Quote:No arguement there. I mentioned the "weapons in general" point to (a) lay the groundwork for the following points, and (b) pre-empively squelch anyone who thought Fenspace was a utopia. (It isn't, nor is it a dystopia; it's an interesting place.)
That said, the weapons ban was not a ban on weapons in general but a ban on using handwavium to create weapons.
Quote:With the rules we've agreed on and have used throughout almost all of the threads here, I can only see two cases where matching velocities would work in space:
Here I think you're missing the idea of matching velocities. Yeah, two ships hitting each other at relativistic speeds are going to cause one hell of a bang, but if they're both moving at the same relative speed along the same vector, then the two ships can latch onto each other without causing a multimegaton explosion.
(1) The ships are cooperating with each other. Most Fen aren't going to blithely let reavers match speeds with them; they're going to cut and run.
(2) One of the ships is powerless to prevent the maneuver... which brings us back to "how, if not with weapons?"
"Faster reaver ships" would solve this problem, but faster ships are smaller ships, and reavers need to use larger ships - they need the extra room for hauling boarders, loot, and prisoners.
So, unless reavers are working in packs, with a lot of small attack ships (pilot and one or two boarders) supported by a few bigger cargo ships, we come back to needing something to stop or slow a victim ship so that its speed can be matched. And if the reavers are working in packs of small craft, then they have the problem of delivering enough boarders at once to take over the victim's ship... Either way, reavers have a non-trivial problem to solve if they don't have access to effective ship-to-ship weapons.
-Rob Kelk
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012