Onno Meyer wrote: > There is an infamous 'undead thread' about the impossibility of piracy > in Traveller. Instead of another regurgitation of the pros and cons, I > thought about it from the other side: what technology would allow or > even encourage piracy and raiding?
Commonplace stealth technology, so that a raider's victims can't see it coming from several AUs away; but not so commonplace that civilian ships can slip by the raiders undetected. Likewise, some sort of EMP-like weapon that lets the raider cripple an enemy ship without destroying it - consider some sort of nuclear inhibitor device with extremely short range, useful as a missile warhead: in game mechanical terms, it would allow you to inflict many of the performance-related effects of an attack (such as crippled drives, blinded sensors, etc.) without much risk of blowing up the ship (but with enough concussive force that the passengers know that they've been hit). If these kinds of weapon systems become the norm, then engineers will find themselves spending more time getting crashed systems back online, and less time scrounging for replacement parts - which helps the raiders' survivability as much as anyone else's. Say that the environmental control systems are particularly robust for whatever reason so that you usually won't have to worry about depressurization or loss of artificial gravity (if the setting has it). -- Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
