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My players have some plot going on but because they are impoverished, they are taking side jobs, so far their first side job was to use their free cargo space to run a water shipment to the portal station of the system they were going to travel to for the main plot. 

I like to encourage this line of thinking, because it lends itself to the Firefly type idea of "gotta keep hustling to keep flying" I don't want my players to be wealthy, at least not soon. 

They have monthly repayment costs on their debt of about 7,000birr, servicing costs of 2,300birr and no savings at all. 

What seems like a reasonable payment for a short journey from, for instance, Coriolis, to the Aiwaz portal station?

I've given them 4,000birr for this run on the following thinking.
1. Its a really safe run, they don't need to go in system in Aiwaz and its only a single job
2. They are pretty safe flying from Coriolis to the Kua portals, its got to be one of the busiest areas of space in the Third Horizon and corsairs wouldn't last five minutes there.
3. The cargo was 40 tons of water, enough for a single class 3 cargo hold to manage
4. The delivery wasn't terribly urgent and if they failed, while annoying, the buyers could have likely found another ship in a day or two to do the same run with the same cargo.
5. Despite this, the ship will require a service and in the PCs case thats going to eat half their income for the job.
6. The job only took a day and a half since their ship is pretty speedy and they won't have to wait at the portal for a convoy (they did their own calculations anyway in the end).

Does this seem a reasonable amount of money for this job? Do any of you have a good formula or rough rule for how much you pay for cargo hauling?

I don't want it to be too profitable since I don't really want my PCs to abandon the plot to become intersystem truck drivers, but clearly they should be able to make a bit of extra cash doing simple jobs.

Good question! The core rulebook is silent on that topic, but fortunately the "Atlas Compendium" supplement is actually providing you a very useful table on the rewards (depending on the mission, distance and complexity) on page 38. In addition you have mission generator based on the crew type.

Highly recommended supplement!

Seems good to me! It’s the simplest mission ever. Safe. Boring. Good business for a low risk/reward outlook. They are basically space truckers. Won’t make a million doing that that’s for sure.

Look at the living expenses in the core book. For grunt work, you would expect a stationary level of profitability. A month lasts 36 days I think? A normal lifestyle in an ordinary environment costs 1000 birrs per month. So roughly 30 a day. Assuming the PCs are five, and that the job took two days. They would need 300 birrs of profit to meet that standard.

This said, in an advanced environment, and I would argue state of the art space craft and most of Coriolis station is advanced, normal lifestyle costs 2500 per month per person. So 75 a day, means 750 birrs of profit to make it.

They made 1300 birrs of profit. They are doing well. Which is good business, since you need to pay that ship back! They need roughly 200 a day for the ship loan.

So they have a net profit of 900. Slightly over 750, which is good, because you won’t be working each and every day of the month! You could redo these calculations considering a month length of 26 working days.

You pretty much nailed it I think. And as I said, it’s true grunt work. They’ll need to be hauling water every god damned day to not go bankrupt!

Seems like a reasonable mission. I would encourage my players to try to take multiple missions in one trip to reduce the cost of service eating into profits. It you're making one trip, why not get paid twice?

I can recommend another thread about profits, other forum mind you: https://forums.modiphius.com/t/cost-of- ... zon/7983/2

The author argues that a scarab with crew needs to earn about 24000 Birr a month/segment to cover mortgage on the loan, living expenses, service costs and jump fees. He further explains that not every day would be a working day, arguing that about 2/3 of the days of the month is spend either looking for a job or recovering from a previous job. That leaves 12 working days that require an average earning of 2000 Birr a day. He continues with a breakdown of what fees could be placed on renting out cargo space and bunks for travellers. He boils it down to cargo space rental fees being about 20 Birr per ton per day. And travellers paying about 175 Birr per day. It is then mentioned that these costs would be significantly different for other ships. Costs being a product of the operating cost of the ship, not any standard of price as such.

There is a thread on this forum that goes into this as well. viewtopic.php?f=108&t=3046&p=25668&hili ... vel#p25668
Here there is a similar breakdown that essentially boils down to the bigger the ship, the cheaper the ticket.

Thanks for the links and thoughts guys, glad to see I was roughly in the right area. I'll no doubt get more of a nose for it once I have more experience running the game.

I have a follow up question that the other people might be able to fill in.

How much disposable Birr would people generally have? Let's have an example. How much would a Lassi salesperson on a random station along a big trade route be able to offer a group of adventurers to save his indebted addict sibling from the Syndicate by transporting them off-station. It shouldn't be profitable for the players, they should hopefully do it for the ethical value, but it'll be nice to know segmental salaries for a regular jo.

Let's say they offer the players 500 Birr. The weight and gravity of this offer varies greatly if the Lassi salesperson can put away single, double or triple digits every segment.

My thought right now is to have disposable income be percentual, most people should be able to save up for one extra segment every cycle (maybe?) So 10% extra disposable. I'll probably check some wage statistics IRL if I can find them and make a more educated guess.

The cost of living table will be of help here too.

A normal lifestyle in an advanced environment costs 2500 Birr for an adult per month. The description is vague concerning lodging. I don't know if lodging is included or not. Let's say it isn't, since it's not listed in the service column of the examples table.

That would be 22 500 per CC for food, clothes, and everything else.

Add to that lodging, permits, bank fees, electricity, water, infonet, comms. All that would at least cost as much, I think 50% of total revenue on lodging and services is probably a minimum! especially on Coriolis. So a normal lifestyle costs 45 000 birr per CC, or 5000 a month.

For savings, it really depends on the person. And if they bought a flat or are renting. But saving 10% a year, for a regular bloke, should be very good. Especially if they have children.

So a middle class person aged 35 would probably have 25k to 60k stashed somehow. But it so much depends on individuals at this point.

For salaries, based on the advanced environment column of the lifestyle costs and above assumptions:

Low level salary: 700 to 3000 per month

Middle class salary: 3000 to 7000 per month

High level salary : 7000 to 30 000 per month

Just eyeballing it really. But if we compare that with some consumables like a music instrument, that costs from 100 to 1000, or a tabula that costs 2000, feels about right.

Remember, as mentioned in the technology chapter, tech in the Third Horizon is made to last. It's sturdy and easy to repair. No programmed obsolescence here. Things are well done and valuable. It's more of a medieval outlook to design, pride and value.

So a tabula is expensive, only high level people will all have one. Middle class might also, but it's super precious to them or provided by their employer. And low level read the paper on paper, or pay by the minute access on info terminals.

I like that breakdown! I recently commented (necroprosted) in the Swedish corner on a thread about rules for doing odd jobs. I speculated that a person on coriolis should earn enough to put away between 1-50% or a normal lifestyle per segment. And given that people probably have maybe 5-6 days off from work every segment I'd say people work about 32 days per segment. That would put an average run-of-the-mill job in the ballark of 30-50 Birr per day. Which seems feasible, that'll be enough for a homeless person to earn enough to fuel their Arash addiction.