What are your ideas for selling or buying a starship?

[Dread Pirate Fluffy Cuddles]

Without simply saying you exchange the found ship for upgrades for your main ship, how would YOU go about selling it for credits the group wants to use to buy better gear or misc things? What are they worth?

[Porridge]

Qua GM, concerned with what would work well, game-play-wise: it's tricky, because the prices you want to disincentivize buying up are much higher than the prices you want to disincentivize capturing and selling every ship you come across.

Anyway, looking through the tables, valuing ships at around 10,000 credits per BP feels about right, coupled with a "you get 1% of the value selling ships" rule for selling quickly. (Maybe it's a lot harder to fence/find buyers for big expensive items like ships?)

And I'd impose an equipment-tier style limitation on how many BP of upgrades they can put into their ship (given the contacts and connections they've managed to build up so far); with something like a limit of tier+1 at most cities and tier+2 at major ones.

So you could sell ships for 100 credits/BP (with a further discount if damaged), a value small enough to disincentive doing it all the time.

And you could further upgrade your ship beyond your tier amount of BP (up to tier+1 or tier+2) by paying 10,000 credits per BP, which is expensive enough to disincentive getting a ship way better than the opposition you'll typically face.

[Dread Pirate Fluffy Cuddles]

I actually like that. The BP/Credit route I think is what I'll go with. Thanks, makes sense.

[Shockra]

That can be a tricky subject. If the ship they're selling is too valuable, the group can potentially gain gear more powerful than what they should have for their level. But keep in mind that most sold items are worth 10% of their purchase price. Plus, the ship could be damaged or out-of-date, in which case a buyer would offer far less. Think used cars in our world; no one in their right mind would pay $20,000 for a used car.

The rules in the game offer possible options for why a group can't sell a starship, like if it's stolen or lent by a major company. But I'm guessing that you're talking about if the group finds a second ship and wants to sell it. In that case, it can count as treasure in an adventure. Don't give the group too much for it, though, or a power surge could occur. Think of reasons why the ship might not be worth as much.

[Dread Pirate Fluffy Cuddles]

Yea I could really see them getting over powered. Players are creative. I just think it's gonna happen and I want to cross this bridge now rather than later. Just in case.

[Porridge]

A better answer than my earlier one: You want a ship of tier X to sell for about the amount a CR X encounter gives you (table 11-4). There is no clean credit/BP conversion here, though, since the rate at which BP scale by level (table 9-1) doesn't line up with the rate at which the value of ships should scale (table 11-4). So that suggests the you need to assess ship value by *tier*, not BP.

So to make things line up with the suggested guidelines in the CRB, you'd need to do something like the following:

--You can sell a tier X ship for the amount given for a CR X encounter on table 11-4.

--You can buy a tier X ship for 10 times what you can sell it for (given the usual "you can sell for 10%" rule).

--You can upgrade a ship from tier X to tier Y (gaining that much more BP to spend on upgrades) for a cost equal to the difference between the cost of buying a ship of tier X and buying a ship of tier Y.

[LeeSw]

Well they need a broker, who takes a cut.
Faster they want to sell the less they get.

Things like that as well.

Then there are taxes, and fees, everyone will want a cut.

[mdt]

If I run Starfinder (not sure yet, the more I look it over, the less jazzed I am about it), I plan on making the '10%' make more sense by stating that all tech is biocoded to the purchaser, so nobody else can ever use it. You can only recycle it by dropping it in a nano-factory (and the nano-factories are under major guard to keep people from stealing them!). Then you basically get 10% of the value of the item as salvage.

So you don't really sell the ship, you drop it in an orbital nano-factory intake and it reduces it to raw materials. So there's no issues with it. When you upgrade a ship, you pay for the upgrades, and launch it into the nano-factory doing the upgrades. The nano-factory spits out a new ship on the other side, using your raw materials plus the additional changes.

It's the only way I can get the economy in Starfinder to not give me a major headache.

[JacobCaster]

Taking a little inspiration from Warhammer 40k, Traveller, and Mech Warrior I like the idea that ships and their components are a currency or economy all their own. Most ships are not owned outright by the people who operate and use it. Raise the suggested price to around $100,000 per BP. Ships and components are usually used. Higher level components or ships are quests in themselves.

I would use the BP per level chart as a guideline for what sponsoring organizations are willing to provide for experienced crews and agents. It also explains a complete refit for a ship since it would actually be a requisition. An area might be reasonably well-scouted but there are hostile forces that a dedicated combat ship would be better suited for.

I would add ship level to BP of the frame when calculating the cost and use the level as a limit on how much the frame can handle.

[EC Gamer Guy]

Spoken like a guy who has never sold anything at GameStop or HalfPrice Books where 10 cents on the dollar would be a good day.

mdt wrote:

If I run Starfinder (not sure yet, the more I look it over, the less jazzed I am about it), I plan on making the '10%' make more sense by stating that all tech is biocoded to the purchaser, so nobody else can ever use it. You can only recycle it by dropping it in a nano-factory (and the nano-factories are under major guard to keep people from stealing them!). Then you basically get 10% of the value of the item as salvage.

So you don't really sell the ship, you drop it in an orbital nano-factory intake and it reduces it to raw materials. So there's no issues with it. When you upgrade a ship, you pay for the upgrades, and launch it into the nano-factory doing the upgrades. The nano-factory spits out a new ship on the other side, using your raw materials plus the additional changes.

It's the only way I can get the economy in Starfinder to not give me a major headache.

[The Mad Comrade]

Based on the repair costs per hull point at the player-scale of starships, 2,500 credits per BP seems about right when multiplied by tier.

A 55 BP tier 1 starship is cheap in all ways, costing a paltry 137,500 credits. The costs per-ship at this tier and below explain the proliferation of such ships throughout known space.

A 115 BP tier 4 starship rings up at 1,150,000 credits.

A 1,000 BP tier 20 starship commands the massive sum of 50,000,000 credits.

Salvage yields 10% as BP only. Currently, BP are starship-exclusive, keeping it within the separate 'starship economy'.

[Ellias Aubec]

Isn't the BP increases you get each level to take into account selling ships you capture, as well as rewards and such from your employers? If so, then there is no need to worry about credit costs etc.

[The Mad Comrade]

Ellias Aubec wrote:

Isn't the BP increases you get each level to take into account selling ships you capture, as well as rewards and such from your employers? If so, then there is no need to worry about credit costs etc.

It does, abstractly rather than specifically. Best part of it is that the tiered BP system prevents optimizing any form of credits-farming scheme into BPs. Flat-rate credits-to-BPs will be abused. Scaling rates are a stop-gap. Admittedly when one finds out that a "mere" tier 4 starship is worth more than a million credits, it falls into something akin to "every doubling of capability exponentially increases costs".

What I posited above is a ballpark estimate derived from the only thing I found equating a credits-purchasable equipment item into BPs by way of repairing Hull Points.

Hrm ... maybe using the old squaring of base to obtain value is applied instead to dissuade credit-farmers from casually buying armadas of 1k BP starships:

2,500 x (BP squared) ... which puts a tier 1 starship at 137,500 credits; a tier 4 starship at more than 33 million credits and a tier 20 starship at 2.5 billion credits...

There's gotta be a better way to do this. KISS ignores credits-buying-BP of course (vanilla rules).

Or ... "every doubling of capability exponentially increases costs". KISS is that this applies at every 4th tier (4th, 8th, 12th, 16th and 20th) when the HP increases occur:

• tier 1 @ 2,500 cr/BP
  
• tier 4 @ 25,000 cr/BP
  
• tier 8 @ 250,000 cr/BP
  
• tier 12 @ 2.5M cr/BP
  
• tier 16 @ 25M cr/BP
  
• tier 20 @ 250M cr/BP = 250 billion credits. No wonder these ships are so gorram hard to fly, no one knows how!
  

Okay, okay, okay ... that's too expensive. Lop off a zero on the cr/BP somewhere about here:

• tier 1/4 up to 7 @ 2,500 cr/BP; ships range from 62,500 - 450,000.
  
• tier 8-12 @ 25,000 cr/BP; 51.25mcr - 87.5mcr.
  
• tier 13-17 @ 250,000 cr/BP; 100mcr - 175mcr.
  
• tier 18-20 @ 2.5mcr/BP; 2 billion - 2.5 billion credits.
  

That's better, I think.