Star Army Roleplay Pricing standards and Guidelines

I priced a loaded-down, fully-upgraded Impulse at 60k, and I feel like that is right on the money.

That's more expensive than the majority of mecha and ground vehicles made by ANYONE. Of course, that might be the price of miniaturization.

The base model is less than a third of that.

Cost of a base Mindy 4 is 50,000 KS, it's just not available for sale save to the military. <20K is in alignment for a civilian Power Armor. Miniaturization plays a role, I'm sure.

Is the fully loaded Impulse worth more than the price of a base Mindy? That's another question entirely, but it's also a different market niche with different accessibility and buyers.

That said, I could see the Princess at 40k being about right, if on the far low end of "about right", since it is just some luxurious stuff in a relatively small ship using common civilian tech. It's a S600 Maybach, not a Globalyst G6. Performance upgrades are always more than the base price because of diminishing ROI, so getting every last bit of performance out of an Impulse is a lot more, even if its tiny. And again, lower production runs, less customer base, etc. compound miniaturization.

Since we're a soft sci-fi setting I think "realism" for SARP is basically "truthiness" which is an opinion that something feels real. That is going to vary from person to person and as detailed as Star Army is, we're not THAT detailed that we're going to make a spreadsheet of all the manhours it takes to add 80 kilometers of network cable to a ship and so on, and come up with a "high realism" price guide.

The best thing we can do to make Star Army feel real is simple: be consistent about things in the universe. And what we do have is year and years of starships and items that people have added to the wiki with prices. What we need to do is add examples of those things to the price guide, figure out the typical prices for the stuff in Star Army, and then we'll be in a position to start bringing the really weird/low prices in line with the typical ones on a case-by-case basis. Once the price guide is completed, creators (and their reviewers) will have a baseline for what their stuff should probably cost. They can then price their stuff based on that and the price-affecting factors of their item (quality level, mass production, etc). For example if we know that most shuttles in SARP cost 50k then we can try to price future ones around the range. It's very straightforward, we just need to do the legwork of getting the price guide completed with good examples from the wiki.

I can definitely start adding Origin items to the pricing guide, specifically in the top end as that seems to need the most and that's really where the most issues crop up; a lot of the everyday stuff that the majority of characters will come into possession of; IE Firearms, ground vehicles, and personal equipment; is already priced quite reasonably given the tech and the setting.

I often have trouble deciding what I should price stuff as - fortunately I've been able to avoid having to do it so far, but I'm starting to get close! I like the idea of tiers or bands for pricing as a general guideline, since it'll be useful to me. I'm glad to see others feel the same way.

I saw mention of a 100,000ks ground vehicle, that is likely mine: the URSA Armoured Transport

thats all i had to say

Thanks to @Kai and @Andrew for adding some stuff to the list. The guide is already much nicer now that the various tiers all have examples and a description of the things that usually fall in that price range.

One thing I noticed is that these are mostly for civilian or civilian market goods, which may be why so many of those ship prices are on the lower end. Should we have a separate list or section of the list for military grade ships?

I also noticed that the list jumps straight from medium sized ships to huge ships, and that those stations are all in the hundreds of millions. It feels like we should have a few categories in between there.

One thought I had was that perhaps when it comes to ships and vehicles, you could organize them roughly by tier, "Light ground vehicles, medium ground vehicles, heavy ground vehicles" etc., and use the tier 'descriptions' verbatim for ships themselves, though that's just a thought.

Something I would like to give input here:

I think we should keep in mind as this pricing guide is fleshed out. We need to keep things reasonable as well. Part of the thrill and excitement of Star Army is to be able to use all this marvelous stuff we've all poured ourselves into making. With that thought, it is also part of what attracts people to the Star Army. The ability to dive into this science fiction universe; command and create and to strike out on their own if they want to. It should be reminded that this is a "guideline", not a "rule". We can't put things so far out of reach that this becomes a situation of "Well my character will never be able to do what I want them to because I'll never have enough KS to do it." It is great that we're getting a handle on prices, its good we're trying to quantify what an allotted amount of KS gets. We just need to make sure we don't make things too unobtainable or price ourselves out of our own markets. Players first, Plots second, Realism as long as it doesn't hurt the universe we've made or the interest levels of our player base or our ability to bring new people in.

When it comes to starships, most players are likely to be looking at personal craft on the lower end of things, something one could conceivably salvage or buy off of their character's salaries or savings from pre-RP. When it comes to large ships, GMs are the ones likely to be using those, and as a GM you can just come up with ways to get your hands on them.