Why are starships so inexpensive?

[Nashoba]

As I have been working on some of my civilian designs I realized that our starship pricing is way too low.

When you look at the prices we have they border on silly for what they can do.

Using one of the Original GE ships the Ge-F6-1A - Light Freighter
Sells for 25,000 KS new

It comes with 4 SDR laser turrets and 1 Plasma turret all SDR.

Price wise, I would pay the same if I purchased 29 Type 33 NSP's at 850 KS

Or I could buy 100 Personal Infantry Machine Pistol (PIMP) from Paragon

Or 5 low end Origin Cub Hover car Sedans.

Shouldn't our starships be priced a bit higher? perhaps in the hundreds of thousands vs tens of thousands? And well for much larger ships possibly in the millions?

Thoughts? It doesn't make sense 'Economically' for starships to be so cheap, I suspect it was done in part to make getting a ship easier, but getting a starship should not be the equivalent of buying a sports car.

 

[Fred]

Last I heard, Mindy power armors were priced 50 000 KS by WickedArms. The freighter you pointed out is half-the-price. Heh. ^_^;

 

[Kai]

I recently went adjusting prices on Origin starships, because I realized the same thing.

However, I believe the reason for the ridiculously low pricing of starships is due to the desire for them to be within reach of a PC's purchasing power.

 

[Nashoba]

Possibly but it doesn't make sense... bump them up a bit, and if a PC wants to get one, there are supposed to be banks, we could easily put rules in place, PC has to put up 10% of the ship and then pay a mortgage to pay of the remainder. That would actually serve to inspire a PC to use their ship to make money so they can keep their new acquisition.

 

[Kai]

That would make much more sense. All i'm going by is what I was told when I joined, and, as I said, Origin's ships DO cost in the hundreds of thousands or more, but then again they're new...


Of course, for a RL example, just today I saw a Million dollar airplane (An older jetliner) for sale for roughly $150,000.

We /could/ set up a pricing scale that starts with the new MSRP of the ship and degrades with the craft's age/condition by a fixed percentage?

 

[Doshii Jun]

Who is going to run the bank, OOCly?

How is the bank going to collect their funds, ICly?

How will interest rates be set, OOCly or ICly?

If a player's PC is in a plot and unable to pay the bank's terms, what then?

Worse yet, what happens when other banks enter the game and undercut the first bank?

Banks could add a huge layer of complication. The easier solution is to make the KS worth what it should be worth — a lot.

That means it's not the starships that are worth very little, but other smaller items that are worth too much. I.e., a Type 29 NSP should be 50 KS.

That means that starting funds should be closer to 300 KS instead of 3,000.

Basically, make the KS like a 1890s-era dollar. Pennies actually mean something, etc.

 

[MissingNo]

A starship can be a home to someone. So, why not treat it like a house? If it's freighter size, or anything with quarters for at least one person, price it like a comparably-sized home, but with engines. You've got single-room trailer houses for one price and five-bedroom homes for another, use those as baselines.

As for the bank idea: Be vague. We don't need to define our economics to that extent.

If your character has a steady source of income, like a salaried job (like a military post) where their livelihood doesn't rely on their acquisition of, say, salvage, then you can assume your character makes so much. Set a time reasonable for their rate of pay and say "when" at the point that it would be reasonable that they could have paid off their ship.

Everyone else can make up an interest rate between 3 and 6% and call it good, making "payments" out of what they earn. That coincidentally lends itself perfectly to a 6-sided die roll. The bank making the mortgage on the ship doesn't need to be named, staffed, or put into the wiki, the idea that a bank (or someone willing to loan money for the ship) has to be there, nothing more.

 

[Nashoba]

Exactly, Yamatai actually has a bank. National Bank of Yamtai

This doesn't have to be complicated, but it would be more realistic, merchants would be concerned about a) making payments to pay off the ship,b) its a goal to achieve paying off the mortgage and actually owning the ship, c) not carelessly risking their ship since its a sizeable investment and if it gets destroyed they are out of their money.

As for defaulting, that has roleplay potential. From either side, a plot could be a ship / team whose job is to recover defaulted ships, or a ship that is defaulted trying to avoid the repossessors.

 

[Fred]

Okay, firstly, the KS is supposed to be worth the same as the U.S. dollar. As far as base value of that currency goes, I think it should stay the same. It allows our members to dig up anything on the internet as a price reference and then use it in the roleplay (like, say, you go and buy an office chair).

Also, bear in mind that the low prices may be related to the situation of plenty that Yamatai 'enjoyed'. Basically, the technology they have is suppose to provide with infinite energy, which they can convert into matter. End result, they could have anything they wanted at any time. That kind of cheapens things you'd consider rare.

Still, I never really did like the concept of infinite energy-to-matter conversion resources. I can relate with wanting to increase the price. Perhaps the current listed values for ship is actually equal to 10% of their actual value for conversion?

 

[Wes]

I'm okay with an x10 adjustment to current numbers.

 

[Kai]

Does that apply to /all/ ships?

What about ships that are already priced in a more reasonable manner?

As Origin's ships are currently priced, anything more than a 2x increase would make them grossly overpriced, and even that makes them priced high enough as to have almost no way of competing with other ships in the same class.

 

[Cora]

I've always thought ships being as cheap as they are was because Yamatai had unlimited resources. SO recouping on a ship wouldn't be so mind numbingly expensive as it would be in reality. Why sell at cost when the materials aren't of any monetary consequence?

 

[Kyle]

I agree that there does need to be an increase in the cost, but ten times that might be a bit too much. Two or three times the current 'should' be alright.

 

[Fred]

I think even with up to a x10 conversion, we're not running anywhere close to the kind of expensive we face in the real world. The problem lies not in conversion, though, but in people just not having any benchmark to price things at.

The real world has plenty of examples, though, that we could base ourselves on. Perhaps not in sheer value - but perhaps proportional value?

...

If the USD is the basis for the rough value of the KS, the F-22 Raptor military fightercraft is 150 million US dollars per unit (not counting fuel, maintenance and other expenses).

By contrast, the Cessna 750 (Citation X) business plane costs 22 million US dollars.

Okay, so military fighter which may equate our in-setting starfighter, and a passenger transport which could be roughly like a large shuttlecraft. What else? Spaceships?

The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier was priced 4.5 billion USD per unit. It's dimensions go around 332x76x11m, I think. That's roughly analogous to our medium-sized ships.

The fairly new Zumwalt-class destroyer is expected to cost 2.5 billion USD beyond the first built. This one's size seems to be around 180x25x8m; that's more around our lighter vessels.

...

Once we define expectations on pricing, people will be able to provide us better figures on their submissions, I think.

 

[Sigma]

But considering the vast amount of resources and (assumedly) the healthy SARP economy, the price of construction materials is most likely going to be lower than what it costs to build US warships. Further, automated construction reduces the need for a large labor force thus also reducing the cost.

One issue is that the money has the same equivalency in real life with none of the same economic factors. Yamatai and Nepleslia have not been trying to figure out how to pay for the war. They just do because economics in role play is really really difficult and boring.

So, unless we add an approved universal system for economics, we'll never be really able to get things to "match" their RL counterparts. A space shuttle today would cost far more than a space shuttle in Yamatai since today, they're hard to make and very little funding is going into space travel. In Yamatai, you NEED shuttles so they can obviously build them better, faster and cheaper.

Just like a car bought in the 1930s is not going to cost the same in terms of per capita as a car bought today.

 

[Fred]

Granted, but as I mentioned, I did not see the interest being matching real world values so much as setting a benchmark for us to use, and one that would make more sense for being proportional (few to no power armor costing less than a starship, for example).

0 022 000 000 transport
0 150 000 000 fightercraft
2 500 000 000 destroyer
4 500 000 000 carrier

In my above examples, the fightercraft is 7 times more expensive than the civilian transport. The destroyer is almost 17 times more expensive than the fightercraft, and the cruiser-sized ship (the carrier) almost twice as expensive as the destroyer.

We could simplify it. What I see above are multiplier values we can use with a base price. Shuttlepods and expensive power armor could sit around x1, fightercraft around x5, destroyers around x15 and cruisers around x30. If that base value is around 50 000 KS, then you get a benchmark for the prices.

0 050 000 KS Power armor and small shuttle
0 250 000 KS fightercraft and larger mecha
0 750 000 KS Size 2 (small) ship
1 500 000 KS Size 3 (medium) ship

(I guess Size 1 ships could sit at 500 000 KS *shrugs*)

Then you can play inbetween those values. A Mindy may be worth 40 000 KS due to its high performance and miniaturization but they saved cost by going for durandium armor - additional yamataium armor and the modules could later add to that price. Whereas the Daisy armor is made with Yama-dura armor, with battery pack, only sublight propulsion, less modularity and such could sit around the 30 000 KS.

 

[Gabriel]

A secondary is that, once you set the base-line price for a ship then you can have any available upgrades listed on the ship's page (or just make sure that every ship component has a cost). That way, if I want to by myself a salvaging ship, but also want to upgrade the engines and the computer system, I can do that and have a definite price set.


Ultimately, I agree that there needs to be a price increase. As it stands, average people can buy really expensive equipment. For example, one of my characters, Ramiro, has saved up around 35,000 KS for just under 3 years of service. Currently he could purchase and upgrade a brand new light freighter, paying the entire thing up front, and still have money left over. Personally, I don't think it is reasonable to say that every 3rd year enlisted should be able to purchase equipment like that.

With Fred's idea (which I completely support) things make more sense. A soldier would save up for all four years and go purchase a brand new shuttle, with little to no debt. In the same vain, if someone saved for a year (let's say 10,000 KS) and wanted to purchase a shuttle they could pay of 10,000 KS of it and at around 400 KS a month (just under half the wages, 4800 KS per year) it would take roughly ten years to pay off the debt, which is moderately comparable to a real-world example of an expensive car.

 

[Nashoba]

We could have a starting value for each class of things,

Power Armor would be a class
Shuttles and Fighters would be a class
Starships would be a class

And to help differentiate we could use the current tech delineation we have for the damage system to make a difference between base craft from different manufacturers

Standard 80% of base cost
Advanced 100% of base cost
Very Advanced 120% of base cost

This is just an example, given that a ship built by a Very Advanced facility is going to be higher quality and use higher end materials and components.

 

[Wes]

We could base base prices on DR stats perhaps.

 

[MissingNo]

Given how much DR is a "guideline", how it has already been changed a couple times, and that it is debated nearly constantly, I wouldn't recommend it.

Maybe the structure points, since that's remained fairly constant and it's what DR is based on anyway?