from action stations (2634):
50 credits: bet on a fight in gar's emporium
50 credits: offered by a Haggan for a dead Jarma (as food)
50 credits: price payed by a kat for a heavy glass ornament
500 credits: half bribe for the protection of the lazarus at gar's emporium
500 credits: 2 month's pay for a fleet academy graduate (therefore 250 per month, 3000 credits a year)
10 000 credits: Tolwyn's yearly allowance payed by his noble family
50 million credits: price of a (already semi-ancient) wildcat fighter - i.e. we do not know if this is the new price, or the worth of a 30-year-old specimen

Good data gathering!

Also, the price of a carrier, probably Concordia class: 73 Billion credits, I think it was.

I don't think I read that figure in Action Stations, maybe it is from another book, and thus later?
I guess the most significant figure is the pay for academy graduates. would be interesting to get the current figure for comparable jobs (west point graduate or whatever)

EDIT: west point cadet: 10K USD, according to http://www.stateuniversity.com/universities/NY/United_States_Military_Academy.html
initial payment for 2nd Lieutenant: 50k USD according to http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080616093005AA8FtNv (1997 figure)

so I'd say 50k USD are about equivalent to 3k credits, therefore 1 (anno 2634) credit equals 16 2/3 usd.
then the wildcat would cost 833 million dollars, far more than a fighter aircraft today. OTOH it's probably much more complex, and a WW2 fighter was probably also much cheaper relative to the then median income than a fighter aircraft today.
the 50 credits would equal 833 dollars, which fits rather well I think.
tolwyns allowance would be 166 666 dollars... I guess I could live with that income (with or without taxes)

fighter/average income comparison:
a spitfire did cost 12 604 pounds in 1939, according to wikipedia (couldn't find a price for an american fighter)
the average wage in the 30ies in the US was 1368 USD
1 pound was about 2 USD (http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/facts.html)
so the average american would have needed to work for
12604 / (1368/2) = 18.4 years to earn the money for a spitfire.
according to wolfram alpha, US average income is $31 410 per year (2007 estimate)
a F-15 did cost 30 mio in 1998
a F-22 did cost 137 mio in 2008 (both from wikipedia)
so an american would need to work
30 000 000 / 31 410 = 955 years for a F-15
137 000 000 / 31 410 = 4361 years for a F-22

let's assume the relationship between average income and 2nd LT's pay stays the same:
(3kc*31k$)/50k$=1860credits average income
so the average confed citizen would need to work
50 000 000 / 1860 = 26 882 years for a wildcat
I guess it is not too far off the scale (seeing the other years-for-fighter-figures, I guess the state-of-the-art US fighter in 2050 or so will cost 27 000 average-US-income-years.)

all of the credit figures are for 2634, much could have changed in the 35 years of war to 2669.

Good job!
You're right about the carrier figure; that was from Fleet Action; 2668.
BTW, the figure is $73B for a carrier and $10B more for a full compliment.
Now, I'm not sure what carrier class that would be, but to take a wild guess
I'd say it's a Lexington class, as that's the commonly seen carrier the next
year in Armada. And I'm not sure what "full compliment" means, in terms
of numbers for a Lex. Assume a 200-fighter equivalent (meaning some
100+ fighters and interceptors, 20+ bombers, etceteras). 10B / 200 is
precisely $50 million; so, in fact, things haven't changed much since 2630.

funnily fleet action figures are in dollars, not credits. maybe a glitch, maybe intentional.

HAHAHAHA
Definitely a glitch.
If it wasn't, in 2669, a used catalytic converter would cost 10^40 dollars.
Bills will need separate numbers for mantissa and exponent.

maybe they are using canadian dollars in 2668
it could also be possible that they had credits up to some time between actions stations and fleet action, then confed dollars to 2668, then new credits in 2669... but probably it is just a glitch.

after the peace treaty/armstice/whatever lots of officers are laid off.
they get a 40/100 benefit, meaning 100 per week for 40 weeks. -> would be 5200 per year.
(it's a bit ambigous if this is for all officers or just captains, so others might get more or less.)
2 of those officers accept a civilian job for '50% of standard pay', so I guess we can assume standard pay would be more than 10400 per year.

10K+ seems pretty high if still holds.

EDIT:
Well, maybe not; bus drivers get paid outrageous amounts in North America, as public transports are
typically government run monopolies and their workers are unionized; --and that's so even though
there are no particular dangers, such as pirates.

EDIT2:
And that's 2634, anyways. Just keep going; maybe we'll figure out the exact inflation between 2634
and 2668/9.

EDIT3:
Maybe we should use Euros for equivalences; our posts will be obsolete in 6 months with USD.

this (plus inflation, as you said) is what I'm trying to find out I'll just continue noting any references to money. we might also happen to find out that it makes not much sense at all, btw

hmm. paladin mentions a one-pound-coin (the optics of his ship could see one from a long distance), but maybe he collects antique coins

maybe not the hardest job, but OTOH they are trusted with a lot of lives...

Where's the one pound coin reference? What page? I missed that.

(then they see the kats' secret in the hari sector)

from false colors:

the 'guild' agent offers captain springweather 50 000 (no currency mentioned, could be landreich money if they do not use confed credits) for information about the goliath project. Max Kruger paid her less than that for her involvment.

10 credits (again maybe landreich?): a bet who would win the simulator duel at the christmas party.

from freedom flight:

10 credits: firekkan customs per bottle of single malt (hunter then prefers to send the bottles back to the ship, so this seems to be quite high.)

hunter also offers to go to the best steakhouse in australia with spirit someday, and thinks it will cost him a week's pay (no numbers mentioned)

us air force captain's pay:
http://www.airforce.com/opportunities/officer/pay-chart/
hunter is a captain (O-3) with a few years of service, so something between 4000 and 6000 USD per month basic pay. he is also a pilot, so he'll get flight bonuses and other stuff, but anyway, this would mean that dinner would cost about 1000 USD minimum. (you can probably spend that much money on dinner and drinks today, if you are motivated )

Good job. What I worry about is that the US dollar being doomed, all these USD figures will need to
be translated to some currency or commodity denomination that remains constant; but I don't know
what that is. I thought gold; but gold is going to be going up in value faster than currencies go down.
The only country that seems committed (for now) to keeping its currency constant value is Japan.
But that might change; probably will. The B pound is almost as doomed as the USD. The Euro is also
going to be inflationary going forward. The renminbi wants to appreciate, but won't be allowed to.
Real estate will continue to depreciate, except agricultural land, which will appreciate... I'm now
inclined to propose the value of an egg. Food prices will go up huge over the coming year or two,
but a lot of people will start raising chickens in their back-yards, so the value of an egg might stay
more or less the same.

But anyhow, the USD lost 15% of its value over the past year. That's no pocket change; and it will
accelerate.
Well, at least we have dates in forum posts, so we can go over the whole thread later and use
graphs and tables of dollar and commodity values for those dates and translate into some other
measure of value. Hard to find historical graphs for the value of eggs, though; so we might want
to record current value of an egg with each post.

EDIT:
And no; "Dollar Index" data won't help, because that's compiled as the value of the dollar compared
to a basket of currencies; but those currencies are themselves inflationary, or soon to be.
And CPI (Consumer Price Index) figures won't help either, as they exclude energy and food, which
will be the things that will go up in price the most (rents will go down to catch up (down) with real
estate, very soon).

from end run:
price of a sabre is 'tens of millions'
the 1000-flight-hours-overhaul for a fighter costs '1 million in parts alone'

Pretty consistent.
Once you're done, I'll put all this into wcpedia.com.

funnily they still talk about paychecks. One would assume they had something more... modern

Yeah, like gold or silver coins... Who'd trust paper anymore in the 27th Century?

the problem with precious metals is that they aren't that useful, and have a much lower value (in the sense of usefulness, not monetary) than that usually ascribed to them. they just have good PR.
What real uses has gold? not much more than infra-red optics, corrosion-resistant electric contacts and tooth replacement (but I guess ceramics are better, and still get better).

Anyway, no matter what (if anything at all) the confed credit is based on - I guess the transfer will be electronically, or with the coins mentioned in the books. but not via checks (cheques?)... I'd say it's a glitch like the mentioning of dollars in fleet action.

OT: In a Star-Trek-like universe it's even worse, with their replicators. I think the best currency for star trek would be energy, i.e. antimatter - because you can use it to make everything you'll need or want.

Well, I was half-joking; in the sense that you used the word "modern" probably to mean electronic data; but history doesn't always move in a straight line. Over the next ten years I predict the world will go back to using precious metals and barter for exchange.
Your "good PR" theory doesn't seem to work right now... In the past decade, the US Fed (meaning JPMorgan, Goldman, etc.) fought a secret
war against gold; and they called it names like "a relic". They got many countries, Canada among them, to sell all their gold reserves; they got
England to sell half its gold and swap the other half for coin-melt. Every time the price of gold started to go up, they knocked it back down
violently. And in spite of all that bad PR and trickstership, gold is soaring.

Gold has many uses; and you can't dismiss jewelry on the basis of its being "frivolous". Consider this: Everything we invent and everything we consume is to satisfy wishes. Everything is frivolous. And value doesn't grow on trees; we invent it. If there were no humans, would anything have value? So, if gold has value for people, then that gives it a use; --as a means of storage or exchange of value.

I'm a big fan of writing "cheques", to distinguish them from cavity searches; but both spellings are accepted.It could be. It could also be that ALL money is electronic already (and I mean "E-money", where you'd have electronic bills, with serial numbers and digitally signed, and cannot be copied; or copying them won't help much because it will be detected too quickly), and you CAN pay with electronic money, but you can also use non-physical, "electronic cheques". This would make sense aboard carriers, for example, where paying crews with electronic bills would create a huge volume of digital information, when what the crew needs is only a few bucks to spend at the bar of bet at a card game. IOW, E-money would be more secure but less efficient (each e-bill would probably have several thousand characters worth of keys and signatures and trace-back cache for security, and would only represent a fixed value; whereas e-cheques would achieve transfer of any arbitrary amount of credits in one shot, --if you trust the writer and the writer's bank. IOW, just like writing a cheque is more convenient than counting cash, today; in an electronic future, wiritng an electronic cheque will be more convenient than transferring megabytes worth of e-money.

We're half the way there, when you think about it. We already own everything we'd ever want and then some, and part of what makes the world go round is the constant bombardment of advertising, the manufacturing of wants, constant brainwash, housing bubbles, etceteras. We wouldn't need much, already, except food and a bit of energy. Start Trek is a joke in that sense: A world with replicators would be a terrible world, probably. If all you needed was energy, energy would be monopolized. Anti-matter-flavored chewing gum would be available to the elites only.

I see similarities here