Re: [Spaceships] Making a setting work...
 

Wow, generalize much? There are certainly sci-fi settings where that's true; possibly even a majority of them, but it's certainly not true for all.

Re: [Spaceships] Making a setting work...
 

Not mine. The average (okay "typical", not a system representing an ideal mathematical mean of all known systems) system sees a new ship arriving every day. Outlying systems see few ever, trade systems get dozens of ships every day.

Re: [Spaceships] Making a setting work...
 

But you can't use the values in the Spaceships book to arrive at this. The GM has to say, "Scrap the numbers in the book; here are the new, cheaper numbers." That's the point.

Re: [Spaceships] Making a setting work...
 

That's closer to what I was working with, conceptually, for this one. I was figuring probably one large corporation-owned ship a week in a densely populated system, while systems with lots of free traders instead of large corporations might see one small ship a day.
'Outlying' systems is meaningless the way my jump drive works, but there are still 'frontier' systems in the sense of 'doesn't have much population or infrastructure yet', and poor systems in the form of 'inhabited planet, but they don't have anything much worth trading for and nobody wants to move there'.

Re: [Spaceships] Making a setting work...
 

If it helps to get a grasp of what I'm looking for...

The trade and private ship situation is meant to be some sort of vague combination of the show Firefly, the anime Outlaw Star, and the game Elite, with greatest emphasis on the last.

So. It's somewhat (okay, very) cinematic, yes. Only, I (and the players) want to actually be able to use the trade rules in Spaceships 2; 'just handwave the money and go with genre convention' throws that whole system out, which takes away a big chunk of the game.

Re: [Spaceships] Making a setting work...
 

Wikipedia claims that Elite was based heavily on Traveller, you might be able to get price numbers from the GURPS version of Traveller.

Re: [Spaceships] Making a setting work...
 

Traveller has never had internally coherent economics, so no, that won't help.

Re: [Spaceships] Making a setting work...
 

Darn.

Well lets see:
FR = down payment on a tramp freighter
MM1 = down payment on a large freighter or buy a tramp freighter
MM2 = buy a large freighter

If we cut prices to 1/10 normal then a Filthy Rich person can rent a ship or buy it in installments and a Multimillionare can buy a reasonably sized ship outright if he plans to be pretty much living in it.

Re: [Spaceships] Making a setting work...
 

One observation about this setup. If we use the SS2 p40 numbers, freight is quite cheap (probably a little more than $300/ton surface to surface...20 each way for interface, about 120 to cross each planet-jump gap, and 70 for the jump itself). But the sizable majority of the cost is in transit between orbit and the jump limit. With that setup, it makes a lot of sense for the highest-traffic routes to be served by dedicated jumpships like the Ricardo class, so that the costly leg of the trip can omit the deadweight of a jumpdrive.

Obviously such a monster wouldn't bother to visit the small-economy worlds that support tramp freighters, though.

Re: [Spaceships] Making a setting work...
 

Good observation. I actually had some space stations in the jump radius with minimal engines, just sufficient to keep them relatively stationary. They're pulled out there by ships with external clamps, lots of engines, and little else.

They were originally meant as sort of... jump-capable refuelling/supply stations, information broadcasting stations, etc. Some of the pirate havens are just these jump station things, usually older and somewhat run-down ones, hopping to different systems whenever the patrols start to track them down.
I suppose it makes a lot of sense for these kinds of stations to do the interstellar cargo movement and such too, at least on major trade routes. Thanks for pointing that out.

EDIT:

Although the Ricardo class itself wouldn't work without an oversized Phase Conveyor; I limit phase conveyors to only conveying mass equal to the mass of a ship their size, to keep ships from using undersize phase conveyors. As a side effect, external clamps aren't much use unless you have empty cargo holds sufficient to make up for the mass you're clamped to.