A while ago I read the 1996 Teen Titans title, and early in the series, the teen heroes escape an alien spaceship in an alien shuttlecraft. It had faster than light speed, but I don’t think it had any weapons (hope I remembered that correctly). Anyway, the comic got canceled a couple years later and the teens went their separate ways. One of them was quite broke. Now, granted the DC verse has alien/advanced tech floating around, but it still seems to me that that shuttlecraft could have been sold to a company who want to try to mine it for technology (the government has deeper pocket, but I thought the characters might be afraid of confiscation rather than purchase). It’s a gamble - might be so far beyond them they can’t gain anything valuable from it, or the materials not existing on the planet may mean nothing comes of it. Still, I’d think at least some companies would have been willing to take the risk and the money would have been very useful for the kids. What do you think they would have paid (and, of course, been able to pay).
Edit: I hope it wasn’t destroyed and I just forgot about it.
Priceless I’d expect. I could see someone like Musk paying whatever they asked for it. Makes me think of the line from Terminator 2:
“It was scary stuff, but radically advanced. I mean, it was smashed, it didn’t work, but…it gave us ideas, took us in new directions. I mean, things we would have never…”
I know it could be priceless, but the company would still have a finite amount of funds, and it could be decades before it brings any wealth. They have to continue operating and making money in the meantime.
The owners are superpowered superheroes with superpowered friends - not a risk they are all that worried about. Sure, the company could pay superpowered villains to kill them, but the rest of the superhero community would likely quickly find out whodunit, and there would be consequences.
What possible purpose do “superpowered superheros” have for mere money? ISTM there is nothing a normie mortal can offer them that would interest them in the slightest.
This is in Cafe Society, which is specifically for fiction, and the opening post clearly states I was talking about within the DC universe and in regards to a specific teen team.
This does not make sense to me - superheroes still need places to live, have clothes to buy, and are just as likely to like going to bars and concerts and all the other pleasures of life as normies. I mean, there are some that don’t need food, but most do, and they probably don’t want spend their time hunting and gathering their food any more than I do.
Logic, science and common sense do not necessarily apply in a comic book universe. They change at the whim of writers and editors and can change totally when said writers and editors change.
Specifically in that context, an FTL-capable ship wouldn’t be particularly valuable, as it’s a tech we already have. There’s tons of stories of superheroes escaping from alien captivity by stealing a ship (like the Titans did), or heroes providing their own alien/future tech as part of their core concept (Green Lanterns, Booster Gold, some versions of Hawkman), or aliens invading and leaving a bunch of their wrecked tech behind (too many to mention). I’m pretty sure Batman canonically owns his own FTL ship - he definitely did in the Silver Age, at least.
FTL is one of those techs in comics books that’s always just about to revolutionize the world. They obviously can’t have it in widespread commercial/industrial use, because that breaks the core superhero conceit that the stories are taking place in something that resembles the real world. But they also want to be able to have Batman punch out a space alien. So FTL is perpetually a newly invented tech, with a few functioning prototypes that are eternally ~six months from entering into full production. See also: Tony Stark’s arc reactor, Reed Richards’ unstable molecules, Cyborg’s cybernetic prosthetics, and so forth.
While the ship might be priceless, this would be a case where the sales price is constrained more be what the seller is willing to accept than it is the value of the ship. Most people would take an immediate 1B cash. It’s more money than you could need and it has psychological significance. 100M might even be enough and would not be hard to find a willing buyer.
Based on the largest tech acquisitions, I would guess a company might be willing to spend 25-100B, especially if you had a couple offers. It would be in stock, not cash though.
With a typical M&A there’s a fair bit of due diligence in addition to all the public facts known. Buying a spaceship would be a completely unknown entity so they would insist on significant time to inspect and research the ship to ensure they could get some value from it.
You might be able to quickly get 1B cash from a super rich person like Bezos or Musk who could afford to buy it on a whim. It’s also possible if you approached a tech company, someone at the company might try to intercept the deal to make a personal cash offer.
If it was common knowledge you had the ship, them violence seems likely. But if you privately approached a company or two, they would more likely just pay rather than seize it. I can’t see Tim Cook at Apple hiring mercenaries to steal it. Much easier to buy it.
(I’m assuming the real world and not the comic one, because there are too many unknowns in a fictional world).
You neglect the possibility that anything they do with it might violate Space Patents, so they can’t use the tech without the risk of Space Lawyers knocking at their door.
Actually, in any comic book world where there is anything close to a Lex Luthorish type of character, my initial response still stands: the craft, and the owner, will disappear.
We all know there is no such thing as Space Law. It is just a set of Space Customs, Space Treaties, and Space Norms that are unenforceable. Besides any competent Space Lawyer would argue that any Space Patents are simultaneously expired and unfiled due to General relativity.
