[Varyon]

Originally Posted by RedMattis

Meanwhile, without reading GURPS Space, based on what I'm reading here I'm guessing they assume space ships are custom built by specialists and have a complexity similar to building a nuclear reactor, rather a random back-water auto-assembler factory pumping out passable heavy shuttles at a rate of 5 ships per minute. Heck, large capital ships might build various fighters on them fast enough that it is relied upon to resupply mid-combat.

From what I understand, the Spaceships pricing basically assumes production models built in factories (or equivalent mass-production scheme), with all the cost savings that implies - building something like the Space Shuttle in Spaceships will result in a markedly lower price tag than the actual vehicles cost, because they were a rather limited run. It's just that building something that will reliably hold 1 atm of pressure in a vacuum and withstand the sort of force a powerful reaction engine would put on it (in addition to all the other issues of building something that will keep people alive in an environment as hostile to life as outer space) requires high-quality materials and rather exacting manufacturing tolerances, so it's tough to make things cheap (also, reaction engines themselves have tolerance requirements that make them rather expensive as well). Superscience drives and life support force field generators that can be built in someone's garage would make things markedly less expensive, as you could more-or-less toss those onto something like a modern van and go fly around in space. That's honestly one of the methods I've considered to make spaceships more affordable in my Harpyias setting (which is loosely inspired by Star Wars).

EDIT: If you wanted Spaceships anyway, what you'd basically need to do for your setting is take a look at each module, figure out why it's expensive, then come up with a reason why it isn't in your setting (maybe there's a really cheap way to produce the durasteel that's used for armor plating, the drives rely on One Weird Trick that's actually pretty cheap and easy to do once you know it, for life support force fields need some material that is unknown to Earth but abundant in you setting, etc). Or maybe there are ubiquitous nanofactories and you just need feedstock (scrap metal) to make the ships. But it could readily have other effects on the setting (realistically, if armed and armored spaceships are dirt cheap, human-scale arms and armors are going to be virtually free).