Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

In a Space setting, owning a spaceship is a fairly common character trait, but the existing GURPS rules don’t support such a concept that well.
These rules attempt to create a playable approximation which can be used as a starting point for such a character concept.

I’ve used the sample spaceships in Spaceships 2-6 to get a rough cost for ‘average’ spaceships, and PK’s House Rule for Trading Points for Money to get a point cost from $ value.

The Rule:

An ‘average’ SM+6 Spaceship at a Campaign TL of 9 costs [50] points.
Note, the TL is that of the Campaign used to calculate the Starting Wealth, not the TL of the Spaceship!
Each +1 to SM costs an additional [10] points.
Each +1 to Campaign TL reduces the cost by [5] points.
Subtract the Points spent on Personal Wealth (e.g. [20] points for a Wealthy character), to a minimum of [5] points.

For Example:

A TL10 Character with Comfortable Wealth, could own an SM+8 personal Yacht for [55] points (on top of their [10] points for Comfortable Wealth).
A TL10 Wealthy Character could own an SM+9 Tramp Freighter for [55] points.

The inner workings:

Cost for an ‘average’ spaceships (which primarily means not military or highly specialised spaceships) roughly scales with Size (SM): $6M will get you an ‘average’ SM+6 Spaceship, $20M for an SM+7, $60M for an SM+8, and $200M for an SM+9.
I figure SM+6 to SM+9 is the likely size range for a privately owned vessel.

Examples:
The Maltese Falcon-Class Yacht [SS2.p15] is SM+8, TL10^ and Costs $52.2M (close to our $60M)
The Kiev-Class Farhauler [SS2.p6] is SM+9, TL10^ and Costs $139.7M (within the $200M approximation)

Using PK’s Trading Points for Money, the point cost from various Wealth Levels, and TL Starting Wealth gives an average point cost, and the variance for each SM and TL Step.

Examples:
A TL10 Character with Comfortable Wealth, could get $52.2M as starting wealth for [54] points.
A Wealthy TL10 Character could get $139.7M as starting wealth for [55] points.

These figures are significant approximations, with very specific break points – e.g. if you’re paying points for a $200M Spaceship, you might want something close to that value (which $140M maybe isn’t). If the GM is supplying the list of ‘allowed’ spaceships with point costs, they can modify the spacecraft or point costs if desired.

These rules also assume the PC(s) are buying a new full cost spaceship, but it’s simple to modify them – the +1 to SM, equates to x3 in Cost for [10] points. Reversing this, a ‘used’ spaceship could sell for 1/3 Cost and reduce the point cost by [-10], for 1/10th the Cost reduce the point cost by [-20]. Such ‘cheap’ spacecraft probably have more than a few problems and quirks which will need constant maintenance and repair (Spaceships 2 Chapter 2 for further details and ideas).

The point cost can be split between the PC’s.
If they have different starting Wealth levels, you could split the cost and then subtract each PC’s personal wealth level cost (still Min [5] points each) to get the cost of their share – assuming they have an even share.
(I’m not sure how balanced this last might be for different starting Wealths!, use GM’s judgement).

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

This last really doesn't look like it will work for PC's with different starting wealth - so I'm not sure how to handle that.
If all PC's have the same Starting Wealth, subtract that from the cost before splitting.
e.g. An SM+9 Courier at TL10 would cost [75] points; Split between 5 Average Wealth PC's that would be [15] each, between 5 Comfortable PC's, it would be [13] each.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

I'm not sure I agree that owning a space ship would be "common". And in a campaign would each character have the option of owning their own ship? Do they just stick to their own ship? Does one character pay enough to have a ship big enough for the other's ships to dock in it?

More importantly, in the campaign, is there an expectation by the GM that the characters will have a ship to get around with? If so, I wouldn't bother charging character points... I'd just design the ship and let them have it. It's a campaign trait.

If the characters don't by default have a ship, and there's commercial space travel, they can just use that for space travel... and then if they decide to buy a ship, I'd probably have it play out in session. If their wealth is enough to buy one together, I'd let them do that. I let them apply for a "car-loan" so to speak if they thought of that. I'd let them choose other means of obtaining the ship if they wanted. It can be an interesting part of the story.

I'm not sure I'd charge points for a ship.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

In many settings, like Star Wars, owning a ship is no more costly than owning a car or truck. If you want to support the buying of spaceships with starting cash, simply price them as cars and trucks. If you want to distinguish them from actual cars and trucks, make them a little more expensive.


GURPS costs for spaceships are realistic (more or less). Less-than-spectacularly-rich individuals owning spaceships is not realistic, but it is cinematic. In cinematic settings, drop the price of spaceships.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

If I was going to charge points though, several characters working together to buy a ship would provide an additive amount of money, not an average. So if three PCs have 10 point versions of wealth, and the ship would cost them 45 points in total... each of them can account for 10 points of the cost with their base wealth, dropping it to 15... each can then just pay 5 character points for the difference right?

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

Pretty much this. Having the ship isn't an advantage in the campaign. It's a prerequisite for the campaign to happen at all.

Kirk wasn't a 2000-point captain who paid points for the Enterprise. The ship was effectively on loan to him by his patron. He probably paid points for his patron though, which would be played out as a chance for another federation ship to be present (and definitely not as the Enterprise being present or not in an adventure).

If the ship was above the campaign TL, that'd be an advantage the captain or pilot would be paying for. And if the PCs had control of a battleplate in a campaign where everyone else typically used frigates, that'd be an advantage (probably an Unusual Background).

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

It doesn't work from a $ perspective -
At TL10, Comfortable Wealth [10] plus [5] points as Cash (using PK's Rules), gives each player Starting Wealth of 200K! x5 = 1M which is certainly not enough to pay for a ship worth [45] points, which at TL10 is ~8M !

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

If the characters are all Soldiers, shouldn't their Weapons and Kit be simply provided by the GM?
Being DF Adventurers requires weapons and armour, so shouldn't the GM simply provide those?

Indeed, if the Ship is a campaign pre-requisite; the GM could just give the PC's a ship; but there are scenarios, and rules in Spaceships2, and there have been questions on these forums, asking how many points it costs to own a spaceship.

If just giving the PCs a ship isn't a suitable answer, these rules provide what should be a simple, balanced, workable option.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

This is it, and the real issue is figuring a reasonable Cost in both $ and Points.

Buying sufficient Wealth to buy a Spaceship (even at a reduced cost) is expensive in points, and has other consequences - Why does a Multimillionaire want to fly around in a beat up old tramp Freighter, scrapping a living transporting cattle and/or wobbly headed dolls?

Spaceships 2 has some rules/options for Buying or Financing a Spaceship; these are an alternative approach, which does not require anything above Average wealth and a load of points to buy a ship.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

You could allow Wealth (with Conditional Ownership from Spaceships 2) to be purchased with Debt as a single meta-trait. This serves as a good campaign motivator, since they'll have to take jobs to pay down the debt.

Alternately, in some campaigns (where there's no space combat, and the spaceships just a place to stay and a way to get around) you could just fold it into cost of living--just set aside 80% of their starting wealth and say that they don't have another home or vehicle.

Perhaps with something analogous to the Base perk from Supers.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

Kirk didn't have a Patron. He just had Rank. Starfleet did not come when he called.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

For Star Wars specifically there's Other Games that list prices that you could simply use. Another idea is to define a few of the iconic ships in Spaceships, check the Other Game prices and find a divisor to make ship prices fit.

More generically, decide how much you want ships to cost, find a divisor to make the Spaceships price come into line with it, then apply consistently... or not and make certain types of vessel inexplicably cost significantly more than others despite similar specs. That might mean a SM+8 Hercules-class tramp freighter costs $50,000 while the SM+8 Plenty-class Fleet Replenishment craft somehow costs $7.6 million with minimal difference in specs.

In my tramp freighter game I tend to reduce the price of the ship, then make the player buy it with the options in SS2. For military games I assume it's part and parcel with the player's Rank and role in the game (fighter pilots or "Honor Harrington" style games) or simply a backdrop (Star Trek style game where PCs are senior officers, but not the captain).

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

I was thinking you could just identify your ship with a type of modern ground vehicle and pay its cost. A tramp freighter costs as much as a semi-truck ($60K); a teaser's ship is like a sports car ($85K); a low-cost cruise ship is like a bus ($120K).


Or, as in your divisor suggestion, you could simply read all Ms as Ks.


If you balk at the idea of reducing prices of arbitrary items, how about increasing the spending power of money on arbitrary items? Your star freighter is still worth $100M, but when you spend bucks on spaceships, they become Space Bucks, worth a thousand times more than Planetside Bucks.


It's completely unrealistic, but then so is the idea of your average slob owning his own spaceship.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

"Madness? Have you looked at this scan carefully, Doctor? At his face? It's love, in point of fact. Something a good deal more dangerous." (Firefly FTW!)

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

Strictly, that's from the movie 'Serenity', but Touché!
It is not his ship though, Simon did not spend his millions buying the ship.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

I've played with the idea of just making the spaceship cost 50 points, split between the players however they want. If one player wants to be sole owner he can pay all 50; if they want to be even partners they can split the cost evenly. If they want to let one person be "captain" but everyone else still has a say then the captain can pay Y points and everyone else pays X points, where Y > X.

It's completely arbitrary, but no less so than arbitrarily adjusting the cost of ships to allow one, or several, of the players buy one.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

The Star Wars setting has been the same TL for thousands of years. There are a lot of spaceships around that are old but can be overhauled again and again.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

Or taking the points needed to buy enough Wealth for the ship, call it "Unusual Background (Ship Owner)" and split it between the players like you described above. Then again I've always viewed Unusual Background as a catchall point crock for character details that can't otherwise be justified as costing points. At least this way would make it variable based on the cost of the ship and allow some "arms control."

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

Neither did Mal. Best guess, based on in-context clues from the scripts, is that Serenity cost the equivalent of a hundred thousand current dollars. This is about what a surface ship of the same displacement and age might cost, but an order of magnitude less than a similar-size aircraft and perhaps two orders of magnitude less than its Spaceships analogue.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

It probably did at times. But generally Rank comes with your hierarchy caring about your existence, so that still works.

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.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

That's how I've done it in the past to good effect. It seems odd to me to charge points for ownership of something that when used either a) serves all PCs and tag along NPCs roughly equally, or b) effectively removes you from the campaign.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

GURPS Supers has a Headquarters mechanism (p. 85) for owning large signature assets without being wealthy. You determine what would be the Status required to just have it as part of what your Cost of Living gets you (p. B266) and pay what that Status is worth. This gets you only the headquarters, not the actual status or the staff for the headquarters, but you don't have to pay the increased cost of living that status would usually require. Usually, the transportation provided by Status CoL is worth less than the living space provided, so it shouldn't be a problem to swap the provided living space for the provided transportation.

For example, Status 6 [30] would get you a private jet at TL8, so Signature Gear (Status 6 HQ) [30] might get you an SM+5/6 spaceship at TL10. Status 7 [35] gets you a private jumbo jet at TL8 so SG might get you an SM+7/8 spaceship at TL10. Status 8 [40] gets you a private airline or an ocean liner so SG might get you an SM+12 spaceship at TL10.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

The purpose of such a mechanic is to empower the players to make a choice, so that they might or might not decide to allocate some of their character creation currency towards creating characters who happen to own a spaceship, instead of towards creating characters who happen to have DX 14 and Combat Reflexes and good combat skills, or characters who have high Astrogation and other science skills and Eidetic Memory and good IQ, or Charisma and Smooth Operator and a bunch of Contacts.

The test, to see whether the mechanic is good, is to subject a lot of character-creating players to it, and if some of them opts for owning a spaceship, then it is good.

It has to be some. Not too few. And certainly not all players, but it is equally wrong if no players decide to start with a spaceship. Out of a reasonably large and reasonably broad sample of players, of course.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

This is something of a challenging test to run even as a thought experiment, because it calls for a game premise in which 'own a ship' and 'don't own a ship' are both reasonable options.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

Strangely, in my current campaign, the original premise was that none of the PCs owns a ship. Still, one player decided to fork over 30ish points and buy an aerospace craft that can fit the whole party (comparable to a large minivan among cars). I don't think it's disruptive, even though this quickly made hired NPC pilots and their craft less interesting in the campaign.

The primary 'trouble' with the 'own a ship' premise is the incomes which the PCs can gain through putting said ship to work. Simply put, either they're going to go broke, or they'll have so much surplus income that personal gear becomes comparatively cheap (even if they can't upgrade to a better ship). Of course, there are wonderful gonzo settings where this is not the case, like Rogue Trader (where ship components can easily be of a cost comparable to a personal item).

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

Precisely, Player Choice
Showing that sometimes a player does want to make that choice!

While the GM can just give the PC's a ship, he might not want to for a number of reasons - an obvious one being that the Players might simply decide to sell the spaceship for a big wadge of cash - and preventing that requires further rules, and/or restrictions, etc.

So, assuming I want to give the players a choice to own a ship, or not, how does my rule hold up?
The point cost is roughly derived using PK's Points for Cash house rule, which basically gives cash equal to double the 'standard' Starting Wealth for the same points expenditure.
This means that simply selling the spaceship won't give any more cash than could have been gained by simply converting the points to cash in the first place.

Using the Cheap/Very Cheap Spaceship option from Spaceships 2, reduces the effective value of the Ship, which can be convert to a point reduction; Cheap would be [-5], Very Cheap [-15].

The 'Base' Rule from Supers is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure it converts to a Spaceship as well as it handles fixed buildings - it would require GM judgment on exactly what 'Status' a spaceship should be equivalent to, and it would still suffer from the selling it for cash issue.

The 'Base' Rule did lead me to another thought: Take the Monthly Costs for the Spaceship (SS2 suggests a flat 0.5% of the Value per Month as a simplification) - so an SM+8 Spaceship (~$60M) would have a Monthly Cost of $300K - and compare that to the Cost of Living for a given Status, which would make it Status 5 which has a CoL of $600K.
You could then use the cost of the Status [25 points] for the Point Cost of the Spaceship; or; the Cost of the appropriate Wealth Level, which for Status 5 would be MM1 [75 points]. The former seems like a better deal, but I haven't crunched all the numbers to see how it works out.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

Sure.

No.

It all depends on your job. Generally I figure if you take a Duty and some Rank you probably get some free gear out of it, often with limitations on how you're allowed to use that gear when you're not fufilling your duty.

My general prefered solution is to figure out what level of wealth would be required to purchase the ship, using the signature assets limitation, and then split the cost between players however they wish. That's IF it's important to them that they own their own ship. And generally for a used ship, and I encourage taking some levels of Debt.

My more prefferred solution is to start the game working as crew for someone who owns the ship and give them the opportunity to acquire their own somehow down the road in-game.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

That gives you ample opportunity to control what kind of ship the PCs can eventually become owners of. Which is exactly why it is preferable to have the freedom to choose to make a ship-owning character, via allocating some of the character creation currency, during character creation.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

Meh.

If I offer a campaign concept that requires a pc-owned starship, and the players sign up for that campaign ... then at least one of the player-characters will be a ship-owner; or there is no campaign and I start to wonder why they wasted my time. Choice is highly overrated in certain situations.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

As I've said before, and will say many times again: Why don't you just create the characters for the players. Why don't you decide what kinds of characters they are to play?

The reason for having point-based character creation is to give the players freedom of choice, as to what kinds of characters to play. "Owns a ship" is an as legitimate a character concept component as "has above-average IQ".

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

Um. I do tell them what kinds of characters they are going to be playing

Example: "We're playing a Star Wars game set in the New Republic Era that is going to see a lot of space combat. Your characters are going to be a space-fighter unit which is part of an amoral mercenary company. Most everyone should have piloting skills, everyone should be combat-useful, at least one of you needs to be force-capable and its' suggested that you take a mix of humans, near-humans and aliens. If you don't have a ship of your own you are going to be left out of the action about half the time; custom fighter-class ships are encouraged. Once you have a concept going, sell me on it and we will refine it until we're both satisfied. Interested?"

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

When one character pays points for a spaceship, they should have all of the advantages of being the spaceship's owner -- they get to make decisions about where the ship goes, what cargo or passengers it carries, etc. They might delegate day-to-day operation to a character who has paid points for skills appropriate to being ship's captain, but they're still the owner.

For a more team-based approach, the players could all chip in by being part-owners in an "organization" that owns the ship, by taking the Patron advantage at 6 or less with the Equipment enhancement. For example, if starting wealth at TL10 is $50k, then Patron (Powerful Organization; 6 or less; Equipment, +100%) [15] gets them co-ownership in "assets" worth up to $500M* (i.e., a spaceship). They get to use the spaceship, and, once per adventure on a 6 or less (each), they get some organizational benefit. If they decide that the organization should sell the ship (effectively dissolving the organization), they have to trade Patron points for Wealth points.

"Organizational benefit" might include an opportunity to use organizational assets (including people) to help you with a personal problem (gambling debts, a unique investment, applying social pressure, etc.), letting you make decisions for the duration of the adventure, an opportunity to set goals for the organization, etc.


* maybe use the partial wealth multipliers from GURPS Spaceships 2 for finer control of value? [10] gets you assets worth $50M, [11] for $100M, [12] for $200M, [13] for $300M, and [14] for $400M...

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

I would see that as worth no more than levels in an appropriate rank (e.g. Shipboard Rank, 1pt/level).

My problem with one PC spending all the points necessary for a starship, which usually provides most of its benefits to the party as a whole rather than the individual onwer, is that the owner-PC is then effectively a less powerful character than anyone in the rest of the party. He may even not have enough points to be as good a pilot, captain or strategist as other PCs.

Therefore in a one-ship/one-party campaign, I'd say the ship should either be a campaign feature or bought with party resources (whether that's points or cash).

This might not apply if each PC is a pilot or captain in a convoy of ships, then relative spending on ships will have commensurate relative benefits accrue to each PC.

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

You know, I rather like this method! Thanks!

Re: Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship
 

Inspired by this thread, I thought I'd take a look at this again.

This might actually prove to be a pretty good approximation (even if it seems arbitary).

Pay a point cost equal to the equivalent Status to get a Spaceship for which the Monthly Costs (assuming the simplified 0.5% of Value), is equivalent (within) the Cost of Living for that Status.

This makes an average SM+7 ship [25] points (such as the Serengeti-Class Bio-Survey Ship, SS5.p17), and an SM+9 ship [30] points (such as the Kiev-Class Farhauler, SS2.p6).

The points cost above for a Spaceship gives you Use of a Spaceship, you don't technically 'Own' the ship, and you still need to make the Monthly Cost Payments! This might be the equivalent of having a Patron who owns the Spaceship.

Double the cost, to actually 'Own' the Spaceship, meaning nobody else can tell you where to go, etc; OR to automatically cover the Monthly Costs, saving on Book Keeping, and the need to actually earn a bucket load of money each month.
Triple the cost to be the 'Owner' AND have no Monthly Costs to make!

So Eric's 'arbitrary' [50] points would cover Owning an average Spaceship, but with the need to make money to pay the Monthly Costs; or, 'Use' of a Spaceship with no Monthly Costs to pay, but you don't technically 'Own' the ship, so the 'owner' may sometimes tell you where to go.

If the values don't quite work for you, adjust the 0.5% Monthly Costs to 1% or 1.5% (which are still within reasonable ranges for a ship on Finance, etc).