Insurance: Is it worth it?

There have been a number of Hull Breaches, especially recently. Perhaps this is due to some recent changes to make it more challenging to enter the lower law levels. This has made me reconsider the value of an insurance policy.

You can buy various levels of insurance for your ship for a 12 week period that pay you based on the book value of your ship. It seems that the cost is about 1/3 of this book value. The Platinum Insurance policy costs 87,816 credits for a Frontier- Boson, and the replacement value currently in-game is 270,000 credits. I’m assuming that the Platium policy will pay out very close to that book value.

So the question I’m struggling with: Is that worth it?

If I don’t lose my ship to a Hull Breach within 9 months, I’ve paid for a new ship with my insurance premiums.

Higher level ships create a new problem. I have a third level tier ship, the Polestar- Minotaur. The Platinum level policy now costs over 1M credits. Although that is still in-line with my estimated value of just over 3M credits, my biggest concern is that assuming I get paid 3M credits, I can’t replace my ship with that. That ship is not available on the free market, and I would have to craft another.

When you get to a level where you’re using tier 3 or 4 level ships, getting a few million credits is easier than crafting a Hydra- Leviathan or a Centurion- Valkyrie. That takes some real effort.

Opinions?

Thanks Tom for starting this topic.

You already mentioned very well, my first concern with respect to insurance: you get credits, but crafting/buying another ship still is a challenge.

I also have a second concern: only the hull can be insured, but a hull breach makes one loose all equipment attached to the ship and all equipment in the ship store. This equipment is potentially a much bigger value than the hull, especially for tier 1 ships.
I will give a small example on my last hull breach, I lost this equipment with estimate value between brackets:
Hull: Polestar - 783K
Mining: 2 Needle Core Laser - Kali (2 * 333K)
Shield: 1 Krala Field Shield KFS3 (415K)
1 Defiant Shield DS-1 (mission item! - not repraceable)
Reactors: 1 Tokamak CE Series 2 (650K)
1 Bussard Generator Series 3 (3250K)
Systems: Kryton Mining Scanner Class 5 (100K)
Prams Armour Repair PR1 (mission item! - Similar item Vortan Armour Repair S1= 300K)

So, the hull breach costed me an equivalent of 6.2M credits of which an insurance will refund me a max of 783K for the hull or only 12.5% of the total loss. For the other tier 1 ships (deepcore/frontier/raven), the percentage would even be lower.
(and if I take into account the 1/3th cost of the insurance itself, the percentage will even be lower)

Conclusion: The credits for the tier 1 hull is the least of my problem when facing a hull breach. The main issue is gathering all the required resources for crafting new hull AND more importantly all the mounted equipment.

It’s a bit like with an home insurance. In case of a disaster, not only the construction has to be rebuild, but also you have to repaint and refurnish the house. But the things you care about most, like the family pictures are lost forever.

I would like to add that usually premiums are based on risk. For the same face value a premium on a combat ship should be a lot higher than say a hauler since the combat ship will be fighting and all the hauler can do is run. It may well be that for combat, only one item in each category is insured and not the ship. For hauling, everything is insured. Mining could be some coverage in-between.