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With a project the society pays the costs up front, and owns any proceeds including equipment purchased with the funding provided. I think the main reason to become a project is to “communitise” any profits and gear coming from a larp, so it can be used for the benefit of all local larps.
The society requires projects to forecast their costs and discourages losses. But I think there are two approaches you could take to doing project budgets while still being able to afford big investments:
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Approximately forecast all your games for the next one or two years now, to show that the costs will come back. The committee may be happy for the project to make a loss at first if forecasts show there will eventually be an overall profit. You would need to report after each event on the debt still owed by the project, until it gets into the black.
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Buy the expensive stuff as your personal property, don’t include it in the project budgets, and don’t give that gear to the society as proceeds of the project. Then include those items one at a time in your event budgets, having the project/society buy them off you over the course of numerous events. This will be easier to get through the committee, because it’s more business-as-usual for the society in terms of funding each event.
In terms of the lightsabres, the society can make any sort of purchases outside the usual project budgetting process if the committee thinks it’s justified. We’ve bought a generator, a printer, masks, and some latex weapons that way. Projects have also bought latex weapons using their event budgets. Mordavia did this to aquire some latex shortswords, although they were a lot cheaper than those lightsabres and the events were a lot bigger, so the same approach might not work for you. To date, these ad hoc purchases have tended to be things that would be used by a lot of projects or affiliates.
Personally I reckon the best approach would be to become a project and use one of the financial approaches above to justify the lightsabre purchase. The lightsabres will be worth more to the society if the society also accumulates a bunch of other Star Wars stuff to be used with them, which is what would happen if you were a project.