Hull point repair cost

[Garran]

If repairs are ship-scale costs then you have to have that kind of money sitting around (or readily obtainable), which means that it's no longer a case of "repair the ship or buy a new laser rifle" but "repair the ship or just cash out and personal-scale stuff is no longer an object so we can just buy top kit for everyone / pay for passage from now on / pay someone else to do everything for us / retire somewhere and live very well thank you".

The current setup (and standard campaign) aims to keep the mortgage and operating costs just barely in reach of personal-scale expenses so that everything can operate at that level and still more or less work. Just barely personal-scale repair costs are no different.

 

[Geir]

Upon further reflection...

Say you have a 200 ton trader (free, far, Marava, whatever): 80 hull points. If it got trashed to 40 hull points, (you'd also accumulate 5 criticals but never mind that right now), you would require 40 tons of parts at MCr4 to repair a half-shot-to-pieces MCr12 hull (and yes, that Hull cost also gets you gravity and atmosphere, but let's ignore that for now). If it was only one hull point short of being shot into enough pieces to lose structural integrity, that would cost you 79 tons at MCr 7.9. It actually isn't really that unreasonable. (Now if you got the ship off a junker for MCr 5 in the first place, that may seem like a lot, but let me ask you this: how much is a $500 used car actually going to cost you... in a year.)

Mortgage on a new free trader is a little less than MCr0.2 a month, so taking 24 hits (which would also be 3 crits bad bad) would be a year's worth of mortgage payments. Losing a single pulse laser would put you back MCr1 but a bad critical hit an m-drive would only set you back MCr0.1 in the worst case (or MCr 2 per ton if destroyed - so that would suck). Starting to ramble: since you can fly with a beat-up hull, the pricing doesn't seem to be too far out.

Now, back to the salvage for spare parts bit out of PoD... well there's a difference between purchasing boxes of hull plates and subcomponents designed for your ship and gathering junk-yard salvage. So that Cr5000 per ton is the value of junk that can be repurposed if necessary, and shouldn't be equated with new parts in a box (odds are that only 1 in 20 pieces of junk are useable, but you don't exactly know which 1 that is going to be). So they can be reconciled in my mind at least. And you won't get rich stripping derelict vessels.

And I think the bean-counter approach would be: Fix the ship enough so it has at least m-1 and enough j-drive and power to operate and fix the other parts as time allows... flying with 50% hull is ugly, but you can at least operate long enough to make money to patch it up later.

The next bean-counter question becomes: What's the least amount of cost and tonnage I can get away with using for spares? The accountant's answer is zero spares (if you need them just call for help - no critical actually disables the comms and you can pay for them as needed. If the power plant is completely destroyed (so the radio doesn't work), the crew probably is too - if not, don't those vacc suits have comms?) And that's another reason why accounting methodologies don't intersect well with reality* - and why 'Accountant' isn't a ship crew position, since pirates rarely attack accounting firms.)

*My job after getting an MBA and acing the accounting classes was as a Financial Analyst. A couple of weeks in (after my first assignment: get yourself a computer and learn Quatro Pro) the CFO came to me and said: "The books for last year don't seem right, look into it."
So I spent most of the next three weeks elbow deep in spreadsheets, reconstructing the books for the entire year, and my results were exactly M$0.5 off. Couldn't get it to work. Finally I told my boss it still wasn't right and he said "Okay, call the accountant at the firm that did this for us last year."
One hour and one phone call later, I spoke to the accountant on the phone and he said. "Oh, I remember that half a million. Never could figure it out, so I just did a single entry." (Okay, so it helps to have at least a bookkeeping background to laugh or groan at that, but anyway, tossed the accounting books and concentrated on the computer books.)

 

[Vormaerin]

If it was harder to take damage to your ship, I might be more sympathetic to the high costs of repairs. But the rules prohibit uparmoring your ship. Or improving its thrust. And if you sell your A1 Free Trader for an A3 Armed Trader that doesn't melt at the sniff of combat, you no longer make a profit space trucking because you lose 30-40k in revenue and have a higher mortgage.

There's still the problem that an actual crit is 0-1 spare parts while the hull point is always 1 spare part, since you can make an Engineering roll to MacGuyer your crits away.

 

[Geir]

There's still the problem that an actual crit is 0-1 spare parts while the hull point is always 1 spare part, since you can make an Engineering roll to MacGuyer your crits away.

Well maybe there's a future answer: Apply the Critical Hit Repair table to the Hull Damage as well... and that table doesn't actually allow for an Effect 0 to do anything... hmm...

 

[MasterGwydion]

Well maybe there's a future answer: Apply the Critical Hit Repair table to the Hull Damage as well... and that table doesn't actually allow for an Effect 0 to do anything... hmm...

I could get behind that as a future solution to the issue of the repair rules being wonky.
btw, Geir, your 1 in 20 salvaged spare parts idea? Love it! I am totally going with that answer. Makes sense and is smart gaming.

 

[Vormaerin]

Ultimately, I personally want the criticals to be the challenge to deal with and the hull damage to fairly minor in the grand scheme of things, especially when it is small amounts.

I'd re-write that repair table to have 0 Effect be 1 Spare part, negative effects be extra spare parts, and positive be reduced spare parts. I'm not really inclined to have a "you can't fix it even with all the spare parts in the world" result be there since that should be covered by the crit result saying the thing is destroyed.

Kind of inclined to set the difficulty of Hull repairs based on how much hull damage taken. Less than 10% is Easy, but more than 50% the repairs start at Hard. The idea being minor scrapes and bruises on your poor ship are not gonna bankrupt you, but if you let your ship get hammered, the costs will skyrocket and not just be linear. Would have to think about it more.

 

[MasterGwydion]

Ultimately, I personally want the criticals to be the challenge to deal with and the hull damage to fairly minor in the grand scheme of things, especially when it is small amounts.

I'd re-write that repair table to have 0 Effect be 1 Spare part, negative effects be extra spare parts, and positive be reduced spare parts. I'm not really inclined to have a "you can't fix it even with all the spare parts in the world" result be there since that should be covered by the crit result saying the thing is destroyed.

Kind of inclined to set the difficulty of Hull repairs based on how much hull damage taken. Less than 10% is Easy, but more than 50% the repairs start at Hard. The idea being minor scrapes and bruises on your poor ship are not gonna bankrupt you, but if you let your ship get hammered, the costs will skyrocket and not just be linear. Would have to think about it more.

I like it, but it may be more complex than the vast majority of player groups would feel like dealing with. Not Me, but I know plenty of people who like linear and simple. Making both tables the same and making it auto-success but your roll determines if you save or use extra spare parts makes good sense to Me. I would say, keep the Diff and the repair costs the same for simplicity. This would be both simple and linear.

 

[Vormaerin]

Oh, I wasn't changing the table. I was changing the difficulty of the roll. Right now hull repair is 6+ and Crit Repair is unspecified, which usually means 8+, though the severity of the crit being repaired reduces the effect. I was just thinking minor damage is 4+ while middling damage is 6+ Major is 8+. Crit is 7+Severity (So Severity 1 is an 8+). But just a quick thought, without having crunched it out.

Just to spell it out clearly, a basic hull point worth of ship costs Cr125k to buy as part of a new ship. So repairing that damage under the current rule is 80% of that cost every time it is damaged.

Btw, repair cost doesn't go up or down with the modified cost of the hull. So repairing a reinforced streamlined stealth hull point costs the same as repairing a basic dispersed hull point. So that means repairing a hull point on a lab ship costs more than the original cost of the hull point, while repairing the aforementioned streamlined, reinforced, advanced stealth hull point would be about 3% of the cost of the original

 

[MasterGwydion]

Oh, I wasn't changing the table. I was changing the difficulty of the roll. Right now hull repair is 6+ and Crit Repair is unspecified, which usually means 8+, though the severity of the crit being repaired reduces the effect. I was just thinking minor damage is 4+ while middling damage is 6+ Major is 8+. Crit is 7+Severity (So Severity 1 is an 8+). But just a quick thought, without having crunched it out.

Just to spell it out clearly, a basic hull point worth of ship costs Cr125k to buy as part of a new ship. So repairing that damage under the current rule is 80% of that cost every time it is damaged.

Btw, repair cost doesn't go up or down with the modified cost of the hull. So repairing a reinforced streamlined stealth hull point costs the same as repairing a basic dispersed hull point. So that means repairing a hull point on a lab ship costs more than the original cost of the hull point, while repairing the aforementioned streamlined, reinforced, advanced stealth hull point would be about 3% of the cost of the original

I would think that most people doing the repairs would have at least a +2DM. Average roll of 7 + 2 is 9. If the current Diff is 6, then your Effect is 3 or 0.6 tons of spare parts per hull point. 60k per point versus 100k. That means that on average on a Free Trader, that is costs a little less than half the original, brand new cost of the hull points.

 

[Vormaerin]

Seems reasonable to me for moderate damage to a hull. But they could also roll a 2+2 = 4 and pay through the nose or roll a 10+2 and it be cheap. The current rule is apparently 6+ to spend a full hull point or what? Roll again? That hull point can't be repaired? You have to go to a shipyard for a full refit to get that laser scratch out of the paint?

Just a pet peeve of mine. I hate games that create rolls where there's no drama or failure state.

 

[MasterGwydion]

Seems reasonable to me for moderate damage to a hull. But they could also roll a 2+2 = 4 and pay through the nose or roll a 10+2 and it be cheap. The current rule is apparently 6+ to spend a full hull point or what? Roll again? That hull point can't be repaired? You have to go to a shipyard for a full refit to get that laser scratch out of the paint?

Just a pet peeve of mine. I hate games that create rolls where there's no drama or failure state.

I agree. I would say that the roll should only be to determine your degree of success, hence telling you how many tons of spare parts you used or didn't use. As far as the 2+2 or the 10+2 and the vast differences this creates in price? Easy. Some damage can be fixed with just a wrench and a hammer (uses 0 tons of spare parts), the other could require replacement of a lot of non-savable parts (uses the full ton of spare parts or if We accept one of the options suggested by someone in this chat, possibly more than just one ton of spare parts).

 

[Vormaerin]

lol. I wasn't saying that was bad. I was pointing out that just using the average value didn't tell the whole story

 

[MasterGwydion]

lol. I wasn't saying that was bad. I was pointing out that just using the average value didn't tell the whole story

No. I agree. I was just pointing out that the average value was much less than your assumed value of 100k per hull point. 100k per hull point is merely the base, not the average.

This does make Me want to pay more for a highly skilled engineer though...lol... Try and find one with +6, pay out the nose for him and then open a repair yard at a Starport. Charge the clients for 100k per ton and then save money when he does it using 0 spare parts. Mad money maker. lol

 

[Vormaerin]

In my hypothetical house rule, yes, the average value is much less than 100k. That's actually kind of the point of the house rule In the core rules, the effect table does not apply to hull repairs, only crits. So RAW, hull repair is always 100k per hull point (2.5dtons of hull).

Dunno if there is much more to say about this topic, but maybe we need to be a bit more clear about when talking about the rules vs house rules if we continue.

 

[metlk]

In my hypothetical house rule, yes, the average value is much less than 100k. That's actually kind of the point of the house rule In the core rules, the effect table does not apply to hull repairs, only crits. So RAW, hull repair is always 100k per hull point (2.5dtons of hull).

Dunno if there is much more to say about this topic, but maybe we need to be a bit more clear about when talking about the rules vs house rules if we continue.

I hadn't considered using the crit table for hull repair. I really like this and sounds like a much more balanced approach than the either/or choice of 10k per point or 100k. I think I'll play around with this some and add a new house rule.