Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

Cheaper than that for used ships. In both the licensed SW games a blaster pistol cost $500 and a used stock light frieghter cost $25,000.

$500 US 2012 is in the low to middle range for a new semi-automatic pistol. Looks to me like you might convert SW credits to 2012 dollars one-to-one.

Even with the full resources of Ve2 and GVB I never got the price of a used ship that low but I did get it down to c. $500,000.

You need to be careful about ingrained assumnptions about starship size and cost dating from Traveller. Traveller ships are _much_ bigger than ones for Star Wars. I live in a 20 dTon house and that's making generous assumptions about ceiling height. The Millenium Falcon is not 10x that big.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

I think part of the problem is that it's easy to look at a number for spaceship size and say "that sounds about right" and go on with it without thinking.

One thing I remember is that a SM+6 "Fighter" from Spaceships is roughly the size of a 747. A SM+8 "tramp freighter" is probably the size of the 6 story office building I work in. A 30,000 ton "Cruiser" stood on end would be the largest structure in many states, even ones with tall buildings. And all that's assuming no streamlining (except on the fighter example).

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

If I go to the dealership right this second now I could end up paying 45,000 for a car.

If I get it used or off lease, I could end up spending 35,000

If I outline the parameters for the vehicle I want and those parameters would be covered by the 45,000 car, but I am willing to forgo things (like warranty, or mileage); I can likely find one in the 20,000 range.

If I'm willing to get an 'old' model that has seen some wear and tear, I can now likely get under 10,000.

If at any point that vehicle has been in an accident cut off another 30%.

If I'm willing to scrounge the local paper, and find someone who is selling there car, and I'm willing for it to be old, and have some faults, likely have been in several fender benders, but still be functional I could have that car for 2000

Final reduction from the 'orriginal price' of a car is 22.5x.

So if your starting gear is an older, beat down, but functional spaceship that would cost 8 million, new, from the dealer, with a warranty, you might only be paying 1/22.5th of the cost or 360,000.

It will be old, it will not be stylish, it will have seen at least a few minor accidents, it will have quirks, but it was cheap enough for the PC to buy. Hope they have the mechanic skills to not die in deep space when the warp drive breaks down, again.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

There's a few problems with your assumption, all stemming from the comparison of a car to a spaceship. Car =/= Spaceship by any stretch of the imagination. Spaceships have a lot more in common with commercial airliners, at all levels of comparison. There will be many regulations about maintenance and inspections, and resale value tends to stay high for many years, even decades, because any plane that can still fly has been well cared for with extensive maintenance logs. Beyond that, $8M is an extremely generous price to quote for a new plane. A modern large body airplane, such as a 747, has an starting price of $100M+ (some models up to $300M+), and a 747 clocks in at SM+6 or SM+7 which makes it small by Spaceships standards.

Note: Price is one of the places where Spaceships is notably off kilter. You can make a SM+7 airplane using Spaceships rules which clocks in at under $5M, off by nearly two orders of magnitude.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

Not multiversally true.

Take the Millenium Falcon again. At best what it is parallel to is a DC-3 purchased and operating in a lawless Third World country. Not a jet airliner operating in a place with laws.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

I disagree 100% with your statement because it is outright false. As long as your not dealing with massive passenger jets aircraft behave almost identically to cars when it comes to loosing value.

Working Cesna ~17,000\
http://www.aso.com/listings/Aircraft...id=20&mps=true

Want some used Russian aircraft 10,000 for a chopper-15,000,000 for a SU-27.
http://www.military-heat.com/19/russ...eneral-public/

Still too pricy, you could always buy a prop based plane for 9,000
www.barnstormers.com/listing.php?main=Biplane

and if your pocketbook is still too stretched I'm sure an enterprising Kenyan machinist can throw one together for you for less then 5,000.
http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/20...-fly-next-week

You could happily operate any of these in most of continental Africa, Russia, China, India, as well as most of south America- they'd likely take some work and possibly a few bribes to have them identified as air-worthy for north America, Europe, Japan and other nations that don't like people randomly falling out of the sky and dying (A friend of mine actually built an biplane from scratch; as in machined out the engine block himself from scratch, and is legally allowed to operate it in north America and Europe.) If you've ever seen a special on bush pilots it becomes immediately evident that there is either massive corruption in the small aircraft market, and/or that the standards for aircraft that will never land at a major runway are VERY low.


Edit:
One of the big reasons that the huge airliners need such strict logs is that they are 'built to die'; IE- rather then be built to operate so long as they are in good working order (but as a tradeoff require much more weight, which is much more fuel, and much less cargo space for the same flight), they are built to operate for long enough to and then require massive repairs (but are much lighter, which means less fuel and more cargo space for the same flight) when your a commercial operation flying lots of people every day it seems to pay for itself, for anything else, not so much.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

In the context of a SF game, space ships (the smaller ones anyway) have a plentitude and market penetration on a par with road vehicles. That implies that maintenance standards will be lower, at least for private vehicle ownership. So you could probably get a jalopy spaceship at 1/22.5 list value. But who knows what the ship was doing in that five year period missing in the log, and does anyone else find that odd whistling noise in the engine room disturbing?

"Space bus" companies might still have so much paperwork to work against that they will want to have full maintenance logs. The kind of vehicles appropriate will also be a lot rarer, on a par with, um, commercial airliners. Military vessels certainly will have complete logs.

otoh, if you are playing a SF game in which space travel is still very new, then private spaceship ownership will be rare. And likely the PCs won't be expected to own one to enter the campaign either. IW's Caliph springs to mind here.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

I didn't say Mal spent a fortune on buying Serenity, which is my point really. Mal bought and owned the ship, without being wealthy. He bought it from a scrap dealer or close enough and patched her up, which is easily covered by SS2 rules for cheap ships, or an equivalent approximation.
The Serenity RPG covers such things for that setting, I'll see how those numbers work.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

All those assumptions about safety checks are assumed defaults in our setting, not necessarily in the settings with common spaceships. Indeed, they seem to be characteristic specifically of states influenced by the Euroamerican culture. There, culture might be different. Maybe the government is that callous. Or maybe the right to travel with minimal restrictions is seen as one of the fundamental rights, and the risks taken on flights are culturally considered the lesser of two evils. Or maybe there are other reasons.

For instance, in Æthereal Sun, air/spacecraft regulation is present but weak, except in places where it is absent. For instance, one of the largest aerospace centres (a whole big island dedicated to the aerospace industry, hangars, landing zones/terminals etc.) has an International side and a Khænish side. The International side has the usual request-for-corridor and other moderately strict procedures. The Khænish side offers no warranties, but lacks those restrictions, and looks like this Driving in India video, but without the impatient honking and jams. And there are fewer crashes than in our world, because the race in question has the Daredevil trait.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

Pretty much. You have two sets of currencies here $ and points. If you set different exchange rates for them for spaceships and everything else, you will see people buy in one and sell in the other.

If you want spaceships not to cost as many points as levels of Multimillionaire, you either need to lower the cash price of spaceships so they don't cost multimillions, which may be unrealistic, or you need to put a bunch of limits on your Ship Owner advantage that somehow prevent selling the ship for more than thousands, but still charge the buyer multimillions in the same transaction, which is definitely unrealistic, but might be fine anyway - essentially it's a kind of Pact with the GM (I won't even try to sell the ship)

Just giving the PCs the ship for a campaign that assumes one amounts to this later case, you're charging 0 points for whatever the ship is worth with the effective pact that selling the ship will end the campaign. Personally I prefer that, the ship is normally central to the campaign plan after all. And where it isn't *not* having a ship is pretty central to the campaign plan - your political intrigue or city cops or high-school romance campaign plan isn't going to work if the players go and buy a cargo ship and start sailing the world either.