Got a group that wants to hit an trans-oceanic shipping freighter, and sell it off. From the best I can read, your bare bones shipping freighter is worth 50,000,000 brand new.

Is this about right, or is this a Rigger 3 issue?

If incorrect, what is a good estimate for the cost of the ship?

Actually, more than that. A light merchantman chassis has a design cost of 30,000, and a diesel engine has a cost of 10,000 design points. That adds up to 40 mil, but light merchantmen have a mark-up factor of 1.5, so it's up to 60 mil. Add in more crew space if you have more than the 15 included in the chassis, some sensors and sonar, communications gear, a crane, a tiny bit of bulwark, and a few lifeboats, and it's up to anywhere from 70 to 80 mil brand-new. Of course, if you don't want it to be worth that much, you could always add a few stress points or something. Or just make sure it gets damaged in the fight.

Runner: "Hey, Simon, we just got this sweet new vehicle we want you to help us shift!"
Fixer: "Hi. So what is it?"
Runner: "It's a sweet ocean going freighter- nearly new, only needs a little work on some panelling to remove the bullet holes."

Okay, so now Simon the Fixer hits a dilemma. See, he could sell this freighter- of course, in order to get anyone to buy it he'd have to make it cheap. See, if a company has something worth that much stolen from them (to say nothing of the problems in concealing such a thing) then they are going to be looking for it. Ignoring, for the moment, the point that they'll be looking to 'discourage' anyone involved in the selling end of the transaction from doing such things again, this is hot property that isn't guaranteed safe to use. So, to be kind, he can mark it down to, say, 15 million. That's still enough money to set up all the runners and the fixer for several years afterwards.

Then we hit that problem again. Companies do not let a 60-80 million nuyen asset be stolen and sold on without heavy repurcussions. This means that if you hit one that is megacorp owned then you will soon be getting a personal introduction to the fishes under the ship you stole. If it's not then you'll be getting to meet police agents who will want to ask all sorts of awkward questions like:
"Is this your freighter, sir?"
"Do you have any qualifications related to driving this several thousand ton freighter, sir?"
"Do you realise what would have happened if you had lost control of this freighter, sir?"
"Do you have a lawyer, sir?"

Hence: momentarily interesting idea, but maybe they should steal a smaller boat.

Correction: Either steal a smaller boat, or go the whole hog and hit an aircraft carrier. If you somehow can't sell it because nobody's willing to fork out THAT much, you can at least use it as a (reasonable) base of operations. At least until someone decides to put a hole in it's hull with a cruise missile.

Some back of the napkin calculations and a bit of consulting ye olde RBD, says that a merchant vessel in the 10,000 Gross Register Ton range should go for somewhere between 25 and 40 million USD. I think this qualifies as a 'meduim' mechant vessel, though I'm not too sure. Expect operating costs to be in the 20-25K per day range (not includeing taxes, docking fees, etc), split half and half between burned fuel and maintenance costs (throw on whatever the crew costs on top of this). The ship can carry around 10K tones of cargo (see the GRT figure).

Although if you tend to park your vessel in little known areas for extended periods and commute to land only via aircraft or helicopter, you could concievably save a bundle on the maintenance. (King of Fighter's Rugal Bilstein does this with his Black Noah, I think...at least before KOF'94. Tho come to think of it, he was running a rather lucrative illegal arms trade....)

Also, remember a standard fence is going to be offering 10% or so of any hot item's possible value. That means that to be profitable, you have to hit the freighter for less than 4M nuyen.

Although "self-made runs" are a great prospect in general, it's important to have a buyer in mind when acquiring anything big or complicated.

Even if you want to give them something like full value for the vessel, you need to make sure the challenge involves more than just 15-20 angry sailors.... like something in the bilge.... or dangerous cargo. Life is never easy for runners....

Quick paint job and renaming, burn off any nautical versions of serial/VIN numbers and then register it in some dinky flag of convenience country as a new vessel- unfortunately Panama is no more. Then sell it off cheap somewhere like Asia or Africa.

This has actually happened in the past in south east Asia. I remember the news stories from several years back. Pirates would board a frieghter, kill everyone and dump them over the side. Then sail into an out of the way Chinese harbour, offload the cargo for sale, re-do the ship and sell it on cheap. Apparently people in the local government were in on it so you had a number of these ghost ships roaming the seas.

Our group is planning on doing a naval campaign next year. This could be useful, thanks.

Of course, taking the ship right into the very port it was headed to when you hijacked it, and trying to fence it there, is suicide. Fencing a ship that size would probably require sailing it to a pirate port. Anyone know any pirate ports or islands in the pacific?

Pirate port? Who needs a pirate port? You've got the newly liberated Philipines, any of the coastal Chinese warlord states, India, most of South East Asia, Hawai'i, South America etc. Any one of them is good for shady deals if you know the right place.

The best way to do this would require some serious prep-work and outlay beforehand...

Get a suitable crew assembled, get the paperwork for the Flag of Convenience arranged (or Forged and deck in to the registry of ships for the country in question to place the matching data there). Select a destination Port (prefereably one the target ship has never been to) that is within a day or two's sailing from wherever you intend to hit your target and arrange a buyer of your ship (under its new registry details) in advance. If you can find a buyer for the cargo too that will help increase the return on the run.

Then hit the target ship, overpower the crew, replace them with your hired hands, and sail to your destination with all the paperwork for the sale ready.

Now there are still a ton of things that can go pear-shaped on the run, but at least you should be in position to have a chance of getting away with it.

As it is I can easily see a run like this costing almost as much in prep, bribes, obtaining the small boats/choppers require to hit the target etc, as the fenced value of the ship and cargo, especially if the 6 Million figure is correct over the 60 Million one.

I could esaily see the outlay costing at least 200-300K for a return of maybe as little as 500-750k. I know a 200K 'profit' sounds good, but split that between 5-6 runners and it starts to look a bit thin for the effort and risk involved. I know the team I run with have had similar paying runs (i.e. 200k or so) that were a lot less of a risk to our existing cred...

Can you say "the Phillipines"? Or Macau? Hong Kong? Guang Zhou? Shanghai?Indonesia? Vladivostok? Hunan? Pusan? Tasmania? Vientienne? Danang? Haiphong? Alyeska?

Not-quite-so-small issue:
Hope your team also has a personal form of long distance air transportation that's readily avaliable too. If you're going to shady, out of the way ports want to make it back to your country of origin in one piece (well, almost, unless the air defense of said country already's programmed to shoot you down), you're going to need it.

With all that money, who needs to return to Seattle? I bet a high lifestyle costs a lot less in those other countries.

I agree that having a buyer ready before they hit the freighter is a good thing. It'll deal with a lot of problems. Although a scene where after a short celebration one of the characters realizes, "Aye, now what the hell do we do with it?" is pretty funny. You should probably tell them (or just drop a hint, if it's more your style) that they need a partner in the form of a buyer. If they look around, some one might be looking for a really big boat.

If they want to do it all themselves and not be technically working for anyone, it'll be more worth their trouble if there's something they can do with the ship. If one of them ever said, "this plan would be fool proof if only I had an oceanic freighter," as part of some (ridiculous?) scheme, remind them. If they pull off the job, they'll have an oceanic freighter.

As for the trouble they'd get into- if they research the owners of the ship they're going to hijack, they can just pick a smaller business. Just because someone owns expensive gear, doesn't mean they're billionaires with global influence. I know that in television stations, equipment is marked as an asset in the books so it doesn't hit the bottom line. The station still lost a few million to get all the new equipment, but they look ok in the books. I imagine similar things are done with (non-megacorp) companies that own a ships. They can just hit a smaller, foreign company and not have to worry about ninjas showing up at their homes.

Basically anywhere in SE Asia that is not Japan, Singapore, or Australia more or less covers it (did I miss anyone?). Money talks.