Ship Expenses

This will come up, so here’s the deal: I’m going to try to avoid super complicated Excel spreadsheets for costs of flying the ship, BUT I have to assume some kind of expense system.

I will base the money off the Basic Set suggestions.

The crew is currently 6 people, including the PCs and Peter Benton, NPC/Backup PC.

Crew’s Cost of Living: Currently, everyone is average, for a Monthly Cost of Living of $600 each or $3,600 for the ship. This takes care of any docking and berthing fees too.

Crew’s Salary: Everyone has a $6,000 monthly “salary” base that they pay themselves to take care of their CoL and then buying stuff. This is therefore $36,000.

Ship’s Reactor Fuel/Overhauls**: The ship needs $200,000 in reactor overhauls and refueling every year. On a monthly basis, this comes out to $16,667.

Ship’s Ammunition, Fuel, and Stores: The ship uses induction engines, so there’s no reaction fuel. Each missile with a standard or plasma warhead is $500,000, so shoot sparingly (if you think this is unrealistic, you are right…a mere $500,000 is insanely cheap for a hyper sophisticated space missile! Observe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SM-3.). Each 500 man-day supply of food is $1,000 and 1 ton. A year’s worth of food (365×6 crewmen= 2190 man-days/500) is therefore $4,380 and 4.4 tons.

General Ship Maintenance: The ship’s general maintenance is subsumed into the PC’s cost of living on the ship and performing the required maintennce. Nonetheless, the ship will require an overhaul once per year at a cost of .1% of its $135,835,000 cost, which breaks down to another $11,320 per month.

What does it all mean? Food and general operation fees are all assumed to be part of the cost of living, so we shall ignore that. The total monthly costs are thus $3,600+$36,000+$16,667+$11,320=$67,587.00 per month. This assumes the PCs want to pay themselves a monthly salary. This amount is also not TRULY required every month, as the largest portion of that is only paid every 2 years. Nonetheless, the PCs will want to squirrel away at least ~$32,000/month for running the ship—everything in excess of that is essentially for them.

Ultimately, this is the most realistic measure of the value of a bounty. If the PCs believe they can capture a $100,000 bounty in a month, that’s doing pretty well, including a full salary and small bonus. If they can do $100,000 bounty in 2 weeks, that’s great, and they can start to save up for ship improvements. A $1,000,000 bounty is fine as well, if they can do it in less than 16 months!

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