Carl Gleba wrote:devillin wrote:Braden, GMPhD wrote:This could end up being a rat hole where you just run around in circles, especially without a well developed system for ship creation. It would be nice to go into the makeup of various fleets and their purposes, but it wouldn't be particularly useful without at least neighborhood stats for the different classes of ships. It may be reasonable for you to do this, but there needs to be raw stats to backup the explanations.
It is impossible to create a system for starship creation for this setting. The biggest problem is that the established ships as seen in the current books were designed willy-nilly, with no formula or set of rules. Therefore, any new rules that I would create would have to allow players to build a Packmaster Carrier say.... and the numbers just don't jive.
While I was going to jump on the bandwagon and just ask for solid prices for starship items, seeing your comment just brought a thought to mind. Instead of trying to shoehorn the established ships into a set of rules and numbers, make your new system first. Sure, you may want the system to give results as close as possible to the existing ships, but that's not the goal. The goal is to make a working system. Once you have a working system, just go back and "errata" the old ships to fit the new system. Sure it may be a bit of work, but at least everything will fit and you have a solid base to do additional modifications on. I don't think anyone would have a problem if there were a couple of pages that list the new correct prices, weights, and volumes for the old ships.
That's a good call
Plus you can add a small blurb that previous ships were not built according to these rules. Sort of a disclaimer. Trying to make a set of rules around something that the authors took their best guess on is going to be near impossible. Just do your best and everyone will be happy.
Carl
In addition to Nekira’s discussion of profit margins and fidgewinkle’s talk about economies of scale and wholesale and retail, I’d also like to point out a couple of ways to allow for the willy-nilly-ness of the established ships.
There can be significant variation in the margin of a product depending on what components there are in it.
As a real world example, I am the lead buyer for an on-campus computer reseller. In addition to other brands, we sell Dell computers. There is no standard price for a Dell. And, the level of discount that I receive depends on what components are configured. An Optiplex GX620 Minitower with an Intel 3.4 GHz processor, with an 80GB hard drive bundled with a 1906 (19” flat panel display) receives a different discount overall than an Optiplex GX620 Small Form Factor computer with a 3.2 GHz processor bundled with a 1706 (17” flat panel), no matter what hard drive it comes with.
The minitower is going to bring the cost down due to economies of scale on the production level, but there’s a lot less margin on the 19” monitor, so that drives the price up. Our cost strikes balance of all the components. Then, it depends on if I buy 10 or 200. That also makes a big difference in the cost.
In other times, vendors also lowball a price on a product to basically buy the business. A few years ago, Adobe put the Academic price on Acrobat 7 Standard (or 8, I forget which) at a supremely low $59.00. Their goal was to have every one in Academia with a legal copy of the full version of Acrobat on their desktop. They figured they make it up on the sale of other products.
Apply the same principle to the existing ships in canon as a rationalization. So the ftl drives would normally have cost 30 million credits, except they had a deal on that line, so that if you had three phase canons installed, you got a 20% discount on the drive and received a rebate or credit on the back end for the navigation system.
I had a vendor present me today with a products line and if I ordered 3 skus of their product, I would get a 10% discount. If I ordered 4 skus, I got a 20% discount. Basically, by buying more, I paid less. Software licensing is like that sometimes too. Sometimes, it costs fewer dollars to buy 25 copies of software for a lab, than it does to buy the 22 that they need, because there is a unit price break at 25 copies.
Another way to rationalize the existing systems: Clearance! To use another computer analogy (hey, it’s what I know!), Once upon a time Apple sold iMacs in a variety of colors. There was Bondi Blue, then they branched out with a few other fruit colors. The third iteration of colors included two colors called “Blue Dalmation” and “Flower Power”
We figured Steve Jobs was reliving the 70s again. After a few months, you could get machines in these colors for substantively less than the other colors, even though the specs on the systems were exactly the same.
Short story long, maybe some of the canonical ships had some intrinsic minor flaw that drove the cost down. Someone made a bad call and thought that a pink Battleship 4000 Starblaster would inspire fear in the Kreeghor. Or the Hidemesecret Blockade Runner had sucky cupholders. I don’t know, it’s a rationalization, it doesn’t have to totally make sense. Then, follow devillin’s advice and make a working system that is consistent. Errata the rest. Or not, I’d just use the new rules and ignore all of the old stuff…Except for the advantage of my NPCs.
oh well. something to look foreward to 
