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An android in heavy armor strides into the auditorium, not bothering to touch the ground. Security guards trying to intercept them receive painful electric shocks and decide to let this one go.
"Hello everyone. I'm Bailey, I've been asked to address you on the subject of Accounting For Heroes. As you know, the universe needs saving from any number of lunatic cultists, and the Society has only so many funds to kit out its agents. Using your credits wisely is key to success and the survival of life as we know it."
I wanted to see how different SFS is from regular SF when it comes to WBL, and what conclusions we can draw from that. In all analyses, I'm assuming a 4-player party.
First, I figured out how many encounters it takes to go up a level. It turns out, about 13 encounters with [CR = your level] enemies. Consistently along all levels.
Next, I calculate the loot you'd earn as a 25% share from 13 of such encounters. (A monster worth twice as much XP also tends to be worth about twice as much GP; not precisely but close enough.) Then add those in packs of two levels, so they're comparable to SFS tiers. As it turns out, the difference is less than 5%, so from here on out we can assume that SF and SFS run on a fairly similar wealth model. Notable difference: the CRB advises not to give big pure cash payouts because it encourages players to put all their money into one above-level item. SFS only gives pure cash payouts though.
Having established that the amount of money you earn in SFS is about the same as in a by-the-book home game, let's look at how much money that actually is.
First, let's check another assumption in the CRB: that characters built above level 1 shouldn't spend more than 25% of their wealth on weapons, and no more than 25% on armor and protective devices. I think this is copy-paste nonsense from Pathfinder where you were encouraged not to spend too much of your wealth on a single magic item; but a typical character had a lot of magic items. Starfinder restricts you to two worn items, and anyway, by far the most expensive things in the game are armor and weapons. I'm just going to ignore this 25% advice.
Next, lets look at how much money you earn ("lifetime earnings") vs. how much you're expected to have (WBL). When you reach level 3, WBL expects you to have 4000 credits worth of stuff; but you started with 1000 credits and are supposed to have earned about 4078 credits in SF or 4320 in SFS. That puts you about 1000 credits (20%) above target. I guess the expectation is that you lose this money somehow:
* Bribes and taxes
* Spellcasting fees
* Replacement body parts
* Expended consumables
* Obsolete lower-level weapons and armor sold back for only 10%.
Typically, the last two categories will make up the bulk of expenses. If you take the "target WBL" of a new tier (for example, the amount of money you should have at becoming level 3), and subtract that from [the WBL at the start of the previous tier + the money earned during that tier], you get the surplus earnings in that tier. Now if you divide that surplus by the WBL at previous tier, you get the fraction of money that was supposed to evaporate.
Doing some of that math, it turns out that the obsolescence rate per tier should be about 40-50%.
Put plainly: you're expected to no longer have/use 50% of the stuff you had last tier.
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That's the idea anyway. I'm not so sure it works that way in practice. In practice, people aren't sure on when to upgrade, or don't think upgrading a weapon is quite necessary yet. Or they buy things with a longer shelf life, like armor upgrades, instead of things that have a short shelf life, like armor.
GM babies are another thing. GM babies accumulate all the income without wasting money on stuff that becomes obsolete. So when you decant them at higher level, they're about 20-50% over WBL.
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What kind of practical lessons can we draw from this?
* If something doesn't need replacing right now, consider postponing it for a few levels and skipping ahead to the next generation of the item
* Mistakes you make in purchasing should fade out in about 2-4 levels.
* The difference between home games and SFS in wealth aren't as big as I thought, assuming that the GM uses the treasure rules well. If he's giving you items counted as full value which you don't use, then you're behind SFS. It's hard to beat the perfect flexibility of cash.
* It's okay to use consumables. It's in the budget.
* If you think about it, an armor that only has a shelf life of a couple of levels is also a kind of consumable.