ConFleet and Money

Well, we know that as of 2668 a fleet carrier cost "seventy-three billion dollars and some change" to bring into service. I guess you could try to extrapolate from that.
 
They mention in fleet action that I think it costs roughly 40 trillion a year to keep the war effort going...
 
I doubt it is the US dollar, but probably a decendant. I wonder if it is like Battletech, the American culture and the English language became dominant because all the best TV shows are made in America.
 
Fleet Action goes on to note that a compliment of fighters cost another ten billion dollars (and then that one and a half trillion dollars in fighters and carriers were lost between 2666 and 2668).

As for the currency, Wing Commander seems to use dollars (or "dols" in Armada) and the generic Sci Fi holdover 'credits' interchangably.

No quatloos, though.
 
Assuming the figure of $40 trillion per year for Confed's military, and given that they are fighting an all-out war (in other words, increasing military funding much more is pretty much out of the question), that puts Confed's total budget at somewhere between $100 and $200 trillion a year. If we assume that one Confed dollar is roughly equivalent in value to a current US dollar (any evidence to the contrary?), and that Confed collects a comparable portion of its citizens' GDP as the US government, then that implies that the Confederation's total GDP is on the order of two to three quadrillion dollars a year (about 200 times the GDP of the present-day US). That value is reasonably to scale with Confed spanning several hundred inhabited worlds, the bulk of which are still in the colonial stages (i.e. having a hundred million residents or less).
 
any evidence to the contrary?

Ten credit torpedoes in Privateer. :)

(Although everything else does seem to indicate that a credit/dollar is pretty much equal to a modern American dollar.)
 
LOL, you just reminded me of Privateer torpedoes. IIRC they could be fired dumb, couldn't they? I remember taking out a few things you shouldn't be able to with a torpedo, anyway...I wonder if you could take out a Steltek Drone with a torpedo?
 
Privateer's torps were proton torpedoes, which were just really powerful dumbfire missiles (albeit with a spiffy graphic). There wasn't any guidance whatsoever available for them.

(Fortunately the AI was stupid, and would "joust" you, giving the perfect set-up for a faceful of subatomic particles. A double-tap of proton torps would, IIRC, kill or seriously hurt a Demon. Something to keep in mind for the Palan missions, with its gobs of Demons.)

As for the drone, only the charged Steltek gun could damage it, by game code design.
 
Well... In WC1, when you eject from a fighter, Colonel Halcyon tells you that each fighter costs Confed several thousand credits... This and the prices in Privateer make me think that the credit is some higher degree form of currency used to simplify numbers during trade. Something like 1 credit = 1000 dollars, or maybe the credit is to the confed dollar what the US dollar is to the cent...
 
IIRC, the number given in the original Wing Commander was "half a million credits".

(Another 'fighter cost' reference is Action Stations - which has thirty million credit Wildcats...)
 
Perhaps the value of the credit skyrocketed between A.S. and WC1, so that a half a million suddenly equalled about 30 million from before. Or, maybe fighters got a heck of a lot cheaper to build.
 
I sure declare it a wartime economy may of had a slight effect on the value of the credit. Maybe the system was simplified during the war to try and make it more streamlined when the enevitable war debt finally needed to start being repaid...
 
overmortal said:
Perhaps the value of the credit skyrocketed between A.S. and WC1, so that a half a million suddenly equalled about 30 million from before. Or, maybe fighters got a heck of a lot cheaper to build.

Or maybe they got a bulk-rate discount for buying 10x the fighters. :p
 
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