The overhead with running any ship, like most businesses, gets arranged into several groups of cost. The basic yacht build out looks like this:
| The Garden (Type Y) | 200 tons |
|---|---|
| Manoeuvre drive (A, 1G) | Model/1 |
| Jump drive (A, jump-1) | CPU 2 |
| Power plant (A, 1) | Storage 4 |
| Fuel (50 tons – two jumps) | |
| Hold (11 tons, plus boats) | |
| Hardpoint | |
| Crew and passengers | Vehicles |
| Pilot | Air/raft |
| Engineer | Ship’s boat |
| Medic | ATV |
| Steward | |
| 1 double stateroom (owner) | |
| 4 crew staterooms | |
| 8 passenger staterooms |
Keeping the lights on
Keeping the yacht in the air needs fuel, maintenance, and a place to park when you’re not in the air.
Fuel. Filling the tank on a yacht costs 25,000 credits (refined) or 5,000 credits (unrefined). The yacht can reasonably operate with half a full tank, because a full tank lets the ship run for two jumps.
Each jump burns 20 tons of fuel, and approximately one week of time.
Each week in space burns 2.5 tons of fueld.
Maintenance. Only a foolish ship owner puts off ship maintenance. The annual maintenance cost for a yacht is 51,057 credits, or 981.87 weekly. Traditionally, ship owners carve off a weekly maintenance fee and bank it in a fund for the annual maintenance. A subtle point about the annual maintenance: it takes two weeks, and has to be performed at a class A or B starport (because they have the appropriate equipment).
Berthing. When parked, the ship doesn’t have to pay life-support overhead. Instead, it has to pay for the berthing at a starport: 100 credits for the first six days, and 100 per day afterwards.
Thus the total mechanical overhead for staying in a port for a week and refuelling to prepare for the next trip costs about 27,350 credits.
Keeping passengers alive
The yacht can’t fly itself, so people need to do that.
Crew. The crew costs for a yacht are not inconsiderable; at minimum, the ship needs a Pilot and Engineer, and most local authorities require the presence of a Medic on board with or without passengers. If the yacht carries passengers, most local authorities require (and passengers certainly expect) the presence of a steward. Payouts to crew must happen at least monthly, but often more frequently to reduce overhead accounting to a weekly cost. A minimally talented crew complement (one steward), assuming the ship owner isn’t performing one of those tasks, costs 3,250 credits weekly.
Life Support. Life support costs are minimal while berthed, but life out in space is effectively life sealed in a tin can for weeks at a time. A yacht with no passengers, but full crew plus the owner in place costs 5,000 credits per week in space. A yacht with a full passenger complement costs 13,000 credits per week in space.
Adding it up
Adding it up means the weekly costs for a yacht are like this, assuming refined fuel and fully loaded with passengers:
| Circumstances | Effective cost |
|---|---|
| In jump space | 28,500 credits |
| In normal space | 18,500 credits |
| In space port | 4,500 credtis |
Note that, in space, each passenger costs 1,000 credits per week (in life support costs); in space port, passengers are assumed not included.
So, where’s the money coming from?
For yachts, it seems as if there are three potential sources of reasonable revenue, and one less reasonable.
Passengers. High passengers seem like the meat of a yacht’s revenue stream. Each high passenger contributes 10,000 credits a week per jump towards a destination world, which makes the break-even point for a single jump trip three passengers. The yacht can accommodate up to eight.
Mail. It seems reasonable that mail can be a steady source of revenue for a yacht. Adding a turret weapon would likely sacrifice one passenger spot for a gunner crew member, and lose 5 tons of cargo space. The payback for that is 25,000 credits per mail run.
The cost for the turret weapon is a one-time cost, and if missiles are chosen and used, there is a replacement cost for missiles. Lasers can be used within the power-plant capacity of the ship and have no consumable cost.
The cost for a gunner crew-member is 1,000 credits in salary, and the incurred life-support overhead, and lost revenue from another occupied stateroom in the crew complement.
Charters. Chartering price for the yacht probably falls into several general configurations (for a two-week charter block):
Mail-yacht (6 tons cargo space, owner plus five crew, seven passengers): about 61,500 credits.
Non-mail yacht (11 tons cargo space, owner plus four crew, eight passengers): about 82,000 credits.
Cargo. Cargo for a yacht can consume 11 tons (if not fitted out for mail), or 6 tons (if fitted for mail). Selling cargo space of such small volume seems like it should target luxury goods or ad-hoc deliveries. Luxury goods probably need to come with some assurance that the ship can protect them in transit, and during off-loading.