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Old 06-11-2020, 10:47 PM
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An attempt to pin a conversion rate between dollars and gold-pressed latinum.


The best balance is where a slip is a dollar and a bar is two thousand dollars. Of course (yet again) the creators really didn't care about this sort of thing when they were making the show, but I do wonder why they didn't write down a little note somewhere giving a simple conversion ratio for future writers.



A comment points out that while we know that a strip is a hundred slips and a bar is twenty strips, we never got the conversion between bars and bricks. When Quark is in Morn's storage unit full of bricks, how much is that (if Morn hadn't extracted the latinum, of course)?



Short Treks introduces a "big bar" equal to 100,000 Federation credits, but how many bricks to a big bar? And how many 23rd century credits to a dollar? In one of the comics Spock has back pay equal to 611,700 credits. Let's call this ten years of back pay, as he doesn't seem like the guy to go to Risa or anything expensive on leave. He probably just visits Vulcan (not necessarily his parents) or goes on a scientific expedition.



Today the executive officer of a US Navy ship makes about $136,000/yr. Let's bump it up to $150,000 for round numbers and Spock's double duty as science officer (plus the flagship status of Enterprise). 60,000 credits a year means 2.5 dollars/credit. A "big bar" is therefore $250,000. If a bar is $2000, that's 125 bars to a big bar.
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