Crunchy: Materials and money

[Mojomoe]

Heya! I've got some players that like to deal with materials and crafting.

I came across a list of Star Wars materials that list all common substances and their prices, but no units. For example - Durasteel, 4 credits. Mandalorian Iron, 365 credits. Again, no units.

This really interests me. The problem id love to tackle is, what units are these? Are these per kilo? Per cubic meter? How does weight factor in?

While this may seem EXTRA crunchy, it's actually got a good application: id like to develop a simple rubric for materials. For example, if my guys buy 500 kg of Mandalorian Iron, what does that cost, and how much space does it take up? Is that enough to coat the entire ship in beskar? Is it cost prohibitive?

My best guesses say that if the prices (ranging from 5 credits per "unit" to 500) are per kilo, it makes the price difference per cubic meter or metric ton too great (hundreds of thousands if not millions of credits different), while if it's per cubic meter the difference is too small to make a difference, and they might as well cover their ship in cortosis armor.

Thoughts? I'd love to know more about how real world materials are sold and valued, and how much of a material goes into, say, a car, plane, or suit of armor.

[shootingwomprats]

I believe that un-worked, bulk metals/alloys made into ingots. An ingot is 20 lbs. The actual amount of material you have to work with will depend on its density. For example copper weighs more than aluminum. An ingot of aluminum would have more physical area and could be used for more projects.
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Don Diestler
Host, Shooting Womp Rats
The D6 Podcast
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@swd6podcast, Twitter

[Mojomoe]

So ingot is a flat weight measurement, but not a size measurement?

An ingot of Mandalorian Iron then, if heavier than Durasteel, would be much smaller then if I understand. Meaning you'd need more ingots of beskar (iron) than Durasteel to cover the same area?

I was also looking into calling each unit a flat 100 kilograms, meaning there are 10 units per metric ton, and you completely ignore size.

With some quick calculations, you could say there's 1 metric ton of solid material in a landspeeder (1 metric ton being 2204 lbs, and there being ~2000 lbs of steel in an average car).

So you could say there's one metric ton of material in a landspeeder, 500 kg (0.5 metric tons) of weave material (interwoven), or 100 kg (10% of a metric ton) in a coating.

So a landspeeder made of Durasteel takes 1 metric ton. A landspeeder made with Durasteel weave takes 500 kg (with 500 kg of another material), and a landspeeder with a Durasteel coating takes 100 kg of durasteel, on top of 1 metric ton of another material.

Does this follow? Using quick 1st edition conversions (~0.5 cubic meters per metric ton), this would require half a cubic meter of material per metric ton, though this is a GROSS simplification, it at least lets you cover storage space.

The neat thing here, is if you can figure out the weight of armor, the D20 rules say cortosis weave adds 15,000 credits to armor construction. This means you can reverse engineer the cost of a metric ton of cortosis, and even figure out the cost to cortosis-plate a starship (ridiculous, but fun to know!)

[shootingwomprats]

Hmmmm, ingot could be a size I guess with a standard median material used for your base line. For example: we choose durasteel, produced in 20lbs ingots of 12"x12"x12" cubes.

As for how this is packaged. You can do it by volume or weight. If by volume all ingots will universally be 12"x12"x12" with varying weight depending on it density. For example if beskar (Mandolorian iron) weighs twice as much as durasteel. An ingot would weigh 40 pounds but physically takes up 12"x12"x12" of space.
_________________
Don Diestler
Host, Shooting Womp Rats
The D6 Podcast
http://d6holocron.com/shootingwomprats
@swd6podcast, Twitter

[tetsuoh]

we started on this a while back but never got it finished out for our games completely.

we gave values D wise to each type and alloy we had on the list and the base price of a "unit"

that unit became a measure of dice - a pip.

thus a suit of armor that standardly had 1D physical and 2pip energy (5 total) would require 5 units of material of both an underlay and overlay, the underlay being the insulation/leather/cloth, the overlay being the metal/plastics/bone/leather/weave etc etc.

It got complex and video gamey but was still fun. our costs were different though I do believe - as beskar in our game was like 2k credits a unit i think.

we scaled by size category - I think we ended up with 2x/6x/10x/100x

also its WAY easier to say each "unit" is a volume measurement only - the exact opposite of how freight works in the game "tons only" because then that the price for the amount to cover a size of object - then you factor weight. Like adding in properties of how certain metals are so heavy in their unalloyed state that using them as armor would crush a person or negate a ships maneuverability completely if not make it unmovable brick.

[Raven Redstar]

Those prices look similar per unit directly from SWTOR. With those items, I really would suggest having the per unit be per hectogram (hundred grams). So to find out a kilogram worth of material material would be 10x the cost. Beskar is extremely rare, so multiplying cost per kilogram by 10 wouldn't be unreasonable.

I was originally thinking about having it as per gram, but then the cost of a kg of durasteel would be 4,000 credits which seems too steep. 40 credits still seems cheap to me, but it seems much more reasonable than 4,000.

1 Ton of steel costs between $1,000 and $6,000 US. 1 Metric ton of durasteel would then cost 40,000 credits, which is pretty expensive. So maybe make it a sliding scale based on rarity of the item in question. For Durasteel, it's 4 credits per kilogram, which would make 1 metric ton of durasteel cost 4,000 credits.

However, maybe make it so that Beskar is set in 100g units, meaning that 1kg of Mandalorian Iron costs 3,650 credits, and a metric ton would cost around 3.65 million credits.
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RR
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[Mojomoe]

I was thinking along the same lines as well. The only hitch is when you start to calculate ship-sized things.

The best guess I could find for the weight of a YT-1300 is 400 metric tons. While this is debatable, it seems like a fair ballpark. Even if we assume the YT-1300 is ALL Durasteel (which it's not - but it's still a very cheap material), it would cost 1.6 million credits in material alone.

From that we can start to figure a calculation method that works well on both the low and high end of the scale.

[Mojomoe]

Ok, this is interesting.

And bear in mind that every bit of this is fan conjecture - and even the prices listed in TOR, which are balanced for in-game currency and not fiction. So I know pulling a system out of this is farfetched, but it's a fun thought exercise.

So I ran across this listing on the Star Wars Combine, which goes into WAY more detail (you can MINE! And SELL it! Insane!).

Their unit of measurement is the cubic meter, and all prices assume 1 m^3 as the standard. They also list weight per unit, so a weight of 2 is 2 tons per cubic meter. The prices they list are similar, if slightly higher. We mighy multiply the TOR number by 10 in order to get similar figures:

http://www.gweep.net/~jedi/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Totj.Crystal

Thoughts?

[Raven Redstar]

[Mojomoe]

So it sounds like there are two quick ways to approach this: by weight or by mass.

If we approach by weight, let's see... Almost everything else in 2ERE (and I assume REUP) is weight-based, yes? So I'd buy 3 metric tons of Mandalorian Iron, which would cost X. If I wanted to turn it into armor, and keep it easy, I would assume a suit of armor requires 10 kg (a ballpark) of material. This would be not taking different masses into account - it would be a flat figure. That would be 10 kg of beskar, 10 kg of Durasteel, or 10 kg of gold. Interweave would take 5 kg (50%), and a coating would take 1 kg. Weight would need to be converted to mass when figuring out how much space is taken up in transit.

The alternative is mass-based, which is more accurate but takes a little more calculating (or a good table). I would buy 3 cubic meters of Mandalorian Iron, which would cost Y. If I wanted to turn it into armor, I would base that off mass (which is technically the more accurate calculation, as different materials weigh more or less). A suit of armor needs, say, 0.5 cubic meters of material, 0.25 for interweaving, and 0.05 for coating. Mass would need to be converted to weight when determining cargo encumbrance during transit. It would also need to be considered if (and only if) you were adding significant heavy material to armor or a vessel(a solid gold suit or spaceship, say, would be MUCH slower, or incur heavy DEX or Speed penalties.)

What are people's thoughts on this?

[Mojomoe]

I do like the idea of industrial discounts and/or scrap metal vs virgin material.

I don't have the industrial discount info, but I was able to determine that virgin steel averages 40 cents a pound, while scrap is around 20 cents a pound. We can say that scrap material is on average a 50% savings, and possibly introduce a mechanic whereby you need to process it to get it to a workable state. (Most f the scrap was literally that - scrap, still in whatever form it came in. Radiators, doors, etc)

Combined with a mechanic or set of figures for bulk discount vs single unit purchase, we could conceivably have a pretty solid crafting system on our hands very easily.

[Raven Redstar]

Volume makes more sense from a crafting standpoint, but weight makes more sense from shipping and trade standpoint.

I would suggest doing a mix of the two. Do price based on weight, but have it set up in units of cubic meters or fractions of cubic meters for crafting requirements. We'd just have to figure out how much each material weighs per cubic meter, which seems like a ton of work to me.

I can think of some craft based players that would be totally interested in a refined crafting system for the game. As well as some engineer/inventor characters which I could use material cost and availability as a limiting factor for their crafting. Having it in writing would make it less work for me, except for making market adjustments and such.
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RR
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[Mojomoe]

That's a good idea.

Also I jut realized I posted the wrong thing - that previous link was for a different conversation about lightsaber crystals.

Thai was what I meant to post:

http://www.swcombine.com/rules/?Mining

Which includes weight, mass and price for a bunch of materials!

[Raven Redstar]

Are you planning on using the crafting mats from SWTOR, or do you have another list that you're working from?

That link is ultra-crunchy! Maybe even too much crunch for my tastes.
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RR
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[Mojomoe]

Oh man, you have no idea. If you really want to test your crunch threshold, take a look at their material equations. These are used for production of commodities, but they interestingly choose to base it on die codes. That is to say, the amount of material used in an item/vessel is based on its strength, so armor with, say, +2D physical would take 6 units of material, but a +3D would take 9 units. And this gets WAY more complicated, as they have different equations for each item you want to craft!

http://www.swcombine.com/rules/?Material_Equations