How much is a station worth? For a webcomic

[Zevbutt]

I’m writing a webcomic set in Elite and for a significant plot point I need to know how much a Coriolis station is worth, and alternativly how large a bounty on a player would be for destroying one. I was going to see how many of each commodity are used in station construction community goals then ballpark off of that. I would crunch the numbers myself but I can’t find the info i need to calculate. I can just spit out a number myself, but I’d like a bit of input from the community. Detailed calculations and of-the-top guesses are both welcomed

P.S. I apologize if this post is in the wrong section of the forum, this is my first time posting so I’m not quite sure where to put this.

 

[Sapyx]

No no, it's a perfectly valid Lore question.

Part of the problem with using a "build a space station" Communty Goal is that the goals of such events were usually quite generic: "Deliver palladium, tantalum and robotics", and it was up to players to decide which ones to bring. On the basis of some past CGs, a Coriolis station is made of several million tonnes of almost-pure palladium!

A more realistic effort might be obtainable from analysing the quantities of materials needed to repair the space stations that are damaged by Thargoids. Logically, it would take much more than these demands to actually build a space station from scratch. And equally logically, the differences in demanded materials from station to station indicate that (a) not every Coriolis is made up of exactly the same stuff inside (which is only to be expected, if some are mint-fresh new while others have been sitting there for a couple hundred years), and (b) that the actual damaged parts of space stations differ from station to station, even if the graphics for "damaged station" all look much the same.

I would suggest: pick some damaged Coriolis stations at random. Add up the requirements to repair those stations, and that would be a good rule-of-thumb estimate for how much cargo would be needed to build a Coriolis station from scratch.

I'll give it a go: picking four damaged Coriolis-class stations at random, in the following systems: Brib, HIP 9599, Lunguni and Ngaiawang.

First, we need an estimate of the mass of an intact Coriolis station. Collating the requirements for each of these and adding them together, we see total requirements requested varying, from 1.3 million tonnes to 2.5 million tonnes. Since most of the station is still physically intact and present on-site, this amount is only a small fraction of the total weight of the station. Let's assume a nice, even 10 million tonnes.

So, what's the breakdown of that 10 million tonnes, commodity-wise? Using the requirements of these four stations to generate an "average composition" of a Coriolis-class station, the numbers I calculate are something like in the table below.

Commodity	No. of tonnes	Unit	Cost
	estimate	value/t
Beryllium	1884693	8229	15509141157
Indium	1466943	5774	8470127841
Gallium	456321	5107	2330428903
Titanium	231039	1106	255528970
Copper	283812	489	138783983
Superconductors	1313698	6662	8751854383
Power generators	356591	536	191132683
Water purifiers	209460	310	64932503
Computer components	80803	540	43633465
Auto-fabricators	130319	3719	484655820
Ceramic composites	195797	227	44445807
CMM composites	311633	5976	1862319323
Insulating membranes	248714	10861	2701283751
Power converters	194178	1254	243498729
Natural fabrics	218993	440	96357023
Tantalum	172556	3929	677971729
Lithium	291219	1582	460708248
Aluminium	177117	348	61636610
Synthetic fabrics	224566	214	48057174
Polymers	811006	181	146792029
Robotics	68378	1830	125130889
Semiconductors	339126	936	317421644
Emergency power cells	248755	2221	552485134
Computer components	84287	540	45514814
Total	10000000		43623842612

So, on that basis, and using "galactic average price" for each commodity as shown above (which is what a 34th century insurer and debt collector is likely to use), the physical components of a Coriolis station alone cost aboout 43 billion credits. Then there's labour costs and other overheads; even considering reduced labour costs due to automation and/or slavery (depending on where you're building the station), I think 7 billion credits sounds reasonable, a number I plucked out of thin air to ensure that a nice round figure to build your own Coriolis station would be 50 billion credits.

 

[Zevbutt]

Wow thank you so much! Thats some wonderful number-crunching and helps me alot (it also sates my curiosity; a coriolis station seems to be worth much more than I presumed). Now all I need to figure out is the bounty part. I think for determining the bounty for destroying a station I’ll use a combination of the parts and labor for repair that you put together and then bring it down to a base percentage, maybe 5%? A 2.5 Bil credit bounty sounds a bit large but it’s plenty big for the plot point I intend on. Thanks again! If anyone else wishes to add their opinion I would appreciate it!

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Trade/mining CGs to build stations I think of as bringing in extra supplies of specific components the station project has a shortage of, rather than supplying the full amount.

The original repair goals for the stations were 10 times higher than today, so I agree with Sapyx but multiply the final answer by ten to account for NPCs doing 90% of the repair supplies now. That would give 500 billion for a station, which seems a bit more reasonable (and perhaps still an underestimate) - these things can dock a good fraction of 50 billion credits of ships just in the hangars, so a Coriolis costing well over 1 trillion credits is entirely possible. For a slightly silly but perhaps price-accurate analogy, a Coriolis can launch Cutters like a Cutter launches SLFs. The SLF costs 16 thousand times less than the Cutter, so the Coriolis costs 16000 times more than the Cutter, or about 20 trillion credits.

This Galnet article sees a company post an annual operating loss of 5 trillion credits, which causes a significant but not catastrophic drop in its share price.
https://community.elitedangerous.com/en/galnet/uid/289d3107159c63abf2b197520776393f8414b579
That's a "we've probably overvalued it a bit" drop, not a "quick, sell the shares while they're still worth something" drop. But it's a good rough estimate of "a large amount of money" when you're dealing on the scale of major corporations, and a Coriolis is again probably in that sort of price range.



As far as the bounty for destroying one goes, I think you're out of the realm of mere criminality and into the realm of politics.
- you would certainly get people hired to kill you for it. Their pay for doing so would probably be in the 5-25 million credit range, based on existing political assassination missions (the political bounties placed on Salomé and her associates also fell in this range)
- you would not be able to pay the bounty off regardless of how much money you offered
- your hunters would be working on mission-pay rather than bounty-pay schemes and therefore would pursue outside of the jurisdiction
- there is the possibilitiy of mass-scale seek-and-destroy missions being sponsored against you and your associates (as happened e.g. with the League of Reparation)
(For comparison, the Thargoids don't even destroy stations - they just beat them up a bit - and they get a tri-superpower cooperation dedicated to their elimination. You'd probably get similar.)

If you did want to treat it as purely a criminal bounty - perhaps if the destruction was as the result of recklessness or negligence rather than political intent - then bearing in mind that your average PvP murderer can run up a few billion in bounties pretty quickly just by blowing up "a few" ships, you'd probably again be wanting to add a couple of zeroes onto that for a bounty in the 100 billion - 1 trillion range.