battery. That's approximately SM+1, which ought to have 5 dHP. So the impactor should have an SM 2 levels lower than the missile loaded into the battery.

If the warhead is itself a single SM+1 system, then at TL7-8 a single-stage design has sixteen fuel tanks (plus two engines, the warhead, and a control room), for 4.8 mps delta-V, below the Spaceships 3 performance. But a TL9+ HEDM design needs 2.5 engines for 5G acceleration, so it has 15.5 fuel tanks, and 13.95 delta-V—better than the stats given in Spaceships 3!

If the warhead + control systems are a full upper stage (six systems), instead we have 11.5 fuel tanks for an HEDM missile with 5G acceleration, which together give 8.05 mps delta-V. Packing 2 mps delta-V into the upper stage, however, only requires devoting about a third of the upper stage to engines / fuel.

So not sure spaceships missiles can quite be built with spaceships itself, but it feels like we're within the realm of "generous rounding" here. The vast cost mark-up is hard to justify. The lower stage of our HEDM missile is only going to cost around $10k per ton of complete missile, so unless warheads are very expensive or the markup for a slightly more compact design is 100x, the numbers just don't work.

(Actually, I'd never done the price math explicitly before, it looks worse than I'd thought.)

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Here in the real world the expensive part of military vehicles is never the engine, and rarely the weapons, it's the electronics. An engine being 10% of the cost actually seems completely reasonable to me. It's certainly possible Spaceships underprices the electronics though.

If it actually hits to within a factor of 3, that's essentially a perfect match. Prices of stuff does after all vary by a factor of two all the time (sold at 100% markup, or 50% off) in reality, so no game price can possible be more "accurate" than that. But if it bothers you as a GM, you can always raise the price.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

It works out to the engine being more like 3% of the cost.

Underpricing of electronics would explain a lot, though. In Spaceships the control room costs a fifth of what the engine does, and pricey electronics like tactical arrays and defensive ECM have the same per-system cost as a jet engine.

Being within a factor of 3 of real-world prices is fine. Being within a factor of 3 of canonical game prices of extremely similar items seams like more of a problem. At that point you may as well be using abstract wealth with x10 bands.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Big caveat for missiles: they have positive sAcc, which requires giving a ship positive Hnd if you want to match that kind of performance, and that's nigh impossible in space (as opposed to atmosphere) with < 10G thrust.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Wouldn't that be more a matter of the targeting system's Piloting (Missile) skill level?

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

I don't think so. Ramming spacecraft use piloting skill even if they're autonomous drones launched from a carrier. Skill of carrier's crew has nothing to do with it AFAICT. Missiles use skill of gunner on launching craft.

This is a pretty big deal at high TLs. At TL 10, 32cm+ missiles have sAcc +3, which under the rapid fire rules is as good as firing x8 as many missiles when you're trying to overwhelm point defense.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

There's also a significant price difference between cutting edge weapons technology produced in small lots and mature mass manufactured technology. Unless stated otherwise I generally assume most technology presented in GURPS has the mature technology price tag.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Just increase the price by a factor of 3, and control rooms/sensors/arrays etc by a factor of 10. Done.

But remember: You can basically do whatever you want.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

What I mean is that sAcc of homing missiles may include the abstraction of the competence of onboard electronics. SS is a rather abstract system.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Spaceships is very abstract but the abstractions work very differently such that they're hard to compare. AFAICT Spaceships missiles don't use the guided/homing rules used in normal combat, so good missile sAcc and a high Artillery (Guided Missile) skill for the launching ship "stack" in a way that good drone AI Piloting skill fails to stack with any skills of characters on your carrier. This gives missiles an important edge that can't remotely be replicated with the rules for building spacecraft, and arguably justifies the higher price from a game-balance perspective if not from an in-story perspective.

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.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Umm, I'd say quite the opposite when it comes to environment. When my car breaks down I don't have to worry about the environment killing me or being a billion miles from the nearest rescue vehicle. Nor does the oxygen I breathe come directly from the car itself. Airplanes and Spacecraft cost a lot to buy and maintain because the results of a system breakdown, any system breakdown, can be catastrophic.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

You might want to check out the article Alternate Spaceships from Pyramid #3/34, it includes rules for creating ground and water vehicles using Spaceships. With these additions the only egregious oversight is propellers for prop-driven airplanes.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

If you give a space fighter and an atmosphere fighter the same level of capabilities (i.e. armor, weapons, etc) except for propulsion they'll be different in price only by the cost of the propulsion system.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Currently all aircraft and spacegraft have to operate within Earths gravity well, in the significant portion of the atmosphere. Spacecraft further have to leave the well, and then do re-entry.

Those are some harsh conditions. Spacecraft operating at a sane distance from a gravity well can be "parked" much like a car - with a reasonable certainty that you know where it will be in a week or a year (moving, admittedly, and still under the force of gravity, but predictably moving and with really relatively little to bump into once you're out of the orbital trash field).

The lifesystem problems are nothing to sneeze at, but once you get out of the well and the atmosphere and the trash field, you don't have the "blink and everyone dies in a gigantic fireball or horrendous kinetic kill incident" problem that cars and airplanes and shuttles have.

Cars in particular are inherently dangerous vehicles because they operate so close to the Earths surface, where all the collision hazards love to go due to gravity. A car is not safe to have break down when moving, because a loss-of-control incident is likely to lead to hitting something. Airplanes give you a shocking amount of time to try and recover, cars do not.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Well, yes, the consequences of problems can be dire, but the environment itself doesn't do much to damage the vehicle.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

The problem is that any damage or breakdown can be catastrophic, which means that building spacecraft cheap has much harsher consequences than building cars cheap.

Keep in mind that most car accidents are not mechanical in nature, they are driver errors. And even at speed, many mechanical breakdowns in a car do not necessarily lead to an accident. An engine blowing up can mean the car comes to a very fast halt, but does not necessarily mean the car will crash.

Most aircraft and spacecraft accidents can be traced directly to mechanical failures. This is largely due to the increased training and safety procedures, but also due the safety and redundant systems built into aircraft and spacecraft.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

A spacecraft at minimum is just propulsion and navigation, (plus life-support, if manned). If you don't need to worry about escape velocity or reentry the requirements are pretty minimal. Which is why you have the trope of teenagers on space stations building ships out of junk. A fire extinguisher and a space suit is all it takes for a rudimentary "ship". Of course the same thing happens with go-karts built from salvaged lawnmowers on Earth.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Only if you include a aerodynamic, lift-generating hull design in the 'capabilities', which is rather unfair to the space fighter.

If you don't it will be cheaper by omitting wings at a minimum, and is likely to ditch streamlining to lower the cost (or mass) of armor.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Remember it's a three way tradeoff, not a two way. If you want cheap and reliable, you just have to tolerate low performance.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

I don't see small rocks flying at 36.000kph towards my car or its passengers getting radiated by the sun or cosmic radiation.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

There's no special reason why a space fighter should cost more than an air-fighter. The space fighter needs a better life support system, but it doesn't need to be streamlined, and that removes a lot of expensive development and makes construction of its outer hull rather more forgiving. If the space drives of that setting cost less than a jet engine, the space fighter probably should be cheaper than the air fighter.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

OTOH a space vehicle will need significantly more powerful sensors than a car or airplane. It will move a lot faster and so should detect dangers at much greater distances than a car or airplane has to (orbital junk vs. bad weather vs. a bump in the road).

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

The normal way of handling macroscopic space hazards is to assume they're too rare to actually bother with specialized systems.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Junk is becoming a big problem in Earth's orbit.

https://www.orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.g...o-gallery.html

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

The solution to that is to clean it up if there is any significant traffic, because otherwise you have cascade failure. You don't see them leaving wrecks on the freeway either for the same reason.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Yeah, in any setting with viable beam weapons it's not going to be hard to sweep junk out of orbit. It's been proposed with basically modern lasers.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

The best defense is a good offense?
That still sounds like putting all your eggs into a tissue paper basket.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Well, you usually also have enough armor to withstand dust level impacts, and for things that are actually mission critical you might want some repair or backup capability, but we have a pretty long record of incredibly flimsy spacecraft that survive just fine. There's just not much out there, and unlike water and ground craft, most damage simply doesn't matter; spaceships are actually hard to disable because they can't sink, crash, spin off the road, etc.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

I suppose another issue is that armor optimized for tiny meteoroids are near useless against larger more weaponized impacts. So I suppose that type of protection would just be shoved under the rug in Spaceship designs.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Power isn't a problem. For sensors in general the expensive part is the processing electronics, and space is a much cleaner and less cluttered environment than that which a 'air fighter' has to operate in.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

A bunch of things in Spaceships are questionable upon closer examination (open spaces, I spit at thee with my dying breath). However, you have to remember that the series as a whole was designed to be easy to understand and use. It functions fine if you want to run a standard TL 11 space opera game. Well, mostly functions fine...

As for spaceship prices, I usually increase them by an order of magnitude. While this make me happier as a GM, it has the side effect of pushing all but the smallest tramp freighters out of the reach of non-multimillionaire PCs.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Tell me more.

It pushes even the smallest tramp freighters (as opposed to shuttles) out of reach of PCs who aren't Wealth-heavy. No struggling bands of merry spacers. In fact that's a concern even without the cost increase relative to the official values.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

I try and deal with this (standard prices) by pushing for more SM+7 designs. Spaceships suffers from a Travelleresque size inflation (I write this from my 20 dTon/SM+5 dwelling place).

As I look at individual components I see more things that look arbitrarily expensive than too cheap. Higher tech always costs more than lower tech and even superscience costs more than hard science. Nothing ever really lowers costs. That in particular looks odd to me. It's probably more of a concern about regular progressions than anything else.

But no, I'd never arbitrarily bump up prices. They're too high for some sub-genres already. With Ve2 I've happily produced $1 million (new) PC-level ships (and they were half that used) and called it close enough to Star Wars 25k credit "stock light freighter" but with Spaceships I'm frequently frustrated trying to stay under 10 million.

I have mulled over a broad principle that would be called "Cheap Ultra-Tech" or CUT that would simply lower process of many UT personal items (like guns)by a factor of 10 and vehicle prices (or at least ^ components) by a factpr of 100.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Uh, there is such a laundry list there...
Remember (A) higher TLs are richer than lower TLs - if the price doesn't go up by a factor of the 6th root of 10 per TL it's getting cheaper relative to income and wealth, and (B) higher TL improves many spaceship systems' performance at no added cost.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

TL8 is much richer than TL5 but that doesn't make a carriage (with horses) a practical budget option compared to motor vehicles.

Sometimes technology advances and lower tech simply becomes obsolete not only in performance but in cost. Spaceships avoids this in a sometimes artificial way.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Open space is an odd one because it gives a firm area to mass ratio for "open space". This would make sense if the main weight concern was atmosphere, but its not. It also adds areas slower than it gains mass, which is kind of the reverse of what you would expect.

Easier to tinker with is that it gives the same cost and mass for all types of open space, from hydroponics to gardens to what amounts to a mosh pit. Which isn't terribly bad when you consider what the book is typically used for, but it hasn't been expanded upon.

One open space can provide food "sufficient for the entire vessel". That's terribly vague and doesn't change with tech level, intensity of the farming, or the population of the vessel. The most extreme case has a single open space feeding a ship made half of passenger seating, or 600 people. They can't all stand there (by the explicit rules, which gives each of the 100 people just over 20 square feet), but they can eat from it! A fairer analysis is using 8 full habitats, which means one area can feed either 48 people if you only allow for the nice cabins, or for for 192 if we use bunk rooms: once again more people than can meet in it by RAW.

This system also makes sense to be included in a bunch of habitat specific rules, but isn't, at least explicitly.

I'm wondering if there is space to expand these rules. hmm.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Wonder if there's _interest_ enough before you do it for Pyramid. Open spaces are one of the things that have already been included for the sake of completeness rather than their frequency of use..

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

No worries. I'm a blogger and tinkerer, not a pyramid publisher.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

That's not Spaceships, that's GURPS in general - if you just use the list prices a carriage would be a dirt-cheap budget alternative to a car at TL8. There are some loose suggestions about adjusting the pricing for obsolete goods depending on whether they're still in production, out of production but being sold to clear inventories, or only available from collections or by special order...but they're loose suggestions and don't even try to account for changes in factors of production.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

That depends on your definition of "dirt cheap".

For the TL5 Stagecoach in HT the $4400 price obviously does not include the horses. If you allow for the multiple teams of draft horses you'd need for a full day's travel the entire rig is probably more expensive than a comparably uncomfortable minivan (and you probably couldn't sell a minivan as uncomfortable as a stagecoach).

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

This got clarified in Pyramid 3/49 (p. 24): "Design Switch: Ecological Life Support." I don't know when this will get ported back to the regular rules, though.

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

What bothers me is that when I DO come up with a TL based population per acre of vertical arming scale, the masses don't make sense. Like say, 1 acre=1000 pop at TL 10. With that, a SM +14 Open Space feeds 5000 people. Bump the mass up by a factor of 10 (SM +16) and you only feed 25,000 people if I'm understanding the scaling properly. Somehow, 10x the mass doesn't equal 10x the production...

Another thing that makes me fuss is the Deep-Space and Interface Rates from Spaceships 2. They don't really mesh with reaction mass costs or Ultratech in the case of space elevator costs.

Add Spaceships 6 to the list too! It provides lots of wonderful industrial ships, but to use them in detail (in contrast to merely using them as set pieces) requires more in depth industrial rules (mining, manufacturing, etc). In addition, somehow spaceports are able to manufacture ships more quickly than equally equipped space stations. I thought the main purpose of spaceports was to act as a nexus of trade for goods and people (at least that's what 2 suggests with the trade requirements for spaceport presence) not manufacture ships? Quibbles I know...

There's the rub. I'm not sure how well the later Spaceships did, but I doubt there would be a lot of people interested in a more detailed spaceship system. I'll admit, I've been thinking about all this a lot while I've been working on my own hard scifi setting. As is, I think the system works fine for low resolution games (which are by far the majority of games in my experience).

What would be cool though is a pyramid article on asteroid mining with different technology level and superscience assumptions.

Which I don't mind all too much. There are plenty of other ways to get a spaceship besides taking out a loan. Hell, stealing your first starship is a time honored tradition in a lot of peoples games!

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

That probably requires more rules material about UT Forgery for all your ship documentation. :)

Re: [Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?
 

Hmmm . . . use lots of Smaller System Open Spaces stacked on top of one another? Open Space seems to indicate area but not mention the higher 'ceilings' on larger SMs.