Manufacturing Chemical Compounds, raw materials cost question.... Options

[Ninj]

In Man & Machine pg 108 there is a paragraph about creating your own home made chemical and pharmaceutical compounds and the skill test info to make them.

However, it does not say anything about the initial raw material costs to make these compounds.

What kind of guidelines does everyone use to cover this situation?? half the actual price of the chemical compound listed in this section of the source book??

[Panzergeist]

Generally a lot less than half. I reccomend looking up the chemical in real life, and finding out what it actually takes to make it. Cyanide, for instance, can be made from peach pits, and thermite from powdered aluminum and rust. All quite cheap ingredients.

[A Rodent of Unus...]

I believe it's 10%, but don't quote me on that. Look for the ammo creation rules at the end of the Firearm Creation chapter in Cannon Companion for solid guidelines.

[Lantzer]

Wow. Real peach pits? From real peaches? Cheap? In 2060s Seattle? In Bulk?

Maybe if you happen to know the venue for Seattle PeachFest 2063 and get the garbage contract... :cyber:

[Nikoli]

Shoot, it should be easy to make a "Create X" spell where X is a particular base chemical. Food is 100 times as complex as say, sulfer alone.

[Kagetenshi]

But then we get into Create Gold and all sorts of other silliness. Create Food is probably based less on complexity and more on metaphysical psychoimportance factor… stuff.

~J

[Joker9125]

Lets not even open up that can o worms

[Xirces]

Can my mage have a Create (Can o' Worms) spell?

Does it take a second spell (manipulation?) to open it?

(and not wanting to hijack this thread any more than necessary - if create food is (whatever gobbledigook Kagetenshi said) then wouldn't it be subjective? - each caster's own interpretation of what food is would become relevant. So what if the mage is a ghoul?)

[Eyeless Blond]

Well yeah; everyone designs their spells differently. I guess you'd never want to buy a Create Food spell from a ghoul, hm? :D

[Herald of Verjig...]

[BitBasher]

Or just ban all permanent creation spells and everythign works much better.

[Herald of Verjig...]

Coward.

[Zazen]

[Herald of Verjig...]

Magic fingers is the general purpose telekinesis. If you could apply a str 3 punch worth of force to the inside of the lid, pushing out, it would probably open (maybe not cleanly, but open).

[Panzergeist]

Yes, Peaches. Food in Shadowrun is still made from real food, just highly processed. Soy beans have to be grown too. Also, cyanide can be found in apple seeds, apple and peach tree bark, and a lot of other plant sources. You could also obtain it pretty easily, since it is used to euthanize animals and extract gold from ore.

[Kagetenshi]

There's still fresh produce in the Sixth World, just less of it and more expensive.

~J

[Kanada Ten]

Any excuse to send the charaters into the Plastic Jungles is a good one. :vegm:

[noname_hero]

I'm a chemistry major, so I have some knowledge in this area, and all I can say on the original question is: it depends.

Generally speaking, small-scale production of most industrially produced compounds will cost you more than what their "standard" price is (i.e. not counting street index). Usually you need labs, costly equipment, protected knowledge, ... Imagine home-brewing beer, or gas, or soap, or... The fact is, chemical companies are either (reasonably) efficient or soon out of business, just like everybody else.

However, sometimes you can make something cheaper by making it almost-as-good-for-your-purposes-as-original-but-lacking-some-properties.
And the biggest reason for homemade compounds are of course various controlled substances (e.g. drugs, explosives). You do not manufacture them to lower your costs (industrially-produced would be cheaper), but to obtain them at all.

So my advice for your games is:

If it is legal, raw materials and other expenses to manufacture it should be slightly higher than the standard price. Reason being, you aren't as efficient as chemical corporations. The only ways you can make it cheaper are a) being a genius, or b) making it either of lower quality or with somewhat different properties (e.g. lower expiration date, higher weight, lower power...). About your only advantage is your production can't be traced.
If it is illegal and/or hard to obtain (i.e. street index > 1), but mass-produced, total expenses to manufacture it should be somewhere between the standard price and the price with street index. This means you're still less efficient than the corps, but your skill and knowledge save you money (i.e. with street index = 2 you either pay +20% when you make it yourself or +100% if you buy it).
If it has street index < 1, it is probably either illegally mass-produced (i.e. street drugs, by criminal organizations) or stolen (and you can't beat the cost-efficiency of these thefts). Don't manufacture it.

Oh, and give the characters a chance to steal some compounds to lower their costs. Small amounts of many substances are really quite easily obtainable this way. Hey, if I were a competent runner, I could probably steal enough poisons to kill a small town, or a pound or two of uranium, without firing a single shot. IRL, such things are pretty common if you know where to look, and such minor runs can provide the GM with various new opportunities.

[Moonstone Spider]

Noname, while you sound as if you know a great deal more than I do, don't the chemical companies need to operate at a profit? Sure, they're more efficient at making the chemical than I am but they have to jack up the price to pay for the salaries of all the chemists, the machinery that makes them more efficient, the 40,000 nuyen lawsuit when the boss groped his secretary and she sued, etc. don't they? Otherwise it seems like they'd close down real quick. I thought any business had to mark up what they produce by at least a single keystone (100%) in order to stay alive long.

[Zazen]

[Kagetenshi]

You can see the lid, which means that you can target the entire lid unless it's made in two separate pieces.

~J

[Zazen]

He's not targeting the lid. He just needs to see the inside so his fingers can get there to push from within.

[Crusher Bob]

Assuming you are refining gasoline.
From the oil, which you have to pay for. (your basic cost).
Say it takes, say, 9 cents a gallon to pay for you plants, egineers and distribution network...
You add a 1 cent profit per gallon...
Assume you move 1 billion gallons of gas a month.
That means that your operations cost around 90 million a month
and you make 10 million a month in profit.

Some runner refining gas in their basment would need to charge much more that oil+10 cents, because he can't match the scale of your operations.

That why shaving a few mils off the cost of petrochemicals is something to be proud of.

[Moonstone Spider]

[noname_hero]

I'm afraid you're mistaken, Moonstone Spider, if you assume it will cost you 6 cents per gallon. If you have to pay, say, $5,000 just to buy and install the equipment you need to start your operations, you're looking at 6 cents times 84000 gallons just to get even on this. Furthermore, every gallon will cost you some for energy and chemicals other than what you'll refine from crude oil (even today's gas contains some, no doubt it will be even more complex in 2050s), you'll have to maintain your equipment, pay rent, distribute your product,...

Small-scale production is not efficient for (almost) all cases where mass production is possible, mass consumption exists, and the costs to set up your operation are not negligible. Yes, sometimes there are technical restrictions on the scale of your operations, but these don't make them automatically inefficient. More often you're limited by demand - you *could* produce more, but you wouldn't *sell* your products; again, this doesn't make your operation inefficient.

Yes, some small-scale operations dealing with mass-consumed goods *are* efficient. For example, there are dozens of small computer companies. However, these don't actually manufacture anything, they just assemble parts - how many companies produce CPUs? There are many more examples of this, say car repairs, restaurants, hospitals, ... - but they are basically middle-men, they provide services, they don't actually *manufacture* (almost) anything.

About your only chance are specialty products nobody mass-produces because there is no demand for large amounts of such products. Even then you'll have to actually use your shop/factory as much as possible, because idle machinery makes no money.


$#&#%^&@$^.... Damn, I've just realized I'm giving a lecture on economics. Time to stop myself. Moonstone Spider, let me put it this way - how many people you know home-produce bread, or cheese, or beer, or soap, or toilet paper, or any of the number of easy-to-produce and often-used products? If it is so cost-efficient, and as those are items one can produce with 15th century technology, why don't more people do so?