Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by kdtipa

I'm not sure I agree that owning a space ship would be "common".

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.

[SCAR]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

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.

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.

[aesir23]

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.

[schmeelke]

Originally Posted by SCAR

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?

"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!)

[SCAR]

Originally Posted by schmeelke

"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!)

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

[ericbsmith]

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.

[panton41]

Originally Posted by ericbsmith

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.

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."

[thrash]

Originally Posted by SCAR

It is not his ship though, Simon did not spend his millions buying the ship.

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.

[SCAR]

Originally Posted by thrash

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.

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.

[munin]

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.