Are We The 1%?

I'm a billionaire IRL. In zimbabwean dollars. But in ED I mostly fly Gutamaya or Saud Kruger ships and don't care about expenses, so I must have made it big.
 
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I laugh at the peasants of the 1%.

But they get access to their own Jameson Memorial with all ships and even better discounts.

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This has been clonking around in my head as I've been trundling around the galaxy lately. Landing at A, filling up my Type-9 with a few hundred tons, and flying off to sell it at B, I feel like an interstellar truck driver. I don't feel fancy, I'm not sitting in luxury (not in a Type 9, that's for damn sure!), I'm just a simple man making my way through the galaxy. Except that my ship is worth a nine-figure amount, and I can expect a few million in profits when I get to my destination. Add up the value of the ships I have stashed away back home, and my net worth is in the billions. And I'm not even that well off. I'm sure there are players out there who are Jeff Bezos rich.

So we're rich, but are we abnormally rich? Has money become so inflated by 3307 that the 52k you drop on a Hauler is the equivalent of a teenager's first hatchback, rather than buy-a-small-house amounts of money? Is being that level of rich a fairly common occurrence, making us the scruffy Han Solo style everyman members of society? Are we more on a par with a farmer, working with a (relatively) small staff and a pool of expensive machinery to Farming Simulator our way to glory and riches? Are we more like a shipping magnate, with a fleet of container ships that we can somehow operate solo and use only one at a time? Or are we completely, ludicrously, disgustingly rich? Are we show up to work in a suit rich, or show up to work in plaid and jeans rich?

How do you think the folks on the planets and space stations we deliver to regard people like us? Are we living-the-dream celebrities who've accrued enough wealth to liberate ourselves from the dreariness of normal existence? Or are we no different from truck drivers, postal workers, baristas, just people doing a fairly mundane job? Do they envy us? Resent us? Forget we even exist? Are we rich enough to have our own entry on space Wikipedia, or are we just nobodies?

Serious answer: look at the price of a ton of gold. With a T9 you are richer than bezos could ever dream of. With a sidey you are already unspeakably rich. You are not the 1%, you are the 0.000000001%. the real miners are the poor sods slaving away on a 6G planet.
 
I'm curious what it takes to actually destroy a ship into a planet. I smacked the ground crazy hard in the 'Conda the other day and the shields just sorta shrugged it off. Thought for sure she was gonna crater in lol.

Yeah those DC' 's are evil, can't trust em! I only use them for special situations because they can save even the most reckless approach lol.

Let's just say that gravity was involved, and exuberant boosting lol!
 
Serious answer: look at the price of a ton of gold. With a T9 you are richer than bezos could ever dream of. With a sidey you are already unspeakably rich. You are not the 1%, you are the 0.000000001%. the real miners are the poor sods slaving away on a 6G planet.

I agree that any CMDR is automatically way beyond the top 1% of humans in wealth in the Elite setting.

That said, I don't think gold is a remotely good benchmark for wealth in such a setting. Gold is rare, on Earth's surface. As soon as interplanetary space travel becomes cheap and easy, gold won't be rare any more, and gold prices will collapse.

In the Elite setting, gold supply will have surely increased exponentially faster than human population seem to have.
 
The OP's question links strongly to the often-asked question, "What is a credit worth, in terms of equivalence to 21st century Earth currencies?". Which has been discussed in numerous threads in the past.

The difficulty is in finding that equivalence point, a common frame of reference by which the 3306 ED credit and the 2021 US dollar can be compared. Because our two cultures are astonishingly different - that's what 1285 years of social and technological change will do.

For example, food and drink. Here on 21st century Earth, poor people mostly eat staple foods, crops and animal by-products they grow themselves, while rich people eat highly processed, prepackaged foods. In the ED universe, it's the other way around: the teeming masses huddling in the domes on crowded industrial planets are daily eating reconstituted foodstuff "printed" by autochefs using algae-based "food cartridges"; this printed food is mass-produced in such quantity that it is either free, or at near-zero cost. Actual fruit, vegetables, dairy, fish and meat are expensive luxury goods, consumed on special occasions or by the wealthy upper classes, though probably somewhat cheaper and more available if you happen to actually live on an agricultural planet.

On 21st century Earth where "natural" foods are still cheap and readily available, alcoholic beverages made from such foodstuffs, like wine and beer, are considered "normal" and are likewise cheap. But in the ED universe, the vast majority of people are forced to resort to drinking flavoured industrial alcohol; genuine beer and wine are luxury goods imported from agricultural planets, to be consumed only on special occasions.

So, comparing food prices isn't a good equivalence point. But in case you're wondering, I calculated back in 2016 that the price of a pint of beer in ED would be about 0.15 credits, wholesale. Which in turn would give an exchange rate of 1 credit = US$53.

Gold, likewise, is an unreliable "universal standard of value", because in the ED universe, gold is far, far more abundant than it is here on Earth. Which only stands to reason: gold can be found just by going out to an asteroid belt and strip-mining a rock; an hours work in basic mining gear can get you several hundred tonnes of the stuff. Beer, genuine beer, would still need to be made the old-fashioned, biological way, with grain and yeast and brewing time.

Look at it this way: On Earth today, 1 tonne of gold will buy you about 8000 tonnes of beer. In ED, at galactic average prices, 1 tonne of gold will buy you only 118 tonnes of beer - and that's after the gold price spike in the ED marketplace a few months ago.

Back to the OP's question: depending on which yardstick you use, a credit is worth somewhere between US$10 and US$2000. Making a brand new Sidewinder worth between US$320,000 and US$64 million. An Anaconda? Between 1.5 billion and 300 billion. By comparison, the space shuttle Endeavour cost US$1.7 billion.

On that basis, the vast majority of the galaxy's 6.8 trillion people cannot afford a Sidewinder; space travel of any kind would be an expensive dream.
 
Nah. We are just the long haul truckers and taxi drivers of space. Once you have several cutters, a FC or two (if you have an alt char), and you decide where and when to make your millions, or not, cause you never need to 'work' to grind credits again. Then you are the 1%.

I guess that describes me pretty well...
2 accounts, both with FCs and both with multiple Cutters (a trucker and a mining build) and Corvettes (a SSD mining and a combat build) and multiple Anacondas. Along with pretty much every other ship I want and 15bn in the bank in both player accounts.

Does that make me a 2%er? 😜
 
Given how all signs point to starship ownershp suggesting we are indeed the glitterati of the galaxy, it always makes me chuckle when an NPC pirate scans me and finds no cargo then says "my children will go hungry tonight". Really? That's a nice nine figure ship you've got there that you used to interdict me, shame if you had to liquidate it or borrow against it to put food on the table.
 
...it always makes me chuckle when an NPC pirate scans me and finds no cargo then says "my children will go hungry tonight". Really? That's a nice nine figure ship you've got there that you used to interdict me, shame if you had to liquidate it or borrow against it to put food on the table.
I'd laugh if this weren't such a common occurrence IRL :(
 
Given how all signs point to starship ownershp suggesting we are indeed the glitterati of the galaxy, it always makes me chuckle when an NPC pirate scans me and finds no cargo then says "my children will go hungry tonight". Really? That's a nice nine figure ship you've got there that you used to interdict me, shame if you had to liquidate it or borrow against it to put food on the table.

But what if his 'children' are more ships? Mats and engineering are like chicken and gravy for ships.
 
If someone rolls up to a food bank in a Ferrari, looking to receive a food package, surely they'd get told to hop it?
OT, but...

I was suggesting some more insipid behaviours... for example a friend's (now ex) husband cancelled their child's trust fund and used the money to buy a spoiler for their car, while also claiming unemployment benefits)
 
Given how all signs point to starship ownershp suggesting we are indeed the glitterati of the galaxy, it always makes me chuckle when an NPC pirate scans me and finds no cargo then says "my children will go hungry tonight". Really? That's a nice nine figure ship you've got there that you used to interdict me, shame if you had to liquidate it or borrow against it to put food on the table.
Of course that is assuming that the NPC pilots actually own the ship they fly and just aren't hired aircrew (spacecrew??) flying under a really bad contract.
 
I have a theory that "credits" we use is an artificial and space only currency, used solely within Pilot's Federation. And real money are in use beyond that bubble of ours.

Think of it - I'm not the wealthiest of CMDRs but if I'd sell all my ships and modules I'd have 3B credits available. With that cash I could just buy an island on a tropical planet, bunch of sexy maids and die in the next 10 years from a atherosclerosis, still leaving most of my wealth intact.

When single data delivery mission pays a regular person's annual income then there must be some sort of exchange. In credits we are multibillionaires. But not knowing the final exchange for "real" currency we simply don't know how wealthy we are. Maybe 1 Imperial dollar, pound, mark or whatever it's called equals to 100M credits?
 
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