Oddly though, I think kg is the SI unit for mass, so a million kilos should be expressed as 1Mkg shouldnt it? that is just so odd it makes me feel weird thinking about it.
Actually not.
Yes, the kg is the SI unit for mass, however it's the only SI base unit which has already a prefix as part of its name. Several prefixes may not be concatenated within the name or symbol for a unit of measure. Therefore you would have to recur to the gram, and a million kilos would be 1 Gg.
Just to back up to the $/Cr exchange rate for a moment: if we use food prices as the basis of the economy, since demand is pretty much universal, and if we base our prices on the potato – and if we further assume that there is a general approximation between 1 T of food in the game and 1 tonne of potatoes – then an average food price of 4.4Cr/T and a current average potato price of around $250/tonne implies that 1Cr = $57 or thereabouts. That puts the Cobra III's base price at $8,550,000. That at least gets it into the realms of possibility as something an individual could think about buying, or at least financing (although still pretty expensive compared to the costs of – admittedly second-hand – merchant shipping on sale here).
Credit - US$ conversions are quite dubious. And I think you must not take current values, but the values from 1984 when the game was first released. At that time Braben & Bell have probably looked at real world values when choosing their own numbers. I work with gold in RL so that is the first commodity I always look at. Historical data for precious metals can be obtained at kitco.
Probably a coincidence but the average for that year for Gold and Platinum were almost identical: 360 $/ounce for gold and 356 $/ounce for platinum. That makes one wonder why platinum was chosen twice as valuable in Elite?
Both would have cost about 11500 US$/kg in 1984. So based on gold one credit would have been $ 288 when the game was released. Based on platinum it is just half as much.
Interesting charts on kitco... do you know which is actually the rarer metal... gold or platinum? My guess would be platinum.
Platinum is much, much rarer. The amount of Gold, stored in banks is many times the annual production, while platinum is often "consumed" immediately.
Result of this is that platinum price reacts completely different on economics than gold. At the start of our recent financial crisis, the automobile production collapsed. A large portion of the produced platinum goes into catalysts for car exhausts. So because of dropping demands, the price of platinum was halved in a year. While gold rose strongly in that period because the financial marked lose thrust in currencies like dollar and euro and bought gold.
I never understood why they never bought Platinum because it was clear that Platinum would rise to its old value after the crisis. And it has doubled already in the past 18 months. (I made the big mistake of buying just 200 grams Pt instead of putting all of my savings into it )
Last edited by Eric Walch on Fri Sep 24, 2010 2:49 pm, edited 3 times in total.
Credit - US$ conversions are quite dubious. And I think you must not take current values, but the values from 1984 when the game was first released. At that time Braben & Bell have probably looked at real world values when choosing their own numbers. I work with gold in RL so that is the first commodity I always look at. Historical data for precious metals can be obtained at kitco.
Probably a coincidence but the average for that year for Gold and Platinum were almost identical: 360 $/ounce for gold and 356 $/ounce for platinum. That makes one wonder why platinum was chosen twice as valuable in Elite?
Both would have cost about 11500 US$/kg in 1984. So based on gold one credit would have been $ 288 when the game was released. Based on platinum it is just half as much.
I doubt very much if they looked at real values at all ... back in those dim and distant pre-Google days, they'd have had to look such things up in a book or a copy of the Financial Times! Much easier just to make them up instead. Especially since the commodity names ("Food", "Textiles", "Ores", etc.) embrace potentially huge numbers of actual stuff.
...then discovered I had to use a credit card, and then this topic derailed
Don't get started on credit cards...
Yes, let's keep this on topic. If you want to discuss credit cards, I suggest you go over here.
"Actually this is a common misconception... I do *not* in fact have a lot of time on my hands at all! I just have a very very very very bad sense of priorities."
--Dean C Engelhardt
)
Much easier just to make them up instead. Especially since the commodity names ("Food", "Textiles", "Ores", etc.) embrace potentially huge numbers of actual stuff.
