Cost of Living for the Average Citizen

[Karst]

If anyone has any thoughts/input, I'd love to hear them.

Trying to calculate any specific inRP sums related to profits, costs or expenses in a game which has fixed game related and partially unrealistic economy, very limited running costs of ships or lack paying the taxes is quite pointless.

This. People in this game buy oil tanker loads of diamonds that cost less than a single fighter. Economic balance has zero relation to any sort of realistic lore economy.

I think it's safe to say that a fighter or freighter is as affordable as a current car or van, and that the running costs and costs of living on a small ship are manageable for even much of the low economic class, as evidenced by factions like the Xenos.

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[Damien McEwan]

I always figured that a single unit of cargo is about equal to a pallet of goods...& if not pallet-sized, then definitely still a large bulk item.

I think it's safe to say that a fighter or freighter is as affordable as a current car or van, and that the running costs and costs of living on a small ship are manageable for even much of the low economic class, as evidenced by factions like the Xenos.

On the flipside, I think it's safe to say that given the population of multi trillions across Sirius, and the amount of ships we see in space, I'd imagine that space travel is common, and attainable for anyone, who really want it, but it's not the norm.

If spaceships were as affordable as cars & trucks, then just about everybody would have one, & Freelancer would be like flying the skies of Coruscant.

I generally just figure that if I buy a ship that costs 39 million creds, it's like a car that would cost 3 hundred 90 thousand dollars

Expensive AF but for the minority of those who choose to make their living in space, it's eventually doable.

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[Sombs]

I think it's an important difference between planetside and spaceborne economy. Affording a tiny space shuttle is very likely a thing not everyone can do, and because of that, the spaceborne economy is generally extremely upscaled, paired with hazard payment as space is usually dangerous when it's not nerfed to boringness to please PvP-orientend people. That being said, the entire scalings of Freelancer are all over the place.

And the PoB-Plugin is literally the worst point of orientation, looking at what kinds of values it plays with while also enabling every single Joe McAverage to produce nomad technology-based equipment.

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[Unseelie]

I'm pretty solidly in the camp that says the spacecraft are more expensive than houses.

I do love teasing this apart. For me, we've a few intersecting issues. A: the scales make no sense, B: its a game with specific gameplay reasons for the pricing, and finally, its handwavium anyway. So, lets define some terms:

Food Rations - 75 S.C.
Water - 20 S.C.
Oxygen - 15 S.C.
Consumer Goods - 120 S.C.

I don't believe a S.C. is a dollar. I think a S.C. Is a medium of exchange created and backed by Interspace, used for massive projects like shipping multi-tonne loads across space, or building mega-structures, and has a changing exchange rates to the national currencies (and probably to many other currencies on many bases (which is why credit cards should have variable prices, if anyone cares))

Assuming for now that a "unit" of cargo is a square meter (and, if we start thinking too strangely about this, we're going to compare ships to the panmax shippers, and realize we ought have it be an order of magnitude higher at least, probably two, and that's without even considering that a human probably needs more than a square meter's worth of space for any trip)

so, for 75 Sirius Credit you can get 1m x 1m x 1m of food. Rice is 204 calories in one cup, that's .000236 cubic meters. A cubic meter of rice is 864,406 calories, or 432 days worth of calories at a 2k calorie diet. Assuming food rations have similar caloric value as rice (and it could be much higher if we assume something more modern than bulk rice), 75 sc is enough to eat for a year. Or, terming it to the dollar, about..ten grand.

Oxygen and Water should be recyclable, so not a huge cost, wiht the fusion engine I imagine is in every ship.

Consumer goods at 120 S.C....that's about 15k worth of stuff in one cubic meter, and that gets to be a little wonky, suffice it to say, lift costs shouldn't be a sizable proportion.

But at 1 SC = 5.6 days of food, and saying a day of food is about...ugh. Now you dig into the economics of what food is worth, and the sociology of how much of a person's income they're willing to spend on food.
.18 sc is a day's worth of food...And I'll say something that's wierd, that seems like, well, 10-30 dollars, depending on how well I'm cooking. If we go back to food being rice, for consistency with our calorie generation, I'll say that rice costs about 3000 calories a dollar.

That cubic meter of rice, with 864,406 calories, costing 75 Sirius Credits, through Interspace exchanges? with our example numbers, it costs about 288 dollars.

The exchange rate from america to sirius, in terms of bulk rice as SC, seems to be 1SC per 3.84 dollar. Going back to the top, a sunburst has an equivalent value to a small house in a suburb, about $122K.

However, remember I said at the top that this is going to get weird?
A panamax has a cargo capacity of 14000 of these (462,000 iiish cubic meters)
and a Falcon Heavy has a launch capacity of 64000 kilograms. (81 of our meter cube cargosunits)

A cubic meter of rice weighs about 781 kilograms. Does an Advanced Train carry just over what the falcon heavy can put into space, or is it a panamax? Is it, as I would argue, given that we're moving things around space with superluminal drives, even larger? I did say at the beginning that the scale is messed up.

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[Saronsen]

However, remember I said at the top that this is going to get weird?
A panamax has a cargo capacity of 14000 of these (462,000 iiish cubic meters)
and a Falcon Heavy has a launch capacity of 64000 kilograms. (81 of our meter cube cargosunits)

A cubic meter of rice weighs about 781 kilograms. Does an Advanced Train carry just over what the falcon heavy can put into space, or is it a panamax? Is it, as I would argue, given that we're moving things around space with superluminal drives, even larger? I did say at the beginning that the scale is messed up.

An advanced train carries 5,000 units, so, 3,905,000 KG of rice (yowza).

Trains store in a series of large containers as opposed to a mountain of them resting atop the ship, though , I don't know the exact measurements, so I can't say for certain if it's bigger or smaller than a panamax.

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[Unseelie]

An advanced train carries 5,000 units, so, 3,905,000 KG of rice (yowza).

Trains store in a series of large containers as opposed to a mountain of them resting atop the ship, though , I don't know the exact measurements, so I can't say for certain if it's bigger or smaller than a panamax.

Well, it only carry's 3,905,000 KG of rice if the vessel is relatively small. I mean, scaled to the sort of size that a falcon heavy can lift, and I guarantee you that if SpaceX had access to fusion and whatever a Docking Ring is, they would be building larger vessels.

The thing about this is that nobody knows the exact measurements, because the scale is borked.

Four million KG of rice is rice for a small polity, not a world.
In 2008, about 7 billion people at 28Million Metric Tonnes of rice, or, 28,000,000,000 kilos of rice. Or, if we're saying "cargo units are 1x1x1 m", about 7170 5k cargo shipments worth. Given that the population of just the planets in Sirius is about 90B, we'd expect to see 96,282 shipments of 5ks around (oh, now I'm playing with sillyness in many ways which can't be gotten into) Just to move rice, which is not the only food people in sirius eat. IF rice is about 20% of the sirius food supply, then it pairs about reasonably with the earth food supply, which I'm saying is 1/5iiish based on this article. That would then have, just to move food around Sirius, nearly half a million transport loads a year.

In a universe where we're saying that the house of liberty has around 50 battleships, and the Humans as a total have less than low 200s, I don't think we can account for half a million loads of transports just to move food. (but this gets into a deeper discussion about scale and travel time that we ought hammer out separately) If you give equal weight to food, to metals, to produced goods, I can at a handwaving level say 1/6th of sirius transports are moving food, 1/8th moving water/air, 3/8ths moving things like ores and raw metals, 1/6th moving finished goods, and 1/8th moving specialty goods, for a decent 6x to that half a million value, so 2,880,000 5k transports loads (a bit more if half of them are 3k, and so on if they are 2k, whatever) are needed to move a year's worth of goods around sirius.

I...don't think we have that many. I think we have low thousands, so, based on this admittedly sketchy math, we need a "unit" of cargo to be more than 1m3. (and, because, as I said earlier, the scale is fucked, that means that the humans sitting in fightercraft are -giants-)

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[Altejago]

I think that weight wouldn’t be an issue however as you put it that 1m3 of rice is roughly 781kg.

However a standard fit pallet is 1000mm x 1200mm x 120mm and weighs ~25kg. Now as a general rule of thumb, a pallet should not be loaded higher than 1380mm not including the height of the pallet at 120mm.

However, one pallet described above varies in weight depending on what it is carrying. So that implies the pallet is as a whole is 1.8m3 but carrying flour would be about 1,200kg. A 20’ container holds 10 of those pallets equating to a net weight of 18,000kg (20,200kg gross).

If it was a pallet of say, mining machinery, you will not fully use the “1m3” in a generalised cube. Tractor parts come on pallets and if to help understand, 1m3 is not always a cube. Sometimes it is 600mm wide by 2000mm long by 300mm high is 1.2m3 and weighing on average 2,200kg.

So unless there is a factual representation of how it is in game, I think it might be safer to say that there is a genrelized unit of measurement that suits the developed logistics industry in game. Because weight don’t matter and so you can fit 1m3 full of feathers or bricks, it will stay the same volume. Unless you’re buying Hull segments in the 10’s of thousands.... then **** you devs!!! (Kidding)

But looking at it, I would summarise that the cargo size is perhaps measured in volume over weigh, and I’d haphazard a guess to say that 1 cargo space could essentially be 10m3, or even 100m3. Some of those ships are massive....

FYI:
Average container ship berthing in nz carries between 1000-1500 20’ and 40’ containers averaging about 15,000kg. These are 250-400mtr long vessels and to compare to say a Mastadon, then the volume is all messed up in game,

Summary, don’t boggle your mind with something as trivial as actual numbers in a completely fictional universe. It’s just not worth the energy.

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