Re: merchants and pirates and guns, oh my! Not again...

> From: [email removed] (Steve Higginbotham)
>>Brandon Cope:
>>(2) Merchant ships must use weapons of a lower technology than what
>>is available for the military. It should be at least 2 TLs lower,
>>perhaps as much as 4. Pirates will fall in-between the merchant and
>>military ships, since they will loot weapons off of whatever they
>>can. This should also apply to armor, and other offensive/defensive
>>items.
>
>Reasonable for merchants, tough on pirates.  Who are the pirates going
>to steal the good stuff from?  And if they can't get the good stuff,
>the Navy will walk all over them.  And if they can, then how much
>trouble can it be for a merchant to come by it?
>(yes, yes, I know: we've had this argument before...)

Also not hostorically accurate. Things may change in the future (have
changed in the future??) but the military is a *very* conservative
group at least for the infantry. Troops are not equipped with the
most advanced weaponry available, though civilians tend to be.
Case in point: Your civial war, the Union and Confederate Soldiers
were mostly equipped with breech-loading (I believe) rifles, while the
civilians had repeating rifles available to them.

I know the discussion is concerning starships, but currently civilians
cannot aquire armed aircraft (which is the closest analogy to starships).
In the future I could see merchants/pirates having the latest weapon
systems on their ships while the militray minds take 1TL to fully test and
try out the new weapons before making large commitments to installing them
on their fleets.


				-Dan

Dan Corrin, Network Manager, Mechanical Engineering, UWO, London, Ontario
InterNet: [email removed].                                [phone removed]
TML/CZ/FrameUsers/Consim FTP site: sunbane.engrg.uwo.ca (129.100.100.12)