The Basics
From Chosen Space V2 Wiki
To assist many of us out there that have no real idea as to how this ship building stuff works I thought I would try to put together a small guide based on what we, as a faction, have learned from owning our own shipyard. A brief tutorial of common myths and such to help everyone else figure out why things are so darn costly out here in the Chosen Space Universe.
First the Basics. There are 5 types of ship hulls, or chassis, available for design within the game. Each has a slight advantage/disadvantage over the next in line. They are as follows:
- The Warship: Heavy Damage Capacity with a higher cost to isoton ratio than any other chassis.
- The Trader: These are your freighters, and they are relatively cheap when compared to the Warship, but they are very weak and should never play alone.
- The Transport: Weakest Damage Capacity but makes up for this with its extremely cheap price (or so they say.) This is also the ship that will one day be able to shuttle passengers around the universe.
- The Miner: Almost identical to the Transport Class Chassis (a little more expensive points wise), but this is the only ship a mining bay can be strapped onto.
- The Merchant: A middle of the road damage rating with a lower cost per isoton ratio than the Warship. A good all around Chassis from what we can see, but time will tell.
The Costs: Ships cost $0 to build. It costs the shipyard owner points and turns to build a ship. So why are the $$$ and points so high? A shipyard owner has to collect all the parts (Engines, Reactors, Jump Drives, Nav Computers, Iridium, Hull Plating, Units, etc...) that go into a ship, and those are costly. Some build them themselves, some buy them from others, some... Well we don't know where some get them from, but at the end of a day you can spend millions, hundreds of millions (if not billions for some of the bigger shipyard) of credits on parts for the shipyard.
Now the Points, why are they so high? Well the way the ship design is set up, the ship yard owner does not set the Point Price for a ship. That is set by what you want to have on the ship. Not only do you have to supply the part, but it costs points to install that part onto a ship. Even a basic 10,000 isoton (The smallest hull available by the way) Tranport hull with nothing but LVL1 everything on it and no cargo bay starts at a miserable 404 points. You want to add a 0.1 plasma gun on there? Sure thing, that will be 40 points. Want a 0.2400 reactor added on for that extra power you need? Well you just added 460 points to the price of the ship, and that is only for the reactor. Did we mention that since that new reactor is 8,000 isotons you need to increase the size of your ship's hull? (Unless you just want a flying reactor of course) So to do that you need to add another 2-5 points for every 100 isotons you want to add to the chassis size. But be careful if you want to add armor later, for every 100 isotons you add will add another 1-5 points per 100 isotons for armor protection. (Q1 adds 1 point per 100 isotons, Q5 adds 3 points and Q9 adds 5 points)
When a ship is finally designed and ready to be built only the dollar amount can be set. The points charged are the points that the ship cost to actually build. So the shipyard basically recovers the points it spent on the ship, and the dollar amount they are charging covers everything else: Parts, labor, collection time, and the profit margin they want to make.
And we thought people were just making up points costs off the top of their head... Didn't you?