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I would imagine that Abadarcorp makes a tidy profit on its starship insurance business...Yeah, probably. It's a bit difficult to prove a claim exists in the Vast reaches of the Drift. OTOH, it's impossible to collect premiums from customers that have exploded. ;)Insurance pays the owners of the ship and/or the ship's cargo for their loss of investment (e.g. if the ship never arrives at its destination).
I would imagine that, as in the real world, the vast majority of ships are owned by corporations (or extremely wealthy individuals) that don't go on the journey, but profit from the journey's success.
Hmmm, how does that work? Never really thought about it before. I know in the old sailing ship merchant voyage days, ventures were insured. That's pretty much where the whole modern insurance business started.
Back then, a lost ship usually just disappeared, never to be heard from again. But they could also be delayed, sometimes for long periods. When did they pay off and how?
From this Wikipedia page:
"Overdue insurance: This is a form of insurance now largely obsolete due to advances in communications. It was an early form of reinsurance and was bought by an insurer when a ship was late at arriving at her destination port and there was a risk that she might have been lost (but, equally, might simply have been delayed). The overdue insurance of the Titanic was famously underwritten on the doorstep of Lloyd's."
Overdue insurance was apparently bought when a ship is late in case it is actually lost. So far I have not been able to find out more details about it beyond the Titanic case (which was legally and morally dubious given that many people already knew that the ship had sunk and not merely been delayed).
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I would imagine that Abadarcorp makes a tidy profit on its starship insurance business...Yeah, probably. It's a bit difficult to prove a claim exists in the Vast reaches of the Drift. OTOH, it's impossible to collect premiums from customers that have exploded. ;)Insurance pays the owners of the ship and/or the ship's cargo for their loss of investment (e.g. if the ship never arrives at its destination).
I would imagine that, as in the real world, the vast majority of ships are owned by corporations (or extremely wealthy individuals) that don't go on the journey, but profit from the journey's success.
Hmmm, how does that work? Never really thought about it before. I know in the old sailing ship merchant voyage days, ventures were insured. That's pretty much where the whole modern insurance business started.
Back then, a lost ship usually just disappeared, never to be heard from again. But they could also be delayed, sometimes for long periods. When did they pay off and how?
you'd have to try to prove that the ship was lost. a lot of owners didn't get paid.
Combining what I read about overdue insurance, the interest of insurance companies in salvaging wrecked ships and/or recovering their contents, and some logical extrapolation, there could be an insurance policy set up for a ship that is about to head off on an exploration voyage into the unknown. The insurance company would pay off the owners of the ship if it doesn't return by a specified date.
The catch to this policy would be that, once the policy is paid off, the insurance company becomes the owner of the ship, meaning that they can claim that ship and its contents in the event that the ship merely returns late rather than actually being a complete loss.