Platinum, Credits and Trade: Money in the Firefly 'Verse

POSTED BY: Kozure
UPDATED: Sunday, August 29, 2004 06:22
VIEWED: 13076
PAGE 1 of 2

1 2 NEXT PAGE

KOZURE

Friday, March 19, 2004 9:48 PM

Hola, Browncoats,

I did some background research for my Firefly-based board game and ran up against a few tidbits of information about the Firefly ‘Verse regarding currency. The thread about body armour and how much it would cost got me thinking about money again.

I've been looking at how much things cost and how much our favourite crew got paid. Specifically, I'm looking at the scripts for any reference to credits or platinum, the two major units (or medium for transferrence) of currency mentioned on the show.

CANONICAL EVIDENCE

In "Serenity", Mal demands and eventually gets "200 credits in platinum" for his stolen Alliance food rations. Presumably this price is marked down for being stolen goods and for selling out of desperation.

In "The Train Job" Niska gives them half up front and promises the other half later, but no amount is mentioned. The price of six crates of Pascaline B is described as a "tidy fortune".

In "Bushwhacked", hard-subsidies for fourteen plus families is described as being "about a fortune" but they are relieved of their salvage by the Alliance at the end.

In "Jaynestown", they pick up a job, but the price is not discussed. On the other hand, Jayne describes his heist as being "about 60,000, untraceable". I presume by this he means 60,000 credits, but he never actually says this, so it could be platinum. 60,000 of whatever he stole can presumably be a wealthy man's fortune and enough to be split between the hundreds of mudders in Canton and make Jayne a folk hero.

No money is mentioned in "Out of Gas", save that Jayne's cut of 7% is considered "standard" and has been raised to 10% cut by the beginning of “Serenity”.

In "Safe" Mal and the Grange brothers haggle over the price of the cows, ranging between 20 and 30 a head. No actual currency is mentioned. They finally settle on 25. It's hard to estimate how many cows there were; two dozen might be a good guess, for a total of 600 (24 x 25). Later, in a flashback, Simon Tam is shown to be freed by his father Gabriel for 2000 credits (the currency is mentioned specifically) in bail money.

In "Ariel" Simon rhymes off the price for several of his drugs: ivoprovalyn - 50 platinum (street value) then says "Maybe twenty credits". Propoxin - "maybe eighty", Hydrozapam "two hundred". At these prices, it's hard to imagine exactly how much money they would make off of this heist, but you get a comparative value from "War Stories"

In "War Stories" the money that everyone has left after spending a fair amount on personal binges (apples, etc.) is pooled to ransom Wash. This is described as being "...five times what you paid us for the train job." by Zoe. Thus the amount they would've made from the Train Job (presumably a small cut of the 'tidy fortune' for fencing the Pascaline D) was two fifths of the amount they got from the Ariel heist. It's interesting to note that not all of the medicine has been fenced by this point, as this is what Mal and Wash set out to negotiate with Bolles.

In "Heart of Gold" the crew is supposed to be paid "in trade" though I suspect that most of them ended up doing it out of loyalty to Mal and a sense of respect/friendship for Inara.

In "Objects in Space", Early mentions that the bounty for the Tams is "200,000", though once again, no units are mentioned.

SPECULATION

Credits vs. Platinum

Simon's off-hand estimations of the price of drugs in Ariel suggests a strange exchange rate - the price for ivoprovalyn is 50 platinum on the street, but he also gives a rough worth of 20 credits. This suggests an exchange of 50 platinum = 20 credits, or 1 credit = 2.5 platinum. This seems odd. One might guess that platinum is the preferred unit of exchange on the street and for shady deals... it seems to be a physical coin, as evidenced by the pouch tossed to Patience. Similarly, the coins seen to scatter on the ground in "Safe" would also fit with this model. Historically, however, a unit of hard currency (gold or silver in the American West) was generally valued at a higher price than

KALIMEERI

Saturday, March 20, 2004 12:31 AM

Whew! SHINY!

Jen dao mei.

KOZURE

Monday, March 22, 2004 3:22 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by kalimeeri:
Whew! SHINY!

Jen dao mei.

Yeah, I guess that was a little long. Oh well, it might come in handy for anyone who is thinking about an RPG based on the series.

Kozure the Kamikaze Highlander

Proud Citizen of Canada-That-Was

DELIA

Monday, March 22, 2004 5:50 PM

Wow! I'm impressed. Thanks for an interesting read.

LODRIL

Monday, March 22, 2004 5:52 PM

Regarding the exchange rates... I watched Ariel last night, so I was pondering that myself.

Generally, hard coin currencies have held value better than paper/credit currencies because they're easier to spend. In an economy with the one all-powerful government with fingers in everything, it's not hard to imagine that credits could be more valuable than hard coins. Since most transactions would require credits in such an economic system, coins would probably be cumbersome to trade for credits and not much use for everyday items.

Hard coins would be the currency of choice for more illicit markets, but for simple things, like food, credits would probably be the currency of choice.

DEBBIEBUK1

Monday, March 22, 2004 7:55 PM

Thanks Kozure for all the thinking you did (not to mention writing it all down), I was going over the same ground for my silly monopoly game but couldn't get my head round the sums/ all the data.

Shiny in the extreme

KOZURE

Monday, March 22, 2004 10:13 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by debbiebuk1:
Thanks Kozure for all the thinking you did (not to mention writing it all down), I was going over the same ground for my silly monopoly game but couldn't get my head round the sums/ all the data.

Shiny in the extreme

You're quite welcome. Anything to help out fellow Browncoats.

Costs, speeds and time are things that writers of science fiction/fantasy shows seem to have a lot of problems with. I've been trying to figure out the relative distances between "systems" mentioned in Firefly (for the record, I'm a proponent of the 'many-systems' model, not the 'one-system, many planets & moons' model - but I can see how the other concept might be possible) and times and destinations are somewhat fluid. I'm not sure if they ever mentioned prices in the "Show Bible", but they usually seem consistent with a 19th century feel (i.e. 200 credits is a fair amount of money in 2517, as $200 was in America around 1870). The only exceptions are Jayne's theft of 60,000 credits and the bounty on the Tams of 200,000cr, which seem like ridiculously high amounts.

It's hard to compare prices as well. The price per head of beef cattle ranges between $70-80 USD lately, which would imply that you can multiply Firefly prices (the Grange brothers paid 25 credits a head for the cattle in Safe) by three to get 2004 prices. Going by this rule, the 200 credits that Mal got for the salvaged food ration bars seems like peanuts ($600 USD?). If you assume that the price was 25 'platinum', then using Simon's conversion of 2.5 platinum per credit, you're paying 10 credits for a cow, and your conversion factor is 7 and Mal and company got the equivalent of $1400 USD for the rations. Conversely, if you base your prices on wages for the crew and fuel for a few weeks being 200 credits, most of the other prices mentioned seem too high or too low. The only things which seemed internally consistent were the relative payoffs for the jobs - a low risk salvage paid 200cr, while the high risk Ariel job netted them ten times or more that price.

Fortunately, in its short run, Firefly never had to deal with the notoriously bad math of Joss Whedon (by his own admission and from DVD commentary on the Angel and Buffy DVDs) when determining dates and people's ages.

Good thing no vampires were involved.

Of course, at least we don't have to deal with stardates.

Kozure the Kamikaze Highlander

Proud Citizen of Canada-That-Was

DITB

Monday, March 22, 2004 11:08 PM

some of my thoughts:

sci-fi being bad for numbers (time, money, distance):
this is just pros and cons. putting in values for everything can be very dangerous. leaving them out will make some people wonder and puzzle, but won't hurt the native environment (it will only hurt when people are making their own spin offs ). simply, they leave (meaningful) numbers out because if they get them wrong it'll be much worse.

cows:
i don't think it's fare to compare the cattle to current beef cattle. for one, the current value takes into account factory farms. also, in firefly, those aren't necessarily strictly beef cattle. it's most likely the primary purpose, as clearly implied by mal, but i'd be surprised if the disreputable men don't get some dairy out of them first. there's also the fact that most current beef cattle aren't used for leather, as the firefly cows most certainly would be.

yeah, so i'm not really sure what i'm argueing about here, but i think some of those issues are important to consider. yup.

KOZURE

Monday, March 22, 2004 11:20 PM

Very good points, DitB, especially considering the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" aspect of pinning down technological and economic numbers.

I'm frankly quite happy that Firefly never really fell into the "quantum foam /tachyon /nanite /particle-of-the-week" trap that a lot of other science fiction shows fall prey to. They don't discuss how a "standard radion accelerator drive" works - just that it is working or it isn't.

As for cattle prices, I was just throwing those numbers out to demonstrate how difficult it is to compare prices - exactly as you make so clear.

Other factors that might affect the price: Jiangyin is probably a lot less accessable than your typical US cattle auction; the price is 'black market' in that Harrow didn't want the shipment widely known and Badger was involved for whatever reason; Mal haggles by an increment of five credits, which a large portion of the price.

All of the things you mention are very important to consider in relation to this topic.

Kozure the Kamikaze Highlander

Proud Citizen of Canada-That-Was

LJOSALF

Monday, March 22, 2004 11:51 PM

Just to throw a new wrinkle into the mix--suppose that credits represent promissory notes from Blue Sun as opposed to official currency? A kind of McDollars originally created to permit trade in Blue Sun goods that became so reliable that, say, during the war they came to be used routinely for goods with manufacture or provenance other than Blue Sun. Thereby becoming a pseudo currency that came to be entrenched in the culture. More prevalent where Blue Sun products are more prevalent, i.e. The Core, and underwriting the continued power of the megacorp itself. The exchange rate could be pretty fluid depending on what you wanted to buy, where, and with which currency.

Just a thought although probably a red herring....

Ljosalf

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)

1 2 NEXT PAGE