Okay, let's pause here. Are people playing devil's advocate, or is there a legitimate misunderstanding, on a meta level, about what we're talking about? Because I'm getting a headache, and I want to establish something before it gets too much worse.
Jet and AC and anyone else humanshaped are, if somehow loaded down with as many gunpods as they could carry, fitted with jetpacks, etc, roughly fighter-scale in terms of power. Someone on WC's scale, again if someone built a giant cannons and crap, still probably wouldn't qualify unless someone tried very very hard and so on. In which case he would be probably be politely asked to register his nukular bomm gun.
We're talking about severely antisocial equipment here. Strategic bombers, warships armed correspondingly, large scale anti-ship and anti-structure missiles or guns or whatever, weapons of mass destruction, and things like that. We're talking about scary MAD crap, on a scale such that left in rogue hands and unopposed by similar grade stuff, there's a reasonable capability to depopulate the non-Earth portions of the setting. Stuff that would require a substantial investment of time and effort to create, stuff that would essentially not have any legitimate usage.
Do any of us *really* *actually* want individuals or individual factions without adult supervision to have their hands on crap of that scale? Does anyone think it's a remotely good idea to have all the rest of the Convention members have to be armsracing to deal with the possibility of someone going off the rails and trying to kill all the rest of us? Because I mean, seriously, that's not the setting I was writing in.
Jet and AC and anyone else humanshaped are, if somehow loaded down with as many gunpods as they could carry, fitted with jetpacks, etc, roughly fighter-scale in terms of power. Someone on WC's scale, again if someone built a giant cannons and crap, still probably wouldn't qualify unless someone tried very very hard and so on. In which case he would be probably be politely asked to register his nukular bomm gun.
We're talking about severely antisocial equipment here. Strategic bombers, warships armed correspondingly, large scale anti-ship and anti-structure missiles or guns or whatever, weapons of mass destruction, and things like that. We're talking about scary MAD crap, on a scale such that left in rogue hands and unopposed by similar grade stuff, there's a reasonable capability to depopulate the non-Earth portions of the setting. Stuff that would require a substantial investment of time and effort to create, stuff that would essentially not have any legitimate usage.
Do any of us *really* *actually* want individuals or individual factions without adult supervision to have their hands on crap of that scale? Does anyone think it's a remotely good idea to have all the rest of the Convention members have to be armsracing to deal with the possibility of someone going off the rails and trying to kill all the rest of us? Because I mean, seriously, that's not the setting I was writing in.