[Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

For fighters, I won't do a full build, but it only takes one jet engine to get 1G of acceleration, and the heavier fighters in Pyramid #3/53 are only ~30 tons (SM+5 on the Spaceships scale). An SM+5 jet engine is $300K, compared to the multi-million dollar price tag for the fighters in Pyramid.

Here in the real world the expensive part of military vehicles is never the engine, and rarely the weapons, it's the electronics. An engine being 10% of the cost actually seems completely reasonable to me. It's certainly possible Spaceships underprices the electronics though.

So Spaceships understates the price by at least a factor of three.

If it actually hits to within a factor of 3, that's essentially a perfect match. Prices of stuff does after all vary by a factor of two all the time (sold at 100% markup, or 50% off) in reality, so no game price can possible be more "accurate" than that. But if it bothers you as a GM, you can always raise the price.