9 October 2023

The crew has decided to accept the offer of the Drinaxian king (ahem, the Emperor of the Sindalian Empire) to become privateers on the Empire's behalf.

This means the following for the players:

• the players need to figure out a decision-making structure: principle agreement: aim for something that is flexible and allows for rotation of command roles, but lets characters with domain specific skills act on them.

• the players needs to figure out a way to handle money. Principle agreements "the ship eats first" and "expenses that benefit the mission-readiness are considered shared".

I see three likely models:

1) The Commune

All characters pool all of their resources to improve the ship maximally and provide starting capital.
All characters who work on the ship, receive an equal salary / profit share.

This probably feels nice for us as players.
Eliminates a lot of character-level bookkeeping.
It seems at odds with in-game reality, and may be unacceptable to some PCs.
It requires liquidation of all private assets, meaning that a lot of backstory / plot hooks become obsolete.

2) (Soon-to-be) worker-owned

All characters who work on the ship receive an equal salary / profit share.
Characters who have ship shares at the start (or 5 MCr in cash), can choose to apply the ship share (or 5 MCr) to the ship for improvements. This entitles them to a(n additional) profit share.
The ship pays out ship shares over time and slowly becomes a fully worker-owned collective.

Decreases wealth + income inequality among all characters (or all PCs) over time to the point of meaninglessness.
Gives characters free choice about using private wealth to improve the ship.
May make ship improvements slower if people choose not to contribute.
Is in line with in-game economic logic, but diminishes in-crew inequality, which may be nice for players.
Creates space for politically colored gameplay (corporations hate us! workers love us! We'll let you go if you give your workers the ship!)

3) Capital feeds only itself

All characters who work on the ship, receive an equal salary / profit share.
No one donates private wealth to the ship.
The ship can take out loans on crew-owned ship shares or other assets to improve itself.
Paying off loans on ship shares become part of the operating expenses of the ship.

Increases income / wealth inequality among PC's, but (if the salary is sufficient) probably not in a way that is salient since we all have "enough" money.
Nicely hypercapitalist, like the rest of the in-game universe.
Higher operating expenses due to loan repayments.
Allows for easy leaving / joining of new characters.
Seems at odds with the clearly materialist leanings of some PCs to leave such an amazing asset unowned.

This means the following for the characters:

• we get to name the ship

Suggestions here:

Hippocampus	(after the sea horses of Sink)
The Second Certain Thing	(Death and... taxes, of course, and a Culture reference)
Brick's Beautiful Bride	(he did meet her after his Bachelor party)

• We get to improve the ship.

Improvement	Current state	ship shares needed
Turret	nonfunctional	1
Holographic hull	partial function, power drain]]	1
Maintenance cost	10.000 cr/mth	4 (to 2667 cr / mth)
Hull strength	72	2 (to 88)
Countermeasure suite	DM+4	2 (to DM +6)
Power plant	75% (195)	1 (260)
Jump drive	DM -2	2
Manoeuver drive	unreliable (1/36 nonfunctional)	2

Total ship shares needed for full repair: 15 or (after the start of the campaign) 75 MCr cash per PoD rules.

Referee Question: do we use original rules or PoD rules for valuation of ship shares (or do we homebrew)?

The rule sets seem incompatible with each other, and PoD rules ignore important parts of the original rules of ship shares entirely, and using either one wholesale, seems to over bork soem aspect of gameplay.

It seems like the PoD rules aim to have +- 62 shares per ship, but for something that's worth 318 million credits, that seems bizarrely low. It seems much more workable to be able to make 'smaller' shares that people can earn more easily.

If we follow PoD and the value of any held ship share from character generation is now worth 5 times what they were, do we adjust the payouts associated with ship shares / ship ownership from the original rules (retroactively)? An annual return of 1000Cr on a 5MCr investment is, well, stupid. It also breaks down when a 25% owned yacht has an annual return of 25000 Cr (because the 5 MCr share valuation means you'd only have 3 ship shares, equivalent to a (by original rules) 3000 Cr annual payout).

Homebrew proposal: we could assign a ship share a value of 3.18 MCR (100 shares per ship) or another easy-to-work with value, and then adjusting the number of ship shares needed for each repair based on the cash cost of the repairs, by multiplying the number of ship shares needed to do repairs to an amount that seems reasonable, but is a bit less than the multiplication factor om the ship share value.

This would be a great incentive for people to spend ship shares because they'd be way more valuable as 'ship-repair resources' than as assets held (for passive income reasons, ship shares are utterly useless)

It would also do a lot to diminish the currently ridiculous wealth inequality between Persy and the rest of the party by doubling or tripling (or whatever) the asset wealth of any crew member who owns ship shares but not Persy's wealth (he'd still probably bring in a few more ship shares than any other player, but maybe 2x as many, as opposed to like 10-12 times.

• how many ship shares does each player want to sell off to improve the ship?
• which ship improvements to we want to make (first)

• Which characters do which jobs on board (and do we want people to (be able to) do more than one job?

Role	Mandatory?	Character
Captain	M	on rotation / watch?	maybe we use a 'commander' role instead?
Pilot	M	Randy / Diogo / (Persy)
Astrogator	M	Persy
Engineer	M	Pent / Stigo / Diogo
Maintenance	M	Pent / Stigo / Diogo
Gunner (barbette)	M	?
Gunner (turret)	X	?
Medic	M	Heloise
Broker	O	Persy
Steward	O	Persy
Marine 1	O	Brick
Marine 2	O	Franky
Marine 3	O	2

• What kind of watch schedule do we set?

With a crew of 8 we could do a schedule that gives everyone 1 day + night with just 1 three hour shift every four days, and between 6-9 hours 'on' on the three intermittent days. We could pair 'command-capable' crew with 'non-commander' crew like so: https://www.followingseas.media/blog/2017/5/8/best-watch-schedule-ever

This seems like a very gentle, and relatively sociable schedule.

• other?

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