[Spaceships] What are the assumptions for passenger costs

[Kallatari]

Can someone provide me with the assumptions as to how the cost per ton of freight or per passenger were determined in Spaceships 2 (p.39-40). I've been trying to see how one can make money with those, and it doesn't seem to work.

For my example, I'll use the Warp-Drive/Hyperdrive. It has an indicated ticket rate of $100 per person per parsec. This rate assumes an FTL-1 drive, which means that it travels at 1 parsec per day. As a simplification, we can therefore assume that the cost for a passenger therefore comes to $100 per day. Assuming a 30-day month, this means that you'll receive about $3,000/passenger per month (assuming you are always fully booked and traveling every day, which is unlikely).

These rates assume first class. You halve the rate for economy, which is therefore $1,500/passenger per month.

Now, the rule of thumb for a ship's operational expenditures, as per the "Fudging It" box on p.31, should be about 1.5% of the total purchase price per month.

Using the two sample FTL Passenger liners (p12-13):

Empress-Class Star Liner: It can hold 120 first-class and 120 economy passengers. Assuming full capacity, that's an income of (120 x 3000 + 120 x 1500 =) $540,000. The ship is worth $391M, therefore it's operating expenses are (391M x 1.5% =) $5,865,000. The income is failing to meet the expenditures by about a factor of 10.

Xanadu-Class Luxury Liner: 400 first class and 800 economy class passengers. That's a monthly income of $2,400,000. The ship is worth $1,685.5M, therefore it has monthly expenses of $23M... again, the income is an order of magnitude smaller than the required expenses.

Granted, both ships have gift shops, bars, etc... but I doubt those are enough to make up the difference in cost. There is also cargo space, but the cargo cost per ton is 1/10 that of the passenger rate and really doesn't make that significant a difference either.

I didn't do a similar full-calculation for a deep-space engine cost (i.e., non-FTL), but real quickly these also seem off. For the Prospero-Class ship, using the 1.5% for expenses, it would have to have an income of about $1,500 per passenger per day to break out even, which doesn't seem to match the ticket prices either... again, roughly a factor of x10

So, based on the above, I'm hoping someone who was part of the playtest can let me know what the full assumptions were. Am I missing something? Does it work better if I use the full detailed rules for all expenditures?

If I did indeed do everything right and there is a mistake to account for, should I be increasing the cost of the passenger tickets by an order of magnitude, or decreasing the "Fudging It" monthly expenses by an order of magnitude?

Thanks for the help