Playable approximation for Buying a Spaceship

[panton41]

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.

For Star Wars specifically there's Other Games that list prices that you could simply use. Another idea is to define a few of the iconic ships in Spaceships, check the Other Game prices and find a divisor to make ship prices fit.

More generically, decide how much you want ships to cost, find a divisor to make the Spaceships price come into line with it, then apply consistently... or not and make certain types of vessel inexplicably cost significantly more than others despite similar specs. That might mean a SM+8 Hercules-class tramp freighter costs $50,000 while the SM+8 Plenty-class Fleet Replenishment craft somehow costs $7.6 million with minimal difference in specs.

In my tramp freighter game I tend to reduce the price of the ship, then make the player buy it with the options in SS2. For military games I assume it's part and parcel with the player's Rank and role in the game (fighter pilots or "Honor Harrington" style games) or simply a backdrop (Star Trek style game where PCs are senior officers, but not the captain).