Muster Out Benefit - Cash Equivalent?

[txnetwolf]

Ok, a T20 PC musters out and receives a Starship benefit from prior experience/history...

But another PC in the party also received one, and has made all the arrangements, deckplans, etc etc necessary for the party to receive the most benefit from his vessel.

So, in your opinion, what would be a fair equivalent in cash if the second PC were to sell her starship benefit?

 

[Savar]

it would depend on how much they still owed

sorta like selling a hosue you still have a morgage on

 

[ybrek]

According to the old CT/MT rules on the Starship benefit, The first receipt of the benefit gets you a ship with a 40 year mortgage on the full value. Each additional receipt of the benefit pays off 10 years of the mortgage and ages the ship ten years. So, to get the ship free and clear, your have to get the staship benefit 5 times.

Now, CT/MT also requires a 20% down payment on any ship you buy through the bank, which is still a serious chunk of credits. To ensure gme balance, I always allowed the player to either trade his Starship benefit for a TAS membership of a flat 2Mcr (YMMV).

Of course, none of this is applicable to the scout starship benefit, since the ship is just assigned to the ex-scout and is still part of the reserve fleet and subject to recall.

just my .02cr worth

 

[Rover]

I ran into a similar situation in my game and I gave the player 25% of what the down payment would be, or 5% the cost of the ship.

The players in question formed a corporation and with the cash player A "bought in" and became part owner of player B's ship. They are now jointly responsible for payments and upkeep. It was amazing how quickly that cash got gobbled up when they made a few upgrades to the ship.

R

 

[deadlock]

Greetings and salutations,

For larity of receiving a starship when a PC musters out of the Scout Service, do they still have to make a mortgage payment on the starship? I have been lucky since none of the Scouts have rolled for the benefit. If they do pay a mortgage, then the Scout is looking to purchase the ship and it is considered under the "Rent with option to buy" clause in the contract Scouts sign when they receive a starship. Of course, obligations and restrictions apply.

 

[princelian]

The way I handle this issue is as follows: First, I make a list of all the ship mustering out benefits earned by the players. The first roll covers the down payment (20% of the ship's value) and each additional roll covers 25% of the ship's value. This is the ship's true value, not doubled for the typical mortgage calculation. These values also hold for pirates and their corsairs - they don't get the ship free-and-clear with one roll.

Second, I discuss with the entire group (ship rollers and those who don't have any ship benefits alike) which of the available ships, if any, they'd be interested in using. For example, one character might be a pirate with access to a 400 dton corsair, another was a merchant with a 200 dton free/far trader, and the final one (lucky party) is a belter with three rolls toward owning a 100 dton seeker. The party may not want the seeker (too small) or the corsair (too big, too many NPCs to run), so they might agree that their "credit" applies to the trader.

Now I apply the value of all the rolls toward that ship, and the value they "put in" is the number of full shares they own. Characters that didn't get any ships on their mustering out get tenth shares.

I don't have ship prices with me, so let's assume a seeker costs MCr 20, a free trader MCr 30, and a corsair MCr 60. The total "value" earned by the mustering out rolls is MCr 4 + 5 + 5 = 14 for the seeker, MCr 6 for the trader, and MCr 12 for the pirate. Full "value" is MCr 32, and one share is MCr 4 (least common denominator, rounded if necessary, from the down payments).

The belter used his uranium hits to buy into the party ship with 3.5 shares, the pirate has 3 shares, and the merchant has 1.5 shares. The other party members each have 0.1 shares (valued at kCr 400), and the total money available to buy/refit the ship is MCr 33.2. They can use this to buy a free trader free-and-clear with 3.2 million in upgrades (which won't go far) or a better outfitted one that they'll owe a small mortgage on.

Profits, if any, are divided among the group according to the shares.

Or they can use the 33.2 million as down payment on their "dream ship," and have to come up with 691,000 Cr payments every month. (33.2 * 5 = MCr 166 ship, mortgaged to MCr 332, 480 payments = MCr 0.691 per month.) They'd better get tradin'!!!

 

[far-trader]

Character's recieving a type S Scout/Courier in mustering out are not obligated to make mortgage payments. They do not own the ship. In fact the IISS still owns the ship, and the character to a degree. The character is not retired but transferred to the Detached Duty office. They don't have any formal mission beyond "keep your sensors peeled and tell us what you find" while they tramp around and report in at a Scout base now and then. They can't sell the ship and in MTU at least are responsible for unwarranted expenses and repairs.

For more on my take on IISS-DD see this thread:

http://www.travellerrpg.com/cgi-bin/Trav/CotI/Discuss/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=000839;p=2

...and specifically my post, 7 down, on that page.

 

[Pickles]

Originally posted by far-trader:
...They don't have any formal mission beyond "keep your sensors peeled and tell us what you find" while they tramp around and report in at a Scout base now and then.

Heh, yeah, that's what we tell all the civilians ...

 

[princelian]

far-trader, that's exactly why I didn't have one of the example group be a scout! The existence of a scout/courier as a mustering-out benefit is something I've handled differently for different campaigns.

For the campaign where the S/C is the only starship mustering-out benefit, that's pretty straightfoward: if the players want access to a starship, they use the S/C. 'Nuff said.

For the campaign where one or more party members roll ships as mustering out benefits and the scout rolls an S/C, I handle it one of two ways:
</font>

• The scout defers receipt of his scoutship until such time as it is needed (which may be never during the campaign). It's a backup should the primary ship be destroyed; something to fall back on.</font>
• The scout accepts receipt of his scoutship and the party uses it as a jump-capable smallcraft. This option has typically been in situations where the party was involved in espionage/diplomatic matters and might want to be associated with more than one ship.</font>

Option 2 works best with a larger ship (e.g., subsidized merchant, corsair, or mercenary cruiser) as they're large enough to take the scoutship inside. With ships with too-small cargo capacity to take the S/C inside, it's a little harder for the players to manage.

 

[Pickles]

Originally posted by princelian:
Option 2 works best with a larger ship (e.g., subsidized merchant, corsair, or mercenary cruiser) as they're large enough to take the scoutship inside. With ships with too-small cargo capacity to take the S/C inside, it's a little harder for the players to manage.

Only if you have a Sulieman-shaped hold, which would be a bit odd (except maybe for the corsair). Certainly, none of the published plans could take a type S on board.

That said, I've run campaigns with a type S and another ship (free trader, far trader, patrol escort, that sort of thing) in he party. It generally works fine, although you're limited to the lower jump ratings of the two.

 

[princelian]

You're assuming it's a Sulieman-class S/C! And that depends on your TU - Paranoia Press published a S/C that was an enlongated design and not the classic wedge of the "normal" S/C. In the same publication, they extended her by 50 dtons, creating a 150-ton extended S/C, which in many ways was a perfect size/configuration for a typical 4 to 6-being Traveller group.

(Was that the Serpent class (100 dton) and Wind class (150 dton)? That was a long time ago...)

 

[Laryssa]

Here's an interesting idea, what if the scout ship were alive? What if the ship itself were a character, perhaps even a player character?

Suppose a character is a scout, and one of the mustering out benefits is a scout ship. What if it turns out that the player character is the scout ship itself? The player character's brain would be the ship's computer running AI software, and his body would be the starship. An example would be something like the Hal 9000 from 2001 A Space Odyssey.

A Starship character would be somewhat limited in his interaction with other creatures, they can't go everywhere a human-sized character can go, and if he gets blown up, he's dead, their is no abandoning ship for him, he also can't sell himself for a cash benefit, his mind is still that of a human's however, he can't multi task very well, he can use all the ship's weapons on a single target, but he can't split them up between multiple targets and fire at both of them at the same time.

 

[mike wightman]

Would the ship's "computer brain" be able to remotely operate an air/raft, an ATV, or some sort of robotic body?

Is so then the character can interact with the rest of the PC party when they are away from the ship.

 

[Pickles]

Heh, guilty as charged. I see 'S/C', I think 'Sulieman'. Hazards of long-term detached duty.

There's another problem with the mothership concept, though, in that you would need a ship which not only has enough space for an S/C, but one with big enough bay doors to actually get it into the bay. Doors are an engineer's bogeyman, so you don't want to make holes in your hull any bigger than absolutely necessary. Most traders and merchants wouldn't take on anything bigger than a container, so their doors are not that big.

Still, this is all IMTU/IYTU, so antyhing goes. As I said, from a PC group viewpoint there's nothing more handy than having two starships. Not for the GM, though ...

To go off on the intelligent ship tangent, Ive used that in the same situation. The PCs had a well-loved and trusty (um, 'well-loved', anyway) old free trader, and got their sticky hands on an experimental Covert Survey Bureau* type S rebuild. They never did figure out that the self-aware ship 'AI' was no such thing, and the computer core acually had a human brain in it.