Civilian Cruiser

[Trogdor]

...Meh. Whether or not it's 'lore friendly' or 'questionable' is a matter of perspective. I mean, look at classic pirate ships, whom depending on the size of the ship, might have anywhere between a couple dozen and a couple hundred crew. They had to have enough people to operate the boat, plus large boarding parties to fight the crew of the enemy ship, operate THAT boat if they chose to claim it, take losses, etc.

If you're wondering where I'm going with this, the point is that there is historical precedent for unaffiliated groups to operate large fighting vessels that were on par with what navies were fielding. And they were able to repair, resupply, etc at ports.. despite being independent.

Now, there are two other matters, one of which is that in history, these vessels were typically retrofitted trade ships that were captured... the pirate crews didn't pool large sums of cash and have a shipyard build something for them.
The other matter is whether this is good for the mod.. On one hand you've got the 'omg not more capspam' people. On the other hand, there are ways of dealing with this. You could place docking restrictions on the ID for ships of X class, like you do with the Zoner ID. Maybe they can only moor at junker/zoner/freelancer type bases. If they can dock in house, they'd have to avoid attention, as houses don't tolerate foreign caps wandering around their space. Or they'd have to roleplay with the house governments to obtain permission.
They could be used by freelancers, generic pirates, etc in the borderworlds, pursuing bounties, pirating, escorting, and whatnot.

I think it could be done, and I think it could be good, as long as some thought was put into its implementation. Rather than digging one's heels in and saying 'nope', could we maybe talk about how we could make this work?
Its firepower, core, armor, size, equipment, rules.. everything is undefined at this point.

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