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A question about Ship Shares

soloprobe

SOC-12
Iv'e read the core rulebook but I'm still not clear on the subject of ship shares. The name imlpies that they can be traded for a ship. If that's true How many ship shares must a character aquire before he or she can trade them in for a ship?
 
If I recall correctly, not having my book with me at the moment, one ship share is equivalent to 1% of the ship's value. So I would guess 100 such would allow the flat out purchase of a ship - but I may be mistaken.


And presuming you don't mind my answering. :confused:
 
Yep, Jame has it right the way I read it too. It's more about making the payments smaller. If you have 20 ship shares then the mortgage for your ship is only 80% of the full value. So you have an easier time of making the payments, or more profits each month for other stuff. But yeah, a large enough group with some luck could pool 100 ship shares and have a ship outright, fully paid off.

From page 138 of Mongoose Traveller Core Book:

1. Work out the cash price of the ship (including any 10% discount for a standard design, not including any fuel or ammunition).

2. Count up the ship shares that characters can put towards the ship. Reduce the cash price by 1% for every ship share contributed.

3. Divide the reduced price by 240. This is the monthly payment.

4. Pay this payment every month for 40 years.

It's also a handy method of dividing the profits I think. If two PCs have 10 ship shares each, and another has 20, the first 2 PCs split half the profits and the other one gets the other half of the profits.
 
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So when you make mortgage payments on the ship, are you actually buying Ship Shares from the bank or lender?

Sort of, with interest payments. But prior canon suggests that as long any payments remain it is the share holders who actually own the ship. Miss the payments and you lose your equity and the ship with it reverting to the share-holders. So not exactly. As in if you make 1% (2% with interest?) of the payments you won't add a share to your character. That share is still owned by another investor, until the ship is paid off in full.

In the case of player shares, the way Mongoose has it, you'd still have those shares I suppose and there'd probably be voting by all share-holders on how to repurpose the asset (ship) to make a return for all share-holders. Typically by mortgaging the ship to a more responsible operator.

Note Mongoose doesn't allow cashing in shares. But I'd allow players to keep shares in another ship(s) and see a return on the investment (the payments) based on their percentage. Until the ship(s) was paid off (however long that would be, a complication...) and the shares were canceled. Fun thought, some player shares on another ship, and the ship skips.

EDIT: Of course there should be a mechanism where you can buy shares in your ship, buying out another investor, and thereby reducing your payments. Maybe. Too much thinking to think about right now :)
 
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I think Dan meant to say that it is the mortgage holder who actually owns the ship. Not the PC's with their shares.

Chip
 
Correct Chip. More or less ;) Thanks for the clarification :)

I'm still trying to work out the details of player shares vs other shares in my head. They complicate the whole ownership issue when you start looking at it. Maybe I'll post something on it if I get it worked out. Though my mind went off an different tangent last night, that promises to be more interesting and less complicated. Might post that up too, or instead...

...eventually.
 
RE: "Buying out more shares"

I was thinking you could do it the way a regular House Mortage or other loan is setup where you could pay over and above the regular monthly payment to pay against the principle. Now all that math makes my head spin and I wouldn't want to keep up with it, so as GM I'd probably just let players make extra payments and eventually pay it off early, if possible...
 
The mortgage lender is the true owner of the ship until the last credit has been paid and the ownership deeds are legally transferred to the 'partnership', ' crew co-operative society' or whatever.

Owning a share doesn't mean that you have any legal title to the ship, it's more like a Xmas hamper payment - no matter how much you pay, you don't get the hamper till Xmas. And if the hamper company goes bust before Xmas... (interesting adventure hook :devil:)

However, buying shares from the mortgage lender is equivalent to an early repayment plan: if you buy more shares, the amount you owe is recalculated and your monthly repayments drop. If you buy enough shares, Xmas might come early.
 
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Ship shares represent contacts, credit rating, savings and favors owed that a character can put towards... Characters can also get extra ship shares by taking an older and more damaged ship...
Ship shares*1 are not like shares*2 in a corporation. You have the shares*1 BEFORE you take 'ownership' of the ship and they are worthless to anyone else, you can not sell or trade them. You no longer have shares*1 once they are 'spent' on a ship. Neither does the mortgage holder. Unless things are done differently in the future, you need to create a corporation to have shares*2 and the corporation then 'distributes' the shares*2. The corporation could distribute shares*2 based on shares*1 and other investments.

shares*1 and shares*2 are two totally different things though.
 
I wouldn't use ship shares myself, because I believe that a ship is a plot device and that the Referee decides if the PCs have one or not and on what terms. But if I did use them, I'd say they represented the part of the ship that the PCs own free and clear, and that the mortgage would be reduced correspondingly.

Just my opinion.


Hans
 
I much preferred the playtest mode where each share was a simple 1MCr worth of ownership.

In either case, your ship shares represent your equity in the ship at time of purchase; in case of insurance, you're entitled to your percentage of the payout.
 
Don't forget picking up some extra shares for the girl having a few parsecs under her hood!
I love the chart for older ships.One of my players loves to play psionic characters & I decided that the ship they got was a 40yr old ship & so I put the "vessel contains distrubing psionic echoes" complication.To non-psionics they just get the classic cold chills from certain areas of the ship but the psionic character sees "things"("Oh My God!!!!! Don't go in there somebody was just riped apart in there;I saw it.";"Uhm,Lee there's nothing in there?!";WHAT!!!!But I saw it!!!!!") My favorite so far was the unknown crewman whose head exploded as "Lee" turned the corner."Lee" darn near had a break down the 1st game.He now doesn't go anywhere by himself.
 
The old ship table definitely needs expansion. There were all sorts of great ideas in a post here or on MgT forums...

Strange smells, clicking noises, a tendency for lights to flash when certain commands were executed, a strange piece of wiring that makes absolutely no engineering sense but everyone's afraid to pull because who knows what might happen...
 
I wouldn't use ship shares myself, because I believe that a ship is a plot device and that the Referee decides if the PCs have one or not and on what terms. But if I did use them, I'd say they represented the part of the ship that the PCs own free and clear, and that the mortgage would be reduced correspondingly.

Just my opinion.


Hans
...which is essentially how MGT is using them. In effect, this is the same sort of thing, though mechanically slightly different, that CT/MT did when you got a ship as a mustering-out benefit - the first time, you had possession of a shiny new ship, complete with the shiny new obligation to pay 1/240th of the sticker price each month for the next 40 years; each subsequent award added ten years to the age of the ship, and took ten years of payments off the mortgage. If, by some strange quirk of fate, you rolled that benefit five times, you got a 40-year-old ship free and clear.

Ship shares in MGT don't change the AGE of the ship, so the ship - and the mortgage - will be shiny new, but the more shares you have, the easier it is to ultimately pay off the mortgage. What they DO do is, in effect, erase the down-payment, AND 1% of the principal, up front. Or, if you prefer, they shift those costs into the background during prior career generation, instead of making you worry about them after mustering out.
 
The wires would drive Lee the psion nuts.The player likes to play the engineer a lot.I'll have to dig up that thread,that sounds fun. I've been using ideas from The Ships Locker on each ship's locker I put on ships. My players uually expect something lose to a creepy old house when they get a new ship.(like the SubLiner that had been converted for merc use.The hallway that runs down the starboard side & several stateroom were charred & no matter what temp they set them to it was always around 20 to 30 degrees in there.It also had that smell like a smokehouse.I turned on my cd player & put the volume to just barely hearable with a holloween cd playing.I used my remote or the cd player to turn it on when they would go into those parts of the ship.
 
Used starships can be fun!!

I like that idea . in one of my earlier T.U.s I had a player shopping for used starships .....He took it for a test flight ,flushed the toilet and sent the ship ,into jump...........
 
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