Naptha23,
Are Blackjacks and Bloopers like Cracker Jacks here in the USA?
[size=78%] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracker_Jack[/size]
MDC
Unfortunatley no.
This was meant to be a small reference to the robot Bender (Futurama; "Blackjack and hookers!"). To keep my post relatively clean, I wrote "Bloopers" to avoid the derogative term "hookers."
But since this little pun failed exceptionally, I guess there I have my little blooper.
Back to topic.
Concerning the discussion about wages and starship costs I would like to point out the audiobook series
The Trader Tales by Nathan Lowell. These audiobooks are licensed under the Creative Commons and you can download them for free on podiobooks.com. The Trader Tales tell the story of Ishmael Wang, who is forced to join a interstellar trader ship as a lowly Quartershare and his carreer; the series lacks battles, wars and most of the time violent encounters and is rather a space opera than an adventure.
If you do not have a problem with that, then the series are quite amusing and interesting; anyway, during the series you can learn quite a bit about naval and starship operations, wages, earnings and starship values. Oh yes, and coffee!
I may very well be mistaken, since I have no knowledge about modern ships, but I assume that spaceships should be a lot more expensive than naval ships, since they are much more sophisticated. If looking at prices, I would rather compare spaceships to submarines, since normal ships are operated twodimensional and have no problems with 3d-orientation in zero gravity and astrogation.