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Star Army

Star ArmyⓇ is a landmark of forum roleplaying. Opened in 2002, Star Army is like an internet clubhouse for people who love roleplaying, art, and worldbuilding. Anyone 18 or older may join for free. New members are welcome! Use the "Register" button below.

Note: This is a play-by-post RPG site. If you're looking for the tabletop miniatures wargame "5150: Star Army" instead, see Two Hour Wargames.

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  • 📅 January 2025 is YE 47.1 in the RP.

Star Army Roleplay Pricing standards and Guidelines

We're not looking at making a hard and fast rulr, but rather a guideline so that when someone goes to price their cheaply made ship, they have an idea as to what price range they should put it in.

As far as scaling and everything, as well as numberof manufacturers and scale of manufacturing, there really are only a dozen or so manufacturers of very large starships, and they aren't pumping them out instantaneously (we actually have guidelines about how fast ships can be built).
Also with the comparison to a freight train; even a single locomotive engine can cost millions of dollars. I'm not trying to say we need to make stuff that expensive but historically we've had a lot of stuff priced so ridiculously low that it makes little sense even with all of our advantages
 
If you're telling people that they have to price their starship in this arbitrary predetermined number range, or else, you just made a rule, not a guideline.
 
Doing it in the name of balance is fine , it's hanging the aegis of realism over it I was objecting to. Even doing it for no reason at all is fine with me.


And really, at Origin's production capability it's not even a locomotive (which also have few manufacturers now, so it was a bad example I was too late to edit), more like a Class 8 truck, even.
 
We're also going off topic; what I really wanted was for the people who actually make tech to come together and discuss an agreement about pricing ranges for certain types of objects, and Wes' Wiki page is actually a great start on that, but again, I would like a discussion about where and how these guidelines could and should be.

@Yuuki you actually hit the nail on the head with that last thing. I never was trying to make everything priced realistically to today's tech, it's more an idea of balancing things to make sense in the context of the setting, and also at least trying to pretend that SARP has a functional economy.

I've been using the caravan as an example because it's an enormous craft that I was originally guilty of pricing very low (i think the original price when i made it was only like 100,000 ks). I also want us to be able to avoid the issues of things like a 10m tall mecha costing more than a 100m starship.
 
It might only cost that to buy, but it costs A LOT to crew it, and 81 million KS to fully load with empty SSCC-Huges
 
While SARP's build times are frankly unrealistically low (And this probably should still be addressed somehow), leading to the appearance of super high production capacities, there's more to getting a ship up, running, and sold than just putting it together. But as Kai said, this is getting a little off topic.

What do we think needs to be more expensive? What do we think needs to be cheaper?
 
While SARP's build times are frankly unrealistically low

By what standard? Automated nanofabrication is very, very fast.
 
As best I can find, SARP's nanomachines can deconstruct at about 1 cubic foot per minute. Deconstruction would likely be a lot faster than actual construction, but this is besides the point.
 
And what if you have a cloud of nanomachines every cubic foot?
 
Things are vague enough about construction that we can justify pretty much anything if we try hard enough. We're a post-scarcity society that has had to be nerfed for various OOC reasons.

I'm more concerned about practicality. Yes, have some people earn their way to vessels, but make it at least possible within a reasonable timeframe for RP rather than expecting people to have to make payments for an IC/OOC decade. Or at least provide some lower-tier vessels for people to have a migration path to. The Hauler (a 9,000 KS shipping container with engines + extra for modules) is a starting point people may eventually outgrow and upgrade from, for example.
 
Demonstrating the folly of appeal to realism.
 
Must we do this every time someone takes a single half step towards anything that falls into the category of realism? This outright feral attacking of anyone any idea that so much as broaches a topic that doesn't fly by the seat of its pants or go off the rails?
 
If you have FTL you are in the realm of sheer fantasy. Period. This is scientific fact.
 
My stance is caution of valuing realism to the detriment of function, which doesn't really seem to have been focused on. Realism has its place, but I'm still not sure what is being proposed that Wes hasn't already enacted. Fleshing out the price index would do pretty much what is proposed.

I'm also not seeing feral attacking. I'm seeing a somewhat heated debate that is devolving, yes, but accusing the other party of 'feral attacks' and attributing it to attacking you rather than debating your stance isn't going to win the argument. It'll just derail it more.
 
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Similarly, one should also be mindful of focusing too much on novelty and pure convenience at the expense of consistency and believability. We shouldn't be afraid to look at SARP and ask where we can improve and revise to create a more cohesive universe, which is what this thread is about. So once again, we should focus on what actually needs changing. What is too cheap? What is too expensive?
 
Everything huge is probably too cheap. Any ship > 200-300m probably needs looked at. Somewhere I saw a 100,000 KS ground vehicle.
 
I like the idea of small, functional, cheap vessels that can hold a relatively small amount of cargo but get a player 'started' after some time in the setting. They can use those ships as a stepping stone to earn more money practically for larger vessels. So keep the entry low, but make the larger vessels perhaps more expensive.

That being said, not too many characters have tens of millions of KS to dedicate to a single large ship even after a decade of RP. I worry we'll overcompensate and go too far the other way with this in the name of realism. If we went that route, we could go from "we can make matter and laborers, this costs little" to "this is the mass of an aircraft carrier and is more advanced, so it costs the same or more" and everything in between.
 
I don't think we're likely to see any civilian vessel go over 5 million, and those would be massive ships, but ships probably shouldn't be our only focus. Kai and I have, for a while, been back and forth on how mecha are priced, and I still don't know if they cost too little or too much. I suppose other ground vehicles like tanks and trucks might also need a look, though most individual players won't be buying the former.
 
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