Affording a spaceship?

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

In my old school experience random character generation just lead to people having binders full of rolls to show the GM until they rolled up the character they wanted.

Heh.

I trust my players not to cheat, but I like to be present at character generation to answer questions and offer advice.

3D6 in order

FTW

[Anthony]

One way of going about all this is the reverse: rather than trying to come up with an appropriate cost for a ship, decide what you want freight and passenger rates to be, and back-compute from that to what ships should cost. If you want PCs to reasonably engage in bulk transport (grain, etc), it should run $100/ton or lower (in relative modern terms, that's maybe enough to transport goods 10,000 miles by ship, 3,000 miles by rail, 400 miles by truck, or 160 miles by air), higher prices indicate a more restricted range of goods available and appropriate to be carried by PCs (I recommend higher rates, but not too much higher rates). As a really crude estimate, a ship might be worth (voyages per month) * (revenues per voyage - operating costs per voyage) * 100.

Note that, if you want a ship that's not massively valuable, nothing wrong with making it small. A SM +6 ship will fit a group of PCs and should cost no more than a few million dollars.

[Refplace]

Ok, All this talk made me start to doubt the books and so I ran the numbers.
I am actually fairly satisfied with the results.
Typical starships are affordable on suitable budgets and there are even built in ways to lower the cost that are suited to most campaigns and likely to increase enjoyment and adventure hooks.


Costs of various ships
Outlander Class Deep Space Frieghter (TL10) 46.2M
Dark Horse Class FreeTrader (TL11) 94.3M
Maltese Falcon Class Yacht (TL10) 52.2M
Dart Class Interstellar Speedster (TL11) 101M

Conditional Ownership -1% per -5% of Wealth up to -20% for all your wealth being conditional.
Cheap Ship reduces cost by half but maintence is 1% of value per month.
Very Cheap 1/5 cost but maintence is 1% of value per week.
Debt owe 1% starting wealth up to 20% [/level]

Starting Wealth/Comfortable [10]/Wealthy [20]/Very Wealthy [30]/ Filthy Rich [50]/MM [75]
TL9 $30K/60K/150K/600K/3M/30M
TL10 50K/100k/250K/1M/5M/50M
TL11 75K/150K/375K/1.5M/75M/750M

At TL 10 you can have an Outlander outright for 75 points and pretty much own a Maltese.
Taking Debt can lower this to 55 points, 60 points at full Conditional Ownership or 40 points for a debt and conditional ownership.
Taking cheap ship does not really reduce the needed points unless you fiddle with fractional levels of multi millionaire.

At TL 11 you can have the Dark Horse or the Dart for the same CP cost.
While these are not battleships they are the right type for most Space Opera campaigns where the party has a single ship which is considered a major asset of one of the characters but the character is still viable.
Space Opera would likely be 250 point characters and this is affordable even on a 100 point budget.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Heh.

I trust my players not to cheat, but I like to be present at character generation to answer questions and offer advice.

3D6 in order

FTW

Getting the character you want is cheating? That's just one of the many reasons why I loathe random character creation.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Getting the character you want is cheating?

Whether something is cheating or not depends on what the rules are, and only on that.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Refplace

Ok, All this talk made me start to doubt the books and so I ran the numbers.

On the other hand, you can have ship provided by a Patron for a lot less pts.

At TL 10 the base Patron need only be an organization with a net worth of $50 million to 499Million. That's 10 pts. This can be a simple limited liability corporation that owns this single ship or a small fleet of ships.

Then the Patron provides Minimal Intervention, mostly in terms of preserving the value of their asset (the ship) rather than helping the PCs generally. That cuts the price in half.

Then the PCs will very seldom be in a position to call on the corporation for aid. 6 or less might be an exaggeration. That cuts cost in half again and we're down to 3 pts (you round up).

The ship doesn't belong to the PCs so this isn't "Patron provides equipment". If it was we'd be at a 20pt base.

After that you factor in the legal Duty the PCs have to the Patron/corp while they have possession of the ship. It won't be hazardous. You're not required to die for your employer in a simple business arrangement. You do have to conserve the corp's assets (the ship) generally and try very hard to make money as your contract calls for. The PCs do maintenance and pay themselves out of the profits and send the rest back to homebase.

That's +5 pts for the non-hazardous but the PCs will be "on duty" a lot of the time so that's either 12 or less for -5p-ts or 15 or less for -10.

So you could get a ship for as little as -7 pts. A Patron that would just _give_ the PCs a ship with no strings attached is potentially only 5 pts. It's having the Patron be someone who is willing and able to come and rescue the PCs that costs a lot.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

On the other hand, you can have ship provided by a Patron for a lot less pts.

That is true, and Ally might also be cheaper but I was just rying to addres the wealth and PCs own the ship part of the thread.
I feel it is doable and not for an unreasonable amount of points.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Brett

Whether something is cheating or not depends on what the rules are, and only on that.

The rules are defined by the people playing, not a book. But this is an off topic drift I found odd.

[Anthony]

So, a nearly minimal spaceship, at TL 10, is:
SM +6 (100 tons) streamlined hull; 3 Alloy Armor (DDR 2 per segment), 10 Cargo, 1 Control Room, 3 Habitat (3 staterooms; can hold 6 people), 1 Fission Power Plant, 1 Hot Reactionless Engine (1G), 1 Stardrive, Artificial Gravity, Gravitic Compensators, Wings. $3.05M. At TL 11 you can get rid of the wings.

[cosmicfish]

I think what is really needed is an expansion of Trading Points for Money (and someone, I forget who, has already done this) that increases the same way Wealth does, such that someone could spend, say, 20-30 cp and have enough starting cash to purchase a ship without being saddled with extra narratives that may or may not fit the character (like Wealth, Debt, Conditional Ownership, or such).

I have seen a lot of situations where I wanted someone to have free and clear ownership of some very valuable item (ship, magic sword, family heirloom) of pile o' cash (Won the lottery! or Aunt Millie died and left me millions!) and yet not necessarily have the Status or job prospects that come with Wealth. Conversely, I can also picture the character who has just gotten the dream job or such that provides them with a high income but little initial money or Status.

Ideally, I would purchase Starting Wealth, Status, Independent Income, and Dependent Income all separately. Status can be adjusted, Independent Income can be obtained or effectively drained, but Starting Wealth and Dependent Income are inexorably linked.