(02-21-2014, 03:43 PM)Haste Wrote: This has been said here a couple times now, but I'm not convinced. In Disco, and vanilla freelancer, NPC transport convoys are heavily escorted with several fully-kitted-out fighters. These fighters happily get into fights to the death with other, hostile NPCs. So they're not just there for show. They're trained fighter pilots.
With that established, what's stopping one of these corps from sending one or two of these escort wings into a secluded, lawless, dark matter cloud to "silently" destroy a rival company's mining vessels? The law is. But again, while it's a mere 3-minute trip in-game, those fields are actually as far away from the lanes as planets are away from the sun in this universe - in other words, with realistic distances, they would be on the other side of the solar system. The law won't see the event nor hear about it if it's pulled off well.
The ultimate cop-out of cop-outs applies here: "Space is dangerous". Corporations aren't composed exclusively of men in fancy suits. The Freelancer universe is a pretty dark one, and I think direct conflict between corps is acceptable and perhaps even "realistic" in it.
(Not that I'm opposed to the Reavers being hired by [ALG] to shoot DSE)
I'm not saying they shouldn't be shooting one another in a border system or anything, since the law doesn't care about those places. But as for "out in the middle of nowhere", the fields are in known places and the DSE has very much made it clear that there's been things going down with the ALG in an official communique to the Government. If you want to put it into a full realistic scope, then there would obviously be government-aligned ships also patrolling that area.
If you want to put it into a universe-player interaction realism, at least for the LSF, we've even roleplayed the existence of drones that scout Liberty, a place like the cloud in which the mining is done (and where the combat would probably take place within Liberty) would obviously have units within the area making sure no smugglers/pirates are using it, and in this case, a counter against corporate-warfare.
Either way, that level of realism doesn't in disco, it can't, why? Because it takes 3 minutes to get to the cloud. So in that scope, in my opinion, ALG and DSE shouldn't be shooting each other with publicly within Liberty and the laws. They could, but if they're seen, the consequences might not be in either side's favor.
