anyone who sets a price tag on a starship in a ttrpg is a fool. Think about how much that costs. The only way you engage with that much value is by fucking stealing it. Everything that isn't bolted to the floor must be stolen, and anything that is gets cut out of the floor with a fusion cutter.
I built a session around a wrecked Subjugtor-class Heavy Cruiser (Same as Grievous' ship with the mega-ion cannons in The Clone Wars). It had been floating through space since the Clone Wars with barely functional reactors.
They kept trying to sell the damn thing afterwards. (They had the coordinates for it, they weren't hauling it around).
Once they joined the Rebellion, I relented and gave them EXACTLY 1% of the ship's value.
Do you know what a Subjugtor-class Heavy Cruiser is worth?
875,500,000 Credits
They got 8,755,000 Credits. They never worried about money after that. The availability rules were the only thing that kept them from getting whatever they wanted.
You hit this game that's effectively an action-figure maker for one-note character premises but then you can so easily get caught up in the fucking economy they wrote from this game out of the lore (nobody who touched a star wars game has never heard of an Estimator I think) that becomes so goofy. There's a Quartermaster talent in Age of Rebellion called Sound Investments that gets you 100 credits a session and you can take it twice. But what does that matter when you can just hack your way into a ship and try your luck flying it out of atmo!
It's such a fascinating game in that way. What has been built is this insurmountable obstacle, so the reaction is to opt for a big adventure. But that's not enough! They have to try and carve out some option for players to try and engage with that obstacle because it is so big, so insurmountable, that the power fantasy of conquering it is too tempting to leave alone.
This is not unique to Age of Rebellion (or Edge of the Empire or etc etc) though the modern games are guilty of a more UNIQUE fallacy than the classics. This was true in the West End Star Wars RPG as well as its immediate space opera predecessor the venerable Traveler
(someday I will write the essay explaining how the immediate predecessor to WEGSWRPG was Traveler and not any of the more gonzo games but that day is not today - Violet Core first before I do other essays)
in which owning a starship was not listed in credits (though price tags were sometimes placed) but rather in shares and debts and liens and bills, because the cost is immense. We thought D&D characters had it rough with buying gear, we thought Shadowrun and Cyberpunk characters had it rough, no, here is an essential part of the game that is forever out of reach... unless you make it a defining part of your character or steal it and deal with the consequences, that is!
There are even some WEG adventures and Traveler supplements that talk about how starships above a certain size are sacrosanct among independent and criminal subcultures, simply because of how expensive they are to commission, repair and maintain, to the point that it is always better to disable and capture than to destroy, unless you're operating an interstellar megacorp or empire fleet. That's rarely true of player character actions, mind you - there's at least one campaign I've run where I made the mistake of actually having NPCs react in-world appropriately to the players bragging about their kill count, and the distress signals left in their wake, and that was... well, the attitudes towards me as a person were very, very toxic, but there's another essay in asymmetric expectations and "fair for me, not for thee" behavior and the like later.
The unique thing that the newer games did, starting with the original D20 game and then moving into Saga and then FFG, is give players more tools to climb the ladder. There's an expectation present in the whole post-d20 corporate and fandom sphere that "if there's an element in the game, we need players to be able to touch it", that "this whole game is made for YOU" (and given the mindsets present on their level, I can't blame them, but there again - another essay) which really, REALLY feeds into this power fantasy cycle where if you give in, you escape the confines of the genre's limitations entirely, but if you don't touch it at least a little bit, it feels wrong, like a D&D game where you hit level 14 and you're still in the armor and using the weapon you started the game with, or where you've been level 3 for the last 19 months of weekly sessions; even if you're wholly capable of keeping up and meeting all challenges and are engaged with the game, it feels like something is missing.
It's really fascinating. There's a couple "solutions" I've found but most of those are one form or another of "yeah disengage with that expectation, here's a different one".
I am immediately reminded of Starfield's answer to this problem. Where you can attack and take someone else's ship, but before you can sell it you need to license it. So you have to pay 90% of its sell price. The first time I got a ship in combat I looked at the amount I'd make and realized I'd made more just selling one cool gun I looted off a mob. You can't even like sell it to the Space Pirate faction for them to chop shop- they also require you to fucking register that ship to sell it off.
It's such a wild thing because there just seems to not be an answer to it. So many of my thoughts here are on the interesting obstacles here. How people are going to just assume that most ships were stolen by force. That empires will have changed salvage laws such that they are the only ones who can benefit from this scrap and tampering with it is illegal. How fucking space cops who don't arrest you for having this stuff because it's obvious you didn't kill anyone for it are going to just confiscate that to line their own pockets. But the thing is that players circumvent obstacles- that's the GAME. So the question becomes okay, when they eventually do, when they achieve their goal. What happens then? If they make that kind of wealth where money isn't a concern, then a good question is, "does the campaign continue?" Like, congrats you just got the monetary equivalent of a wish spell- is it over? And I think there is a fantastic little module there? You found a cool old ship to salvage and if you can just get paid for this then that is it! One last job. And you've got to dodge around all these obstacles to get there, but if you succeed you are popping greeny greens on Niamos baby.
But a huge issue with RPGs is the expectation of the shape of the story. As much as we say "play to find out", people have a shape in their head of what a story SHOULD look like, what their endings could be. And more than that they have the feeling of responsibility to the table to keep things going. I used to see this all the time in Pathfinder campaigns where a PC would finish up their arc, everything would be wrapped- and they'd just keep going because they didn't know what else to do. The game isn't done- so I'll keep playing. I'm having fun playing this character so I'll keep playing them. And it's this same principle applied to all the players that I think keeps them from saying "yeah this is a good end point".
