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[keckles]

10 credits a month!? If anything, they are severely over-payed! Let's set some standards here: A Vulcan cannon cost 200 credits. Now a Vulcan is a shipboard rapid-fire close-in anti missile/fighter cannon, a close real-life equivalent is the Phalanx CIWS. One Phalanx costs about 10 million$. So, assuming that the cost of these weapon systems are comparable, a crewman would make the equivalent of 500.000$ a month!

This was always how I thought about the value of credits. The value of ships and weapons in Starsector are relatively low if you compare them to the raw dollar real-life equivalents, if you scale credits to USD values a single credit is actually a shitload of money. Any single ship in Starsector would represent millions upon millions of dollars.

[smithney]

credits seem to be used for everything, you buy/hire crew for credits, get payed by people with credits, and the domain currency semms to be credits, so its probably all made in creadits

Have you noticed what currency does your character buy your drinks for? I haven't, though I remember quite a few moments where drink pricing is mentioned. I mean you probably don't pay for your TP with US dollars in real life, even though USD is the standard currency for most international trading and some currencies are anchored to it.

Btw please don't multipost. It's a slog to read through ^^

[Histidine]

[on further consideration, deleted]

[Oni]

..... Any single ship in Starsector would represent millions upon millions of dollars.

Although, thinking about it, would ships in Starsector cost the same as they would for us? Constructing them seems relatively easier (once you have the design chip) and may be as simple as shoving the raw materials into the auto-factory. That would certainly play havoc with our concept of manufacturing costs.

[keckles]

We'd have to break it down by both labor and resource cost, I think someone could actually do the math on the resource side of things since we have the total market value for every resource in the game, same with labor cost since we know how much Heavy Machineries costs in credits.

[KikogamerJ2]

there isnt a lot of realism at least if the player is your average parsean sector admiral or captain, i has looking at the salaries and found out that each crewman makes 10 credits per month, and they are working on  a spaceship! imagine someone living in a colony what are they making? 2 credits a month? i just did an easy pirate bounty for 47k, it would take the poor crewman 391 years of working to get that. HOW da heck is the player making so much money? and how do the factions and people who pay for missions have this type of income, i also would like to see more smaller cheaper ships for civilians so that at least it would be realistic, like a easy pirate fleet with 4 small frigates with 4 d mods may be to hard for some cheap 500-1k civilian ship that a bunch of friends managed to buy but that doesnt exist, right now the game feels extremly unrealistic.

going off a quote in the desc of the rift cascade emitter & a line in rules.csv from when you visit kanta

"Enough is enough. Anyone who cracks another joke about 'black magic' must contribute ten centicredits to the lab party fund."

You transfer a fractional credit over to the thug running traffic control, enough to cover a generous meal or a round of cheap drinks.

"Eh, here's one to brighten today," control says enthusiastically, "Me, I like going halfsies with the fry, bit-a each. Shuttle, you're cleared to land at munitions bay 12."

we can figure that one full credit is probably around 1k USD (or a vaguely equivalent amount; it's a lot for planet-dwellers but not much when you're running a fleet), that puts crewmen at making the equivalent of 120k per year, which is a pretty nice salary to send home or save with, even if it does come with a pretty high risk of injury / death.

Im not sure if the thing when you go to the planetside bar and pay for a drink to someone is vannila or not, but the drink costs 5 credits, also knowing how the people live somewhat in starsector, its more likely those supposed 120k you are making a year are going to pay for the beds and food the player and any faction is providing their crewmen

[TJJ]

This topic has me thinking of an idea for a fun little mod; track the life of each crew member on each ship in your fleet individually.
Whenever someone dies, randomly pick a crew member from the ship.

See how long you can maintain some element of the original crew, and generate stats such as mean life expectancy aboard each ship in your fleet.

[KikogamerJ2]

This topic has me thinking of an idea for a fun little mod; track the life of each crew member on each ship in your fleet individually.
Whenever someone dies, randomly pick a crew member from the ship.

See how long you can maintain some element of the original crew, and generate stats such as mean life expectancy aboard each ship in your fleet.

that would be interesting, but it probably would make the game be a bit laggy having to calculate all the crew, imagine having 10k crew

[TJJ]

This topic has me thinking of an idea for a fun little mod; track the life of each crew member on each ship in your fleet individually.
Whenever someone dies, randomly pick a crew member from the ship.

See how long you can maintain some element of the original crew, and generate stats such as mean life expectancy aboard each ship in your fleet.

that would be interesting, but it probably would make the game be a bit laggy having to calculate all the crew, imagine having 10k crew

Why?

The real-time aspect of the problem is O(1), and the intermittent components are O(n).
It'd be a trivial mod to both implement & compute.

[Ruddygreat]

Im not sure if the thing when you go to the planetside bar and pay for a drink to someone is vannila or not, but the drink costs 5 credits, also knowing how the people live somewhat in starsector, its more likely those supposed 120k you are making a year are going to pay for the beds and food the player and any faction is providing their crewmen

it's not vanilla, iirc it's added by legacy of arkgneisis.
and eh, crew on naval vessels don't have to rent their bunks from their employers, I can't see why that'd change in <however many years in the future SS is>

[vcuaoiwk]

Ooooo now this is a really fun topic.

I do think that looking at the cost of modern warfare can help shed some light.  Just bear with me while I go off on this next tangent

For example: A low level bounty might could have 47k payout but ideally requires a challenging fleet of comparable value to beat it.

Next: Lets look at modern warfare. A modern US naval warship (something like the Freedom class Littoral combat ship) has roughly a 70 mil annual operational cost. Which equates to about $190k per day requirement. The crew complement is something around ~100 crew. Naval salaries can range from around $35k-$140k per year but obviously this has a hierarchal order with the majority of crew making between 35k-70k annually and a small minority making above that. We can do something like [80 crew * (35k+70k)/2 + 20 crew *(71k+140k)/2 = 6,310K per year (i.e. 6.3 mil yearly salary cost). Divide that by 365 = $17,000 daily crew payout for the 100 crew or roughly $172 per day per crew member.

Alright, now we compare the measly $172 dollars to the ships daily operational costs and you get 172/190k which is like 0.0009 or 0.09% cost goes to each crew member or roughly the entire crew gets 9% of the total daily operational budget.

With this in mind, we see that a single crewman actually gets a tiny percentage of a ship's operational cost. The crew also doesnt own the ship nor did it help fund the ship. The pirate bounty you got for 47k neglects the fact that the crewman is not providing their own vessel but rather looks at the cost of what fleet size it would take to actually kill the other fleet. In general, the game does provide some realism if you look at it that way.

[smithney]

All the talk about currency reminded me of a question. Does Epiphany trade differently, considering it has no functional comms relay? Afaik there are currently no mechanics taking advantage of this; the pricing works as if Epiphany was connected to the network, you just can't check how the prices are in different colonies.

I'm not a fan of realism at the cost of gameplay, but I sense there could be some shenanigans that would make trading with the off-the-record colony more interesting. Epiphany doesn't really feel special atm, its only curiosity is being a sole colony of a rogue faction in a system without a relay. I imagine Pathers would like to abuse this status to secure taxed trades that would be unprofitable on other colonies by manipulating commodity prices. Speaking of which, perhaps Epiphany's black market should behave differently considering Pathers are used to backroom deals and have an iron grip on the colony. Do you guys think it would be worth the effort?

[Alex_P]

i just did an easy pirate bounty for 47k, it would take the poor crewman 391 years of working to get that. HOW da heck is the player making so much money?

That bounty fee is paying for you to provision an entire starship with supplies and antimatter fuel.
In real life, $10,000 a month is a very comfortable income. But that money only covers about 2-3 hours of a U.S. Coast Guard cutter's operating costs. Look at your own income and then consider how long it would take you to amass enough money to buy a basic freighter ship, an airliner, or an entire hospital complex.
Even a simple Lasher isn't a few friends scraping together funds to go on adventures, it's a ship with a crew of 25-50 that absolutely dwarfs anything modern humans have managed to launch into space.

[Thogapotomus]

That bounty fee is paying for you to provision an entire starship with supplies and antimatter fuel.
In real life, $10,000 a month is a very comfortable income. But that money only covers about 2-3 hours of a U.S. Coast Guard cutter's operating costs. Look at your own income and then consider how long it would take you to amass enough money to buy a basic freighter ship, an airliner, or an entire hospital complex.
Even a simple Lasher isn't a few friends scraping together funds to go on adventures, it's a ship with a crew of 25-50 that absolutely dwarfs anything modern humans have managed to launch into space.

Yeah, this is one of my favorite things about the game. Everything is HUGE.  The crew pay is probably pretty solid for the "supposed" state of sector. If anything, the officers are grossly overpaid, but both make sense for gameplay at least.

[FenMuir]

From an economics standpoint, the poor get poorer and the rich get richer.
Credits as the player uses them are likely galactic credit that are exchanged to a much larger amount of planetary credits.

Most of the weapons in Starsector don't actually make sense in terms of space combat. Two fleets would be duking it out from the distance from the Earth to the Moon, not close orbital ranges, and the only weapons that make sense at those ranges are beams, missiles, and hangar units. Ballistics would be purely PD. Worse, if we're going for realism, every non-beam weapon should be subject to PD since their trajectories can be calculated in less than a second, and it should take them a very long time to reach their target, realistically speaking.

https://youtu.be/ovAiAlGGQus

For realism we have ships coming in, firing off Anime levels of missiles, shooting down enemy missiles, shooting lasers at each other, and massed hangar units dominating the skies. Between the fleets is a no-man's land of hangar units and missiles crisscrossed with lasers. Offensive ballistics would be the god weapons at close range that pierce through entire ships and run down a column of ships dealing massive damage.

So, Starsector doesn't make realistic sense. It doesn't need to. It is a game. The design of how combat and trading works has evolved to be more fun to play.

Oddly enough, you can do something that is an approximation of realism with Mora mono-fleets. They're insanely deadly. I've tried them with massed reapers. I just tested them with massed Pila, and they're taking down 5 star remnant fleets more easily than with torpedoes.

Turns out Medley Moras using massed Pila are potentially the apex of moras when massed. Not sure how well it works with Bombers, though.