How wealthy did someone need to be to afford a starship?

[Lagmonster]

I was thinking about wealth in the massive SW galaxy, when I realized I had no idea what the cutoff point was for ownership of personal starships, despite the fact that you see them basically everywhere. I'm hoping people familiar with the EU and beyond would have an idea. As far as I know, I see:

1) People who own nice starships and/or lots of them: Governments. The rebels, Empire, Republic, Separatists, and Jedi all own starships capable of interstellar travel, because duh. Also wealthy individuals. Count Dooku, Bail Organa, Leia Organa, Padme Amidala, and Palpatine all have private transports. Explainable because they're examples of extreme wealth and people who may need to travel as part of their job.

2) Private ship owners who aren't rich: Guys who hang out in seedy ports, bounty hunters. Okay...Han has a ship, but he won it from the much wealthier Lando in a gambling match. Otherwise, we've only seen the 'best of the best' among freelance ship owners - people notorious enough to be invited to meet Vader personally, for example, or work for high-profile crime lords/governments who may be footing the bill. In other words, working-class specialists with unknown levels of income and who may or may not have stolen their ships/won them from gangsters in the first place.

3) The poor, who don't have starships. Farm boys who have never been to space, war refugees, people who live in the lower-level slums of city-worlds. These are the people who can't afford private ships (even where it might benefit them), so they have to book transport.

So how much does a starship actually cost? Are they cheap enough that poor people could afford them, but they have no real need and so don't waste their money on it? Or are they seen as legitimately luxury items that you have to be rich to own?

[Eleas]

I was thinking about wealth in the massive SW galaxy, when I realized I had no idea what the cutoff point was for ownership of personal starships, despite the fact that you see them basically everywhere. I'm hoping people familiar with the EU and beyond would have an idea. As far as I know, I see:

<schnip>

So how much does a starship actually cost? Are they cheap enough that poor people could afford them, but they have no real need and so don't waste their money on it? Or are they seen as legitimately luxury items that you have to be rich to own?

Well, the SWRPG is actually reasonable canon, AFAIK. In it, the standard price for a rickety second-hand YT-class freighter would be 25,000 credits. Basically, it's on the level of buying yourself a speedboat or a Winnebago in today's world.

[Eternal_Freedom]

There are some references in EU books of really cheap, crude, slow spaceships that are apparently affordable enough for low-to-midly wealthy people who want to own a starship, so I'd say it would be like the equivalent of a medium-to-high end car.

You have Luke's remark in ANh about how for "10,000" they could "buy their own ship for that." I have no idea what the 10,000 actually represents but given that Luke got the better part of 2,000 for a crappy Landspeeder it can't be all that much.

Also, on Bail, Lei and Padme, IIRC those were actually "official" vessels in their roles as Queen, Senator etc. Which raises the question of why Leia's official starship from a wrold that had disarmed was still carrying turbolasers.

[StarSword]

In the short story "A Hunter's Fate: Greedo's Tale" from Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina Greedo is looking at buying a used Incom Corsair for IIRC 14,000 credits (his share of bounty money he and some other bounty hunters got for shopping a Rebel cell to the Imps). When they turned that story into a webcomic it looked like this:



So, yeah. Cheap, crappy hyperspace-capable ships don't cost that much more than an expensive landspeeder (though I'll grant we don't exactly know what 1 Cr is actually worth).

[Wicked Pilot]

I would just parallel it to the modern aircraft market. You can buy a small piston for less than $20,000, but it's the fuel and maintenance that's going to set you back. Assuming the GE isn't as strict as the FAA, you could probably pay less in maintenance and take your chances. Also, if you're mechanically inclined like Han Solo, you could save money by doing a lot of your own upkeep like a lot of modern day pilots. Then of course is you're buying a starship for commercial services, you can get something pretty expensive as long as your profits can pay the lease.

[tezunegari]

Which raises the question of why Leia's official starship from a wrold that had disarmed was still carrying turbolasers.

A turbolaser armament might be mandatory equipment for ships used by government officials. At least during the Empire era. They wouldn't be able to compete with a stardestroyer (as demonstrated in ANH) but space pirates and other assorted criminals might be held off until a stardestroyer or patrol ship arrives to save the day.

[Boeing 757]

I would just parallel it to the modern aircraft market. You can buy a small piston for less than $20,000, but it's the fuel and maintenance that's going to set you back. Assuming the GE isn't as strict as the FAA, you could probably pay less in maintenance and take your chances. Also, if you're mechanically inclined like Han Solo, you could save money by doing a lot of your own upkeep like a lot of modern day pilots. Then of course is you're buying a starship for commercial services, you can get something pretty expensive as long as your profits can pay the lease.

This right here. ^^

[Tiriol]

I would just parallel it to the modern aircraft market. You can buy a small piston for less than $20,000, but it's the fuel and maintenance that's going to set you back. Assuming the GE isn't as strict as the FAA, you could probably pay less in maintenance and take your chances. Also, if you're mechanically inclined like Han Solo, you could save money by doing a lot of your own upkeep like a lot of modern day pilots. Then of course is you're buying a starship for commercial services, you can get something pretty expensive as long as your profits can pay the lease.

In some Essential guide they talked about space travel somewhat and it would appear that the Imperial bureaucracy actually did pay a lot of attention to in what state the spacefaring vessels were and tended to be quite anal about it - in Core Worlds, that is. The person who talked about that was a smuggler and she didn't seem to have anything against Imperials being very careful with spaceship logs and maintenance (it's common sense, actually), although she did note that things were very different in the Core than, for example, in Outer Rim or even Mid Rim or Expansion Region (although it varied quite a bit depending on how wealthy and important the planet/system was). I could imagine that in the Outer Rim the bureaucracy was lazy or so overextended that even if the Empire imposed draconian maintenance regulations, they couldn't truly enforce them (and in the Outer Rim it just might be possible to avoid any regulations or official warnings by bribing the officials in question; the smuggler noted as much, although she warned that anyone stupid enough to try to bribe an Imperial customs officer or inspector in Coruscant or any important Core World had it coming when they were thrown into a brig or their ship confiscated).

[lord Martiya]

Which raises the question of why Leia's official starship from a wrold that had disarmed was still carrying turbolasers.

A turbolaser armament might be mandatory equipment for ships used by government officials. At least during the Empire era. They wouldn't be able to compete with a stardestroyer (as demonstrated in ANH) but space pirates and other assorted criminals might be held off until a stardestroyer or patrol ship arrives to save the day.

The Tantive IV was first acquired before Alderaan disarmed, during the Clone Wars. In that time, using a light multipurpose warship as diplomatic courier was the sensible thing. On why they didn't take away the guns after the disarming... My guess is that the Empire actually had that kind of regulations, and the Organas used them to justify the weapons of at least one warship of the Rebel Alliance.

[AniThyng]

Maybe disarmed just meant no explicit warships, but a diplomatic cruiser with the equivalent of some 76mm DP guns are fine...?

[Lord Revan]

Well the Organa family were philantropist during the Clone Wars and Imperial eras so it wouldn't be unreasonble to assume that they spent a decent amount of time in the outer rim even in non Rebel Alliance related activities so arming your ship would be reasonble as a famous coreworld leader (even if only a figurehead) would make an exelent hostage for a pirate crew seeking one and do remember that the crew was armed too.

[Jedipilot24]

For those who are neither wealthy nor lucky at cards, they probably have to get a loan--either from a bank or from a loan shark. The latter are quite common for those on the other side of the law, in fact that's probably how a lot of smugglers get into the business in the first place. Think of the situation as roughly analogous to buying your first house, except that this house is also your car and office all in one.

[Eleas]

This was actually the rationale they used for the Smuggler archetype in the old WEG game. The Smuggler began the game with a Stock Light Freighter (i.e. an YT-1300 or equivalent, with a single blaster cannon and crappy stats). He also began with a 25,000 credit debt to a nasty crime boss. Worked like a charm in nearly every game, in that everybody either wanted to be the Smuggler or have a Smuggler on the team just for chance to get access to a starship, while at the same time everybody knew that they'd signed on to be hunted down like dogs by a vengeful mobster.

[Connor MacLeod]

I would just parallel it to the modern aircraft market. You can buy a small piston for less than $20,000, but it's the fuel and maintenance that's going to set you back. Assuming the GE isn't as strict as the FAA, you could probably pay less in maintenance and take your chances. Also, if you're mechanically inclined like Han Solo, you could save money by doing a lot of your own upkeep like a lot of modern day pilots. Then of course is you're buying a starship for commercial services, you can get something pretty expensive as long as your profits can pay the lease.

I suppose it might depend on the performance and other parameters. Most starships apparently don't run on hypermatter reactors or need the huge powerplants warships do (at least that I am aware of) so I would gather there is a corresponding decrease in performance (how it scales is another matter.)

However, given that on Tatooine you have even a small chance (as opposed to none) of finding rare hyperdrives (like in TPM) in junk shops (which is 20K credits, which might give us an idea as well of just how expensive they and starships might be even allowing for Watto's greed.) maintenance doesn't seem like it would neccesarily be a huge barrier, performance wise.

Indeed performance restrictions at the cost of reliability may be one of the ways the Empire indirectly maintains control (safety regulations and standards) - making it harder for people to casually travel great distances. Heck we know they were limiting hyperdrive ranges for military starships prior to the Clone Wars, so it shouldn't be impossible for civilian vessels as well.

Also remember that Luke had a skyhopper of his own (that according to official materiasl had an ion drive and could do transorbital (and apparently cost between 6500-14500 credits used to new.)

Maybe if we used Luke's speeder as a baseline we might figure out some sort of conversion/comparison (although being in the double digit thousands for space flight/space travel being equivalent

[Lagmonster]

On the issue of ship maintenance, it may be worth mentioning that a slave built a protocol droid packed full of data. It may well be that ship AIs and astromech droids are cheap as dirt, so a ship owner really wouldn't need a whole hell of a lot of technical knowledge. Arguably, Han needed to be more tech-savvy than average, on account of the fact that the Falcon was a Frankenstein of custom, high-performance parts that didn't always mesh correctly (or even interface well with other droids, see ESB and Threepio having trouble understanding Han's exotic hyperdrive's AI) and needed constant care.

[Boeing 757]

On the issue of ship maintenance, it may be worth mentioning that a slave built a protocol droid packed full of data. It may well be that ship AIs and astromech droids are cheap as dirt, so a ship owner really wouldn't need a whole hell of a lot of technical knowledge. Arguably, Han needed to be more tech-savvy than average, on account of the fact that the Falcon was a Frankenstein of custom, high-performance parts that didn't always mesh correctly (or even interface well with other droids, see ESB and Threepio having trouble understanding Han's exotic hyperdrive's AI) and needed constant care.

What I find to be most impressive is that a slave could acquire the parts needed in order to build what is a jet engine in all but name (on what essentially is a backwater crapshoot for the SW universe), and not only that, to maintain two of them without rousing much attention. Consider the airlines. Their greatest expenditure on maintenance is because of engines often at 40% of their total cost direct maintenance costs, and most of that arises out of the supply chain for procuring the necessary parts and maintenance tools (albeit labor is included in that). The maintenance on engines is often outsourced since it consumes a lot of revenue from airlines to do it in house. Anakin didn't have a supply chain or outside help aside from C-3PO, yet he built the engines and fuselage from scratch and maintained the thing while also supplying it with fuel. For example's sake of what typical costs are even for a small jet engine, an overhaul or unscheduled maintenance can easily rack up to $200,000 per year in current US dollars; not even including small maintenance items.

Most starships apparently don't run on hypermatter reactors or need the huge powerplants warships do (at least that I am aware of) so I would gather there is a corresponding decrease in performance (how it scales is another matter.)

I don't suppose that the EU touches upon what powers the Falcon? Nuclear fusion comes to mind for some reason.

[FaxModem1]

Could Anakin have had a head start to most people because his master was the owner of a junk heap? That's a rather great place to get plenty of spare parts and other things most people would consider garbage, but to someone raised fixing things by their mother and master, it would be rather easy to have technical knowledge and an almost endless supply of things to work with?

[lPeregrine]

What I find to be most impressive is that a slave could acquire the parts needed in order to build what is a jet engine in all but name (on what essentially is a backwater crapshoot for the SW universe), and not only that, to maintain two of them without rousing much attention. Consider the airlines. Their greatest expenditure on maintenance is because of engines often at 40% of their total cost direct maintenance costs, and most of that arises out of the supply chain for procuring the necessary parts and maintenance tools (albeit labor is included in that). The maintenance on engines is often outsourced since it consumes a lot of revenue from airlines to do it in house. Anakin didn't have a supply chain or outside help aside from C-3PO, yet he built the engines and fuselage from scratch and maintained the thing while also supplying it with fuel. For example's sake of what typical costs are even for a small jet engine, an overhaul or unscheduled maintenance can easily rack up to $200,000 per year in current US dollars; not even including small maintenance items.

But how much of that expense is because of the FAA's rules insisting on expensive precision manufacturing with layers of verification and testing, licensed mechanics following strict procedures, etc. The costs of operating that jet engine would be considerably less if you could buy replacement parts at the local walmart and install them yourself.

[Ahriman238]

Just chiming in, In the Lando prequels he says that buying a starship is no big deal, but managing it's operating costs is a different matter. The former is within a lot of people's means, the latter is not.

He also extends a thousand credits of credit for a droid (Vuffi Ra) that he mused may be worth more than his ship in the present economy.

Not to mention the betting that took place in TPM, though I'm pretty sure that was atypical in every regard.

[Formless]

That's because Vuffi Ra is a unique, extragalactic probe for a race of robots that he only acquired because of a stroke of luck at cards. Not exactly the same thing as if he bought a contemporary R2 unit.

[Ahriman238]

True, but at the point where they anted up, all Lando knew was "Class 2 pilot droid." Nothing about Vuffi Ra's nature or character.

[Connor MacLeod]

I don't suppose that the EU touches upon what powers the Falcon? Nuclear fusion comes to mind for some reason.

'Fusion' is about as close as I'm willing to say without doing more exhaustive digging that I really don't want to spend hours/days on. I don't thikn they defined it in any precise terms, but WEG used to go with the idea hyperdrives were powered by weird fusion reactors that could run on all sorts of exotic shit (gasses, dense metals, whatever.) although I think they might have been conflating propellant and fuel -they also often mentioned the starships drew power off their main drives rather than having dedicated reactors - or had additional reactors in addition to main drives, so there are lots of interpretations to go with.)

I did learn that the original ICS describes the falcon as having a highly pressurized liquid metal fuel, for whatever that helps us with

[RogueIce]

WEG used to go with the idea hyperdrives were powered by weird fusion reactors that could run on all sorts of exotic shit (gasses, dense metals, whatever.)

So basically this:

[Broken]

What I find to be most impressive is that a slave could acquire the parts needed in order to build what is a jet engine in all but name (on what essentially is a backwater crapshoot for the SW universe), and not only that, to maintain two of them without rousing much attention. Consider the airlines. Their greatest expenditure on maintenance is because of engines often at 40% of their total cost direct maintenance costs, and most of that arises out of the supply chain for procuring the necessary parts and maintenance tools (albeit labor is included in that). The maintenance on engines is often outsourced since it consumes a lot of revenue from airlines to do it in house. Anakin didn't have a supply chain or outside help aside from C-3PO, yet he built the engines and fuselage from scratch and maintained the thing while also supplying it with fuel. For example's sake of what typical costs are even for a small jet engine, an overhaul or unscheduled maintenance can easily rack up to $200,000 per year in current US dollars; not even including small maintenance items.

But how much of that expense is because of the FAA's rules insisting on expensive precision manufacturing with layers of verification and testing, licensed mechanics following strict procedures, etc. The costs of operating that jet engine would be considerably less if you could buy replacement parts at the local walmart and install them yourself.

Also, what we consider expensive precision manufacturing might be crude, nearly workshop level work since the Star Wars galaxy has easy access to micro-gravity environments (iirc, good for making alloys and such), magic-level sensor equipment, and who knows what else all the way up to the World Devastator automated factories and molecular furnaces. Given the amount of stuff Watto had on hand, I get the impression the materials are tough enough that they seem to be able to be installed with minimal inspection and no worries about flaws.

[PainRack]

I was thinking about wealth in the massive SW galaxy, when I realized I had no idea what the cutoff point was for ownership of personal starships, despite the fact that you see them basically everywhere. I'm hoping people familiar with the EU and beyond would have an idea. As far as I know, I see:

1) People who own nice starships and/or lots of them: Governments. The rebels, Empire, Republic, Separatists, and Jedi all own starships capable of interstellar travel, because duh. Also wealthy individuals. Count Dooku, Bail Organa, Leia Organa, Padme Amidala, and Palpatine all have private transports. Explainable because they're examples of extreme wealth and people who may need to travel as part of their job.

2) Private ship owners who aren't rich: Guys who hang out in seedy ports, bounty hunters. Okay...Han has a ship, but he won it from the much wealthier Lando in a gambling match. Otherwise, we've only seen the 'best of the best' among freelance ship owners - people notorious enough to be invited to meet Vader personally, for example, or work for high-profile crime lords/governments who may be footing the bill. In other words, working-class specialists with unknown levels of income and who may or may not have stolen their ships/won them from gangsters in the first place.

3) The poor, who don't have starships. Farm boys who have never been to space, war refugees, people who live in the lower-level slums of city-worlds. These are the people who can't afford private ships (even where it might benefit them), so they have to book transport.

So how much does a starship actually cost? Are they cheap enough that poor people could afford them, but they have no real need and so don't waste their money on it? Or are they seen as legitimately luxury items that you have to be rich to own?

We have a rough guide from the canon movie itself. 20 thousand credits would buy Luke and Obiwan a starship, although it says nothing about the operating and maintenance costs.
Luke speeder sold for 2 thousand and he bemoaned that this was because newer models meant less of a market for it. So, a spaceship, maybe the dinky, sccoter version instead of a luxury yacht, cost ten times the amount of a used car..........

So...... essentially, a spaceship in the Star Wars universe is as 'scarce' as a boat is in our Earth bound civilisation.