[Spaceships] Making a setting work...
 

So, I'm currently running (sort of; still in the initial phases) a space game of sorts. After some false starts as I'm adjusting the spaceships rules and such, I think it'll work out okay mechanics-wise. I'm hoping some of you can help with rationalizing and justifying why the setting is the way I want it to be, though. :P

Suppose I should list assumptions first:

1) There is one type of reactionless drive (using the stats for 'hot reactionless'), called an Etheric Drive. It only works within a limited radius of a star, and if it accelerates something too fast (1% c, I think) relative to the star, the ship goes ethereal until it slows down. This doesn't prevent all problems, but it lets me avoid pseudovolocity and lets me make handwaving 'why can't we crack planets?' a little easier.

2) Similarly, planetary point defense have Ether Wave Projectors, which can push relatively small objects they hit into the ether for a few seconds. In the even that someone does work out a planet-cracker, the idea is that civilized planets can just make the kinetic weapon phase through them harmlessly.

3) Travel between systems uses a Phase Conveyor. It's a sort of Jump Drive that requires you to be a certain range from the nearest star (75 to 100 AU, multiplied by the stellar mass relative to sol), takes an hour to activate and then about another week to arrive. During the week of arrival time, the location you will arrive at in the target system has some ether turbulence that sensors can pick up, alerting pirates and patrols and stuff that someone will be at that location within a week or so. The only info about your ship it gives them is your rough mass, though.

4) The phase conveyor doesn't actually convey the ship any distance, it just shifts it to a star system in a parallel universe based on the coordinates input into the computer when it was activated. This means no two inhabited systems are in the same galaxy, or even the same universe. It also means you can go from any system to any other system you have the coordinates for.

5) No alien life, so far. I might add some alien races, but in general they probably won't have the etheric superscience technology that enables reactionless drives and phase conveyors.

6) The setting is TL10^, with the only superscience being the etheric tech, torch drives, and plasma weaponry. Most worlds are fairly safe-tech, with some fringe worlds and such more heavily into cybernetics, bio-tech, etc.

7) There are psis and mutants and such with supernatural powers, but they're uncommon, many have unique powers, and nobody's pinned down a way to reliably produce them.

8) There are space pirates, often based in uninhabited systems. Since there's a nigh-infinite number of possible Phase Conveyor coordinates, they can just put an outpost in a system that's not on the normal maps, and when patrols and stuff finally do figure out the coordinates, they just relocate to another uncharted system. The pirate ships themselves tend to hang around in the phase conveyor zone (the 75 to 100 AU thing) watching for vulnerable ships to phase in, which they try to intercept.

9) There are tramp freighters and such, usually wandering around in the less pirate-infested systems, but occasionally heavily armed ones wander into the frontier systems to make a better profit.

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

So, my first question is simple enough.

It takes Filthy Rich to afford the cheapest little ship, and Multimillionaire to afford one that can survive an assault by weak pirates without it costing so much as to make the trip worthless.

How do I justify all these poor traders with ships and stuff?

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

Is that an Idea? Honest Al's customers will have to to trade in order not to default on an instalment :)

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

In the good old days of shipping the captain didn't own the ship. A rich patron would own the ship and the captain would be contracted to run the ship for the owner. Given the communications available at the time the captain had considerable leeway in running the vessel so long as he made a profit. This still happens with smaller vessels such as fishing boats, but not very often with larger vessels where the captains are essentially just another employee taking orders directly from corporate HQ.

Another option is to have lots of old ships which are relatively cheap. Or you can do the Traveller route and have the military give out ships on extended loan to some retired personnel. Both of these require a long history or spacefaring.

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

The various options from Spaceships 2:Traders and Liners can probably lower the level of Wealth required a little. It is also a question of relative Wealth, being able to buy a large ship to spec is clearly more wealthy than someone who has to buy a smaller, factory basic model, which in turn is more wealthy than someone who has to meet a 20 year repayment schedule and pay off the debt for the loan on the down payment. Poor traders are probably those who have blown most of their money getting a down payment and so have most of their wealthy assets tied up in the ship itself. So it may be possible to see Very Wealthy, or even Wealthy, individuals buying a ship owning it. I don't see anyone at Comfortable or lower getting a spaceship by buying it without stretching my suspension of disbelief though.

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

There are two possible approaches to this.

You can vastly lower the price of ships. In the age of sail model for this sort of setting, ships were cheap, a ship crew could build one in any wooded harbor in a season, so if you were rich enough to pay the crew, you could probably afford the ship too.

Or you can make it impossible to sell the ship. The traders don't actually own it is one approach to that, but only works if you have a lot of civilization (i.e. pirates selling ships to hardscrabble worlds on the frontiers is inconcievable). But other approaches might be possible - "Everybody knows hyperdrives bind the soul of the human sacrifice used to first activate them, and only his genetic descendents can use the propitiatory ancestor rites necessary to control one."

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

And of course there's always "Being in debt up to your eyebrows".

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

I'm struggling slightly over how to really enforce serious debt in the setting where law enforcement is lax enough to let piracy be a major profession too.

That is... if you try not to pay up on a debt, law enforcement wants to catch you. If you pirate, law enforcement wants to catch you. Piracy includes stealing ships, so the monetary value of both crimes are similar in this case, so both are roughly equal priority.

So.

If I have a setting where pirates tend to be able to often escape punishment, how do I enforce debt? It seems like the end result is that companies won't give out big loans like that to free traders.

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

Well, there are two well-established ways to be poor despite 'owning' productive assets.

Sometimes, the cost of living plus operating and keeping the asset is quite close to the income the asset produces. That's what Firefly seems to do. Mal owns the ship free and clear, but fuel, repairs, and crew eat up basically all the profits. Of course, in this case, there's the question of why the owner doesn't sell off the ship. Some sort of ulterior motivation, whether emotional (tradition, desire for independence) or more exotic (maybe they're some sort of spy using a tramp freighter captaincy as cover) can answer here, but another possibility is that self-employment is the only way they're employable. I don't think Mal could hold a job as captain on any ship he didn't own...

When the asset is a spaceship, one has to wonder why it was ever built if it's so unprofitable to run. If the ship is obsolete, aging (and thus more expensive to maintain), or originally built for another purpose (stripped and decommissioned former warship) that might be justified.

Alternatively, the asset really is profitable, but the owners don't get to keep the profit. Bank debt is obvious, and explains how they got the ship in the first place in the bargain. Confiscatory taxes or tithes could also work. Or perhaps the captain-owner belongs to a trader clan that takes the lions share of the profit (in cash or in service) but acts as a Patron. In these cases, in addition to the previous possibilities, the 'owner' may not be permitted to sell the ship.

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

Not quite. They won't give out big loans to typical "free trader" PCs. They might be perfectly willing to finance free traders who actually have ties to a community where the law does get enforced. The loan officer of the bank that has dealt honestly with your parents and grandparents, who still live here, knows you aced your college business classes, and remembers you fondly from when you and his daughter did all those Girl Scout civics projects together might be willing to write you a loan if you turn up with a reasonable business plan. A bunch of scruffy ex-mercenaries arriving from offworld three months ago probably aren't a risk he'd be very interested in even if law enforcement *were* good.

Some people are bad risks is not the same as all people are bad risks. The problem from a RPG perspective is that people willing to do things that qualify as adventures, particularly the different kinds of adventures you need to keep the game sessions from being too repetitive, are almost poster examples of "bad risk". You don't get your money back from people who die in the wilderness somewhere.

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

Y'know, even though that doesn't help the PCs get a ship, I'm glad you pointed that out. That makes the setting work better, so now all I need is a handwave for why the PCs can afford a ship, without it being hugely improbable that there are other not-insanely-wealthy traders out there. And that's easy enough with 'inheritance' / 'discovery of improbably valuable treasure' / whatever.

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

Basic law enforcement at most spaceports will do that.

In order to do business, a trader needs free access to many ports. Pirates don't. A pirate needs a haven where they can resupply and fence their loot, but they only really need one.

So if you've got a few worlds, stations, or what have you that cheerfully enable piracy...Tortuga, Jackson's Whole, that sort of place...the pirates can get by just fine even if they'd be arrested on sight in the vast majority of ports of trade. But a merchant who's been declared pirate for stopping payments on their ship will essentially be out of business.

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

It does have some effects though. The big one is most free traders are going to be both competent and honest people. They have to be or they couldn't get financed. This makes it harder for the PCs to get rich by competing against them for the honest runs, but means there won't be a lot of other bidders on the slightly shady deal the old guy in the tavern is offering....

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

Don't neglect the possibilities of giving the PCs a PoS ship. Let's say that a new ship of some type costs $10 million, and has operating costs as follows:
Loan Service and RoI: $100,000 per month
Crew: $25,000 per month
Parts and Maintenance: $25,000 per month.
Total: $150,000 per month.

Now, consider the PoS ship. Because it's in bad shape, it needs double normal crew ($50,000 per month) and four times normal maintenance ($100,000 per month). That's $150,000 per month right there, and basically means the ship is worthless in normal use. It would have some value, but if it's currently basically nonfunctional and the PCs can get it operating, it might cost them under a million. This has the side virtue that the GM can randomly strand the PCs on strange worlds when their ship has a breakdown.

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

Yes. When I was preparing the Gloria Monday campaign during the 3e era I used Ve2 to build the ship (it wasn't even hard when using GVB) and I selected technologies that made ships cheap.

Ships of the Gloria's class cost a little over a million new and half that when worn down to Cheap quality (as the Gloria was).

The Gloria was relatively small, only having a cargo capacity of around 100 tons but there was a size limit on all ships in the game. No Imperial Star Destroyers in that setting.

Ships in a certain supplement may cost tens or hundreds of millions of $ but that's only because someone thinks they should. If it's your game then the "someone" is you. Ships cost what you think they should.

This is particularly true both when you're the one writing the rules of the universe _and_ when using an system as abstract as Spaceships. Just leave costs the same across the TL and the SMs and the system won't care. It's not a game balance issue as long as everything built with the rules uses the same rules.

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

Though you do have to be a little careful of prices of relative to everything else, or you can get into situations where it's cheaper to buy a ship and land it permanently than to build a housing unit or a village power plant.

I'd note that in most game systems spaceship rules, ships get a lot cheaper if you leave off the weapons, armor, and long range sensors, none of which are very useful for a merchant operating in places that have local policing and traffic control. Adventurers will whine about the crappy ship capabilities, but merchants who try to avoid places where you have to shoot at pirates, avoid uncharted asteroids and land without a field beacon and won't miss them.

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And add a "pirates don't like competition" clause; newly defaulted merchants won't be experienced at piracy = easy prey for inveterate pirates.

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I'm dubious of that. Predators don't tend to prey on each other. Even inexperienced would-be pirates are going to be more dangerous and less profitable prey than legitimate merchants. And harder to catch, too, since they won't be using the regular trade routes anymore. And the pirate haven is unlikely to let you ambush them in-system. They've got a strong interest in the safety of traffic within their space, and getting blacklisted by a pirate haven is a seriously bad career move for a pirate...

OTOH, newbie pirates are going to have plenty of problems without adding that one...

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

Yeeeeaaaahhhh, but the real money-sinks in spaceships are engines and power plants. Take the TL10 Outlander-class Deep-space Freighter from Spaceships 2. After the $30M engine, the next most expensive component is the control room at $6M. The armor only comes in third at $4.5M for the whole ship. A major battery weapon (what's a tramp freighter doing with one of those?) would only cost $15M; smaller weapons would be much, much cheaper.

Even if you wanted to buy a "very cheap" Outlander-class ship, you'd still need $9.24M, which at TL10 means you'd still need to be a Multimillionaire to support the genre convention of "entrepreneur buys ship, lives hard life as tramp freighter captain." If we take the costs in Spaceships as reasonable, we are left with one inevitable conclusion: the genre is economically unrealistic. You must make everything to do with ships cheaper to simply buy a ship the way the genre works.

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

"There are fifteen shaped plasma charges on this ship. You have no chance of finding them all. If I don't get my money each month they go off and you start losing atmosphere through a bunch of gaping holes in the hull."

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

It could also be pointed out that those considered pirates by one group might be the registered privateers of another. So essentially there could be a world (or a commonwealth of worlds) funding an underhanded economic war against another.

Essentially - we'll give (or loan) you a ship if you go out and disrupt any ships that aren't ours that are using X shipping route. BTW if you claim you work for us we will refuse to acknowledge you and our legitamate ships will come after yours (and you go from being a privateer to a pirate).

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

This shouldn't be all that much of a surprise - the genre is economically unrealistic. You need lots of wierd assumptions to make it even kinda-sorta work, and even then it's usually a stretch. Much easier just to say 'ignore all that 'economic reality' stuff and just obey genre conventions, okay?'

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

The Outlander is already civilian-built. Its 'light alloy armor' gives it a sturdy hull, not anything that would actually be considered serious armor at its TL. Replacing that with nanocomposite would make the armor cost more than the rest of the ship combined, even without hardening.
The Anthem class might be a better model to think about...it's got the super-science kit appropriate to the setting. It also costs less (being smaller).

If your model of the genre expects a captain to pay full price in cash to buy the ship and then live a Struggling lifestyle to keep it...that's not impossible, but it's not too likely when a very minimal freighter costs over 5M.

If you're willing to allow the captain to maintain a somewhat higher standard of living, though, it gets rather more believable. A small-trader captain should probably be Status +1, anyway...and can't afford to be Status -1!

And of course allowing credit helps.

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

Sure, but it gets tricky when one player wants to be rich enough to own the ship the other players crew on.

During some early Tales of the Solar Patrol games, the player of the ship's commander decided to be Wealthy, and he wanted to replace one of the ship's lifeboats with a non-regulation runabout. I didn't have a problem with letting the Patrol look past this, but there was just no way his character could have actually afforded the runabout. Fortunately, most of the players didn't really care about actually sticking close to the GURPS rules, so I just okayed it and we moved on.

But there are no advantages supporting this particular genre convention — it's very hard to "just own a ship," even in settings like, say, Star Wars where owning a ship isn't all that big a deal.

According to the genre, owning a spaceship is the equivalent of owning a boat in the real world, and all costs are likewise. Realistically, it's quite reasonable to own a boat, but not a spaceship. That's the problem.

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

Well, you can always buy the spaceship as Signature Gear (or Signature Assets) and hand-wave away how he got it ('he won it in a lottery, but part of the rules is that he isn't allowed to sell it!', for example). That won't significantly impact his actual Wealth level, but it does adequately show that, yes, he does actually own a spaceship.

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

Buying a ship as Signature Gear by RAW involves point totals better suited to cosmic-grade superheroes than spaceship captains. Buying a ship as Signature Assets involves having enough Wealth to do so in the first place, and while you can't sell the Signature Assets you still get the general benefits of the Wealth level.

Buying a ship by trading points for cash via RPK's exponential scheme and then registering it as sig. gear could work. It's still pretty expensive, but that's not unreasonable for owning a spaceship.

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

So in Star Wars a new Stock Light Frieghter costs 100,000 credits and a used one like the Falcon goes for 25,000. That's 10x the cost of a used landspeeder where a new blaster is about 500.

The prices of Stock Light Freighters, landspeeders and blasters all being speculative as well as existing in a universe with 17 kinds of superscience technologies it's all as likely as anything else.

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

A significant part of the problem is that, well, owning a ship will generally produce income that is roughly appropriate to the cost of the ship, because trade rates are normalized based on the cost of trading vessels; you can assume that a ship, in normal operation, produces revenues that exceed its operating costs (including crew salaries) and mortgage costs (if possibly narrowly). On a $5M ship, that's probably at least $25k/month in excess of operating costs (and probably significantly more); in a TL 10 game, without a loan, that's going to be at least Wealthy.

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

Did all that back in 3e too. Calculated maintenance costs for used ships typical of the Gloria, added in crew salaries and decided how much they needed to charge to meet that figure based on a hold 50% full (the bank had been paid off a long time ago). I think the number was a couple of bucks per cubic foot.

Since it was a cheap ship it made for cheap shipping. Expensive ships will make for expensive shipping. One of these assumptions will probably fit your genre better than the other.

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

At best, in any sci-fi setting, your average star system will see 20 ships a month. That's hauling luxuries, people wealthy enough to move planet, military vessels and 'police' patrols. Planets HAVE to be self sufficient in basic goods, or they don't survive.

Economically, you might see an ENTIRE GROUP of player characters band together with their money, loans, favours owed etc to afford a ship, with shares in it between them (which also prevents it being sold by 1 of them, as they can sell their shares in it, but not the ship itself. One of them might professionally captain it, being the front man and negotiator for the crew, but they all are owners) That'd give you A) a decent starting point on buying a ship, B) a reason the PC's are together and having to work together, even if they don't get on 100% of the time, and C) an opportunity for adventures, when different things affect different people.

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'.

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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.

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

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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.

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The Ricardo class has 6 FTL systems, so a Ricardo with it's full 5 equal-mass barges is the usual 5% by mass jumpdrives.

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Ah! Okay. Yeah, that would more or less work, then.

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Why not go back to the age of adventure and see how it worked? A reputation for success, or ruthlessness, "paid" with adventuring opportunities. Joint-Stock companies were driven by wealthy men with an appetite for great reward. They were GREEDY, and they were perfectly happy to send off some capable captains and see if they came back. Columbus did not own his ship. He wasn't even a very good navigator, or the most experienced sea captain. He was lucky (which in GURPS you can quantify) and he was qualified. Sometimes, that's all that was necessary. John Smith was not a man of means, but he commanded a very important colonizing expedition when his style of leadership was needed. Most of the adventurers of that era, in fact, were what we all would call high point PCs with only a marginal amount of investment in wealth. They had marginal status, but clearly impressive levels of much more important stuff -- Fearlessness, Charisma, Talents, high skills in Leadership, Combat Weapons, etc. Read up on Cortez or any other the Conquistadors. Those guys were classic adventurers and the stuff they pulled off made them gather even more opportunity. If they failed, they often died.

The archetype for a good space game, IMO, is not the self-made captain who owns his ship. He's won it in a card game, got it on loan from a mafia in Zeta Alpha, or stole it from a dock on the other side of the universe. But if you want them to be made-men, just give them the points. You are playing an adventure game, not populating a reality simulator.

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Malcolm Reynolds of the Serenity would disagree.

"Hey, GM! You let Bob have a free spaceship by saying he won it in a card game. Well I won a Super Dooper Personal Impenetrable Force Field Insta-Kill Blaster Doohickey in a bowling match! Gimme the stats!"

Freebies only work if they are campaign elements that benefit the entire group equally. The moment the owning player says, "It's my ship! Follow my rules or else," you've got a problem.

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Mal bought his own ship, apparently without debt, but do we know where the money came from?

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Doesn't matter. Starting wealth doesn't consider how you got it, only that it's yours.

Mal owns, with no strings attached, a cheap or very cheap ship, yet he is Poor. A character cannot start like this in GURPS without GM fiat or without spending hundreds or thousands of points on Signature Gear or extra cash.

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I've been thinking about this. I think the difference might be what Poor means.

You're wealth level in GURPS measures potential income almost more than it measures actual worth. The money you can make with a ship is generally proportionate to the size and quality - and thus cost - of the ship.

In GURPS terms, Mal has a fairly high level of Wealth with 100% of it in Signature Assets (see Spaceships 2, p. 27) for Serenity. However, he doesn't really have wealth independent of Serenity, so generally all his income comes from operating that spacecraft.

He also has either several levels of Debt to represent the costs of running the thing, or he bought Serenity as a Cheap or Very Cheap ship, which both represents how broken-down it is and how expensive it is to maintain.

Something still doesn't seem quite right, but I'm not sure what.

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It does, though. Wealth isn't just money. Did Mal ever have Wealth, or just some manner of windfall?

Regardless...
Yes, if you want owning a ship to be on your character sheet in GURPS, it's going to be a problem.

MyGurps offers sensible rules for 'doesn't have lots of Wealth but does have lots of money/stuff'. If you don't use those, yeah, you get into the 'Han Solo costs more points than God' realm.

But even if you do use them, basically, you'll only play Mal because you want to. His junker of a ship and tight personal finances aren't saving many points, compared to the incredible amount of inconvenience they bring him.

I'd attribute this to GURPS' baseline position that gear is really not very important. If you want a game in which some gear is very important, you're going to be working around that.

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It's a fundamental problem with GURPS Wealth rules, for which there are several partial patches (like Debt and Independent Income and Signature Gear) and lots of house rule fixes floating around.

Wealth covers at least four separate traits - total assets, adventure useful assets (set at 20% of starting wealth), monthlyl income, and how many hours you have to devote to that monthly income. Well, maybe five traits, there's also the social components that overlap with Status and credit rating.

Bundling these together makes Wealth simple, which is nice for characters where the details don't matter a lot, but any time you try to design a character where exact economic situation is an important part of the character concept they're going to pinch you. Having a really big asset you can't or won't sell is one of the more common ones, but it's also hard to design a character who has a huge monthly income but has to work full time to earn it, or who has been pretty much broke up to now but *just* got hired for the high paying job the campaign is going to be about.

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Mal doesn't seem to function as if he's got Wealth enough to own a ship at Spaceships-type costs. If he did, he'd have much more of a social place, higher standard of living, better contacts... As it is, his 'social place' is being Inara's transport. Or 'sketchy guy who can maybe move your cargo' when he's working.

He also doesn't really function as if he's Poor. His living conditions are pretty spartan, but remember that he's traveling all the time...lower than Wealth-appropriate living standards aren't surprising. He doesn't seem to be a low-status person, except when he comes to the attention of significantly high-status people...the frontier ultra-rich or core-worlders. Mal being Average wealth seems plausible to me.

He doesn't make much if any profit on the ship, but if we assume it's a Very Cheap ship, the finance costs that he avoids by owning it outright are pretty trivial. Add in that he's probably got some sort of Unluckiness and more than a few mental and social disadvantages interfering with money-making opportunities, and his constant struggle just to keep flying is easy to explain.

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I wouldn't say he's Poor, but he's certainly not Wealthy. However, I would submit that Mal's ship is GM fiat in action; Joss Whedon is not the type to do detailed economic analysis, and Mal has the ship because Mal having the ship makes the plot work.

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

I have to say, I would generally consider any owner of a singularly large and valuable property (like a starship) to have some increased level of wealth. While they possess the starship they enjoy a higher status as a starship captain, and the continued opportunity for a high level of income through its operation - whether they choose to use it as such or not. Isn't that what Wealth provides? I would generally allow multiple levels of debt to represent the ship's expenses, and might require a couple on principle!

Not necessarily - Wealth gives your social status for free, it does not guarantee anything else. There are plenty of wealthy people in fiction and reality who are reclusive, unpopular, and boorish. Mal enjoys the status of a starship captain - uniquely tied to his wealth.

Wealth doesn't require that you spend it, or that you spend it on appearances - Mal spends his considerable income on the ship's expenses and paying the rest of his crew, many of whom he does not technically need.

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

But he couldn't give up captaining and get a cozy Multimillionaire's job, and just live on the Serenity. He can't do big-time Multimillionaire business — he smuggles cattle. Mal's status as a ship captain never seemed to be very high — almost everyone looked down on him. Inara was the one with Status, not Mal. Inara's job on Serenity was to make the ship respectable.

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

Wealth provides more than that, or is meant to. Credit, for instance. Mal's credit rating is approximately 'Guard, throw this scoundrel out of my bank!'

It also provides less than that (though it's not meant to) by failing to factor in to job-hunts...
The Advantage Wealth is a poorly documented thing, but it seems firmly established that it's intended to involve being tied into a social network.

This doesn't preclude being reclusive, unpopular, or boorish! Fiction and life both indicate that the rich don't need to be nice to be cut into the whole upper-crust deal. If you're entirely cut off from society and live alone in a mansion with gold bars in the basement, you're probably not Wealthy. If you're seldom seen to leave your penthouse apartment and seldom talk to anyone other than your stockbroker and your personal assistant, you may still be a Multimillionaire 1.

Mal does enjoy some status (and Status) as a spaceship captain (not actually a starship...the 'Verse is weird). But I'd say it's Status 0 or maybe 1, not what you'd have if you had Wealth to cover a multi-million dollar spacecraft.

(I'd say most people on the outer worlds are Poor or Struggling and have negative status.)
It is interesting to note that the only crew members who seem to serve an essential purpose are Wash and Kaylee. None of the others seem to have any technical skills relating to spacecraft operations at all. Mal and Zoe can stand watches, but if they've got any applicable abilities other than reliability and leadership it doesn't seem to come up...

Though nearly half the effective crew members are (or at least originally were) passengers. They might not be on payroll.