[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."