What about customs or police ships? You have one or more large galatic
empires, that span a lot of territory and have either little direct
control over part of their territory, or have smaller states within their
territory, or they have long borders for the sizes of their territory.
Examples would be the Traveller Empire, or the Star Wars Old Republic for
the first, something like the Star Treck Federation can create the second
case (as they don't force other countries to join they propably create
many San Marinos inside their territories). The last scenario can created
by tweaking hyperspace physics, making it hard to create easily defendable
borders (like if hyperpace has many dimensions, though that makes it hard
to make maps), or by a peacefull split of an earlier large empire, with
plebiscites in every individual world, and the citicens did not decide
based on what gives sensible borders.
The common thing would be that there can be many cases of frighters, and
you might have for political reasons problems to control them via their
source or destination points or via a central registry. Or you can have
foreign belters who move to your territory, steal resources from your
belts and leave again, equivalent to illegal fishing.
For that you need as many ships as you can muster, but all they need to
outgun is unarmed freighters. Depending on the ecconomic and social
background, you might also have trouble to recruit as much qualified
personell as you like, so you might cut down retundancy there. Especially
as long as you can savely bring the ship back to port, if it has to abort
a mission because of accident or illness of a crew member, this does not
really influence the overall effectiveness of your operation. Your patrol
schedules get rearranged a bit by random factors, big deal.
There might also be the following politicy doctrine:
*) Civilized countries do not use military force to further any of their
goals other then strict self defence.
*) If an uncivilzed country attacks you, you do not need to show any
constraints regarding the force you use.
It might be that the military of a country with that doctrine might call
for the cheapest patrol ships, that can identify any attacker before
fleeing or being destoyed, and just enough of them to patrol your
territory. And a some "death stars" to bomb whoever attacked you back to
stone age or beyond. Depending on technology you might even have small
cheap "death stars", that stealth into enemy territory, or you send
enough, that that at least one is almost guaranteed to get through, that
use nuclear warheads or large comets or similiar to destroy important
enemy worlds.*
Yet an other scenario would be that you have to regulary lead large
convoys of freightships through hostile or otherwise hazardous
territories, where the savest routes change constantly but slowly.
A convoy might consist of some freighters, some larger warships, and a
couple of scouts, that move ahead along the different possible routes, and
check if they are save enough for the convoy at the moment.
If they run into trouble, they run back to their convoy. The ships will
operate for a long time (the traveltime of the convoy) but they will
operate alone only for short intervals. You just need to tweak the time
they need to operate alone to make it long enough, that using a
slip-fighter instead does not make sense. I guess if a typical scout
mission last something like 12 hours with a large portion of the time
spent in definitly save areas (hyperspace?) that would work.
* Sideline: I wondered why such a tactic was not used in John Ringos
Posleen series. They had stealth ships that could bring commandos to
Posleen worlds, they did not expect to be able to conquer thoose worlds
back anyway, yet they did not use thoose ships to smuggle nuclear warheads
with timers onto thoose worlds, making it harder or even impossible for
the Posleen to use thoose worlds for production, and reproduction or
possibly even as bases. Heck they could even have boobytrapped worlds that
were about to be conquered, as perfect scorched earth strategy.
One mans groundfloor is an other mans earthmissle
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Johannes Trimmel
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