Insurance for ship and cargo and rules for salvage

[Anstett]

Smells repairable to me. There has to be rules for used ships. *goes to look*

And @mavikfelna

There are some rules scattered about and other non-mongoose publications that cover it. Here is how I combined things for our game.

Dragonslayer Space | Main / SaleAndSalvage

 

[phavoc]

This is my second post about happenings in last night's game.

My fellow players and I were under the impression that insurance is part of a ship's mortgage and for freight, part of the fee for carrying it also included insurance. Additionally, the loan we took out for our spec cargo would also logically include an insurance rider. But of course I can't find any support for that sort of view in the game rules. So what is everyone's opinion on insurance? We're currently debating this with our GM, since he doesn't agree with that.

Also, we captured a pirate free trader, after doing some significant damage to it, but there are no rules that I can find on valuing the salvage. Are there rules for this?

Typically insurance is an after-market cost for cargo, but would normally be included in the mortgage costs if you don't own the ship. That would be the same as a person with a car has to carry collision insurance (in the US) so long as a bank owns the title.

Freight is insured separately, and it would be (possibly) in two parts. If you are shipping freight owned by someone else they could buy a policy on the value of the freight for themselves - if you were to lose it they would get paid but you would not get paid your profit (potentially) for transport. If you were to buy the freight on spec then unless you purchased insurance post-sale, then you'd have no insurance on the freight's value if something were to happen to it. Your ship policy would cover damages to the ship, but not the value of the freight itself.

Of course, it's entirely possible that some people would take on extra mortgage costs to cover freight, but that gets a bit complicated and costly. The reason for that is insurance is based on value of what is being insured. A load of steel is less valuable than a load of electronics. So your insurance company would want a higher premium for a higher value cargo. A mortgage payment is flat and set, thus unless your cargo insured value was fixed, it could not pay for more expensive cargos in a way that an insurance company would feel comfortable with - they don't like risk unless they are being compensated for it.

However, if you want to make it very easy, then sure, just assume all ships carry cargo insurance and the premium is part of the mortgage.