The ability to live on the ship for a long time would make things easier for pirates. That would mean little or no fuel or spare parts requirements for ships, food replicators or small hydroponic farms on ships or other non exhausting food sources.
Being able to canibalize equipment from one ship for an other would make pirates lifes easier. If you soon need a a replacement, you don't buy it or build it but capture a ship and take it from the other ship. So having normed engines helps. Mostly a social requirement, but the more likely it is for a ship to vanish without trace for innocent reasons, the more easy for future pirates to steal one and get away with it. So more hazards, especially if they leave no wreck in an area of serachable size (like possible warp drive failures) should help piracy. The cheaper ships are, the better. It means less effort both to protect them and to search missing ships. Might be achieved technological (they are simply cheap to build) or ecconomical (some entity uses only ships with an age less then 1/10 their average lifetime (propably because the warpdrive is still save at that age) and sells older ships. Or some large empire with an oversized fleet has changed it's policy or collapsed and thrown lots of surplus vessels on the market. Large surpluses of ships, that happened due to historic accidents, will have more implact if the ships are longliving. The best way for chatching ships would be a method that disables the other ships drive, but does not destroy it. A tractor beem or even better a weapon, where after a hit you have to "reset the ion matrix" or something, and that requires half a day. Then destroying/disabling the tractor beam is not an option either. It propably best would work with something like a mine. Trader runs on the mine, gets drive (and ship weapons?) disabled and then the pirates come and board. It would also be helpfull if the standard weapon for military crafts (or other pirate enemies) would be such a disabling weapon. You can still have space battles, but if a pirate ship barely limps away from a combat, it mostly needs time, not expensive equipment and spareparts, to "heal". So disabling weapons should be very efficient compared to blow ships apart weapons. If you want to destroy other ships, you can still first disable them and then accelerate them into a sun. Carmourflage of ships should be easy. That would mean there is little radiation or exhaust from ships or it is easily maskable, what of it is there, will leave little clues to what size, class or configuration the ship has. Scanning inside a ship is all but impossible, so you don't know from the outside if the ship has been reconfigured. Normhulls that are used for ships of diverse purposes would also help. Then you see the shape of a ship, but it does not tell you much that is usefull. The smaller the difference in combat effektivity between civilian and military ships, the better. That makes stolen and refitted freighters more formidable. Like you could have a warp bubble drive, where the only parameter you can change is the size of the warp bubble. The larger it is, not only the larger the ship can be, but also the faster the bubble can go, independent of the mass inside. Or some groups does have a huge advantage in TL for armour. And for religious reasons, they sell only their 23 standard hulls, but they sell them to everyone. Any armour anyone else builds, will be dramatically worse in terms of cost and weight. So military ships will not have dramatically more armour. One mans groundfloor is an other mans earthmissle @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Johannes Trimmel @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
