[Spaceships] Making a setting work...

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Ejidoth

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

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."

[Ulzgoroth]

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 If the ship is obsolete, aging (and thus more expensive to maintain), or originally built for another purpose (stripped and decommissioned former warship) that might be justified.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.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by malloyd

You can vastly lower the price of ships.

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.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

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.

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.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by malloyd

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.

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.