[Spaceships] Are spaceships unrealistically cheap?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

Spaceships is very abstract but the abstractions work very differently such that they're hard to compare. AFAICT Spaceships missiles don't use the guided/homing rules used in normal combat, so good missile sAcc and a high Artillery (Guided Missile) skill for the launching ship "stack" in a way that good drone AI Piloting skill fails to stack with any skills of characters on your carrier. This gives missiles an important edge that can't remotely be replicated with the rules for building spacecraft, and arguably justifies the higher price from a game-balance perspective if not from an in-story perspective.

Spaceships missiles pretty nearly act in accordance with the usual Guided weapon rules. The launcher doesn't have to continuously focus on guiding them for the entire flight time (in the version of the system where they have flight time), but other than that I can't think of significant divergences.