Post by Pttg on Oct 30, 2018 7:33:36 GMT
In order to better estimate the longstanding question "how much is a credit worth," I decided to figure out what salaries probably look like in the CoaDE universe. For this, I'll use ¢ as the unit name for credits, and SI modifiers.
Let's start with the bare-minimum number. This is exceedingly low: 0-credit slavery, minus 0.21¢ per day for oxygen (based on material cost), 4.3¢ per day for water (water rental, really), and a varying cost for food, but probably in the 40¢/day range for daily food. That last number is taken by using the credit cost of a biomanufactured organic compound, specifically spider silk.
Yes, getting conscripted would suck awfully, but if the alternative is death, many people would just struggle through, accumulate debt, and just hope to get back home before getting irradiated or evacuated. Still, we'd probably see more mutinies if the conscripts were janissaries. It's safe to say that the lowest possible salary is something like -44.5¢/day, or -16,209.15¢/year. We can also take 16k¢ as the bare minimum cost of life support for a year, not counting ablative radiation shielding and other incidental consumables.
Alternatively, the non-structural elements of a crew module come out to 9.5k¢. Almost all of that is internal "aluminum" which represents electronics, heat management, and such, but since that is all rentable, repairable, and bare-minimum mil-spec essential hardware, I feel safe in including it in the costs. Since the minimum mission spec is six months, then the annual cost is something like 18k¢, close enough to my other figure for me to say OK. I'll point out the 16k¢ number comes from buying a year's supply of consumables all at once, with no machinery. the 18k¢ number is buying a coffinfull of air, a glass of water, and a meal, plus enough equipment and spare parts to keep re-using those three things for a year. The fact they're so close despite using very different methods makes me pretty comfortable with the numbers.
If the society is stable at this point, than at least civilians are paid enough to stay alive without going into comical mega-poverty over a lifetime. So they're getting paid bare-minimum 15k¢/year (presuming they live in hyper-dense complexes with better efficiency than spaceships through scale alone).
Let's call 15k¢/year our minimum wage. Using contemporary data to compare salary ratios....
Low-skill cleaning jobs and food prep workers, plus a few other tasks where the job description is "be like a velvet rope, but slightly less effective at keeping drunk patrons in line," are all the lowest-paid jobs in the highly-automated modern USA. Spaceflight may change that a little but when times are tough, these jobs are going to pay the minimum survivable wage, which is something like 15k¢ in the poorest habitats but higher in better ones. If habitats vary the same way countries do, then very wealthy habitats may offer minimum wages 1500% those of the very poorest.
That's where things get interesting. Let's pick a middle-of-the-pack habitat and say that an unskilled worker there can expect five times the rental-coffin cost of living. A manufacturing worker such as an assembler or something can expect about 150% of the pay of a nonskilled worker, or 112.5k¢/year. This is the guy who does manufacturing work that probably could be automated but isn't because it's not cost effective to do so, like assembly of small electronics after soldering and forming.
Let's go a little higher up. A dispatcher for emergency services is a reasonable job to preserve even in a highly-automated future (which this is only marginally). They're probably paid something like 150k¢/year in this middling hab, as are all the civilian maintenence workers for a lot of our ships. Not our nuclear techs or weapons techs, though... Nuke techs pull in something like 300k¢/year, as do civilian captains and other high-ranking civilian crew. That's nothing next to a skilled surgeon, though. A proper expert surgeon in our middle-wealth habitat can get over 900k¢/year, and in the most wealthy habitats they'd be making more than 2.5M¢!
Even if that average surgeon at a wealthy colony is spending half his money in taxes to fund his military defense and half of the remainder on a comfortable cost of living (giving him 46 times the space, resources, and technology needed for bare tin-can survival,) he can save up enough to buy a gunskiff outright in about 11 years.
That sort of calculation goes out the window when you start running into megawealthy individuals. It's a complicated issue I'll resolve by ignoring a bunch of things and saying that the average modern billionare has an income of about $80M, which is more an annual allowance but whatever. That converts to 225M¢. Surely half of that goes into maintaining an adequate lifestyle, but that means he or she must merely choose between buying a Corvette or a Laser Frigate this year, or maybe assembling a pirate fleet of three Corsairs.
Of course, none of that accounts for the crew salaries. At ~225k¢ for an Able Spaceman (from a wealthy hab) on a six-month cruise, only your Bill Gateses and Koches will be mounting very large privateer fleets. It's after midnight right now but rough estimate, a corsair's crew costs about 17M¢/Year. Not outlandish, but certainly not worth ignoring.
My takeaway is that spending 10M¢ to protect the habitat holding 20M¢ worth of brains and hands is actually a good investment. Any ship that costs less than its crew compliment is, on the other hand, a waste of money.
Oh, and converting credits to dollars is not really meaningful but if you're comparing apples to pears you can say very roughly that 10¢=$1.
