Roleplay ?

[Tenacity]

I'm a moderate on this issue. I believe that the criminal factions have the right to control capital ship use as they see fit, but that anyone should be allowed to roleplay a snub ship using criminal.

I also believe traders have the right to fly whatever ship they want, provided they are not independent traders (since corporations would fund their ships, not themselves), though obviously with some restrictions (no Samura Mammoths).

I believe the quasilegals have pretty much a similar situation to the pirates, and I believe, lastly, that military factions have a right to unilaterally enact exclusionary policies to satisfy consistency and roleplay.

The main reason for the capital ship restrictions is that many of the player factions number among them the upper hierarchy and some of the bosses of the criminal factions, and criminal factions should have a very limited amount of capital ships, considering crew and economic requirements. Same with quasilegals.

For cruisers/destroyers to battleships and dreadnaughts, yes. I think gunboats are quite a bit more lenient, and they're certainly more common.

Honestly, I think very, very few people should be using anything destroyer sized and up. I think only players with a decently thought out RP background should be able to use those ships. They're extraordinarily expensive (in RP terms, any trader can make 200 mil in a week easy), and a faction wouldnt just hand out their most powerful vessels to some run of the mill pilot serving them.

Gunboats arent as large, they arent as expensive, and they're easier to manufacture. Most of them are really nothing but oversized fighters when you think about it - the average gunboat in discovery, from what i've been told, has a crew numbering anywhere from three to twelve people. They really arent that large.

For a lot of players, gunboats make sense though. My pirate, bloodsail, for example... Fighters do not have the cargo space to haul back 'loot' from pirated traders, and freighters/transports usually don thave the firepower necessary to pirate successfully (this goes for VHF's even, most traders can easily get away from a single VHF trying to pirate them no matter how well equipped they are).

I also use the gunboat as a matter of pvp effectiveness, I'll admit. I've tried fighters and bombers before, and I was less than successful in pirating even the weaker traders. Then again, I refused to use superweapons on my bomber, which could be part of the reason. The gunboat gives me the survivability to escape from lawfuls when they zerg me, and gives me the firepower and cargo space to pirate traders successfully.

Also, compared to cruisers and the other larger capships, gunboats are very well balanced (well, most of them *cough*BHgunship*cough*). They have about the same effective firepower as a bomber, with quite a bit less manuverability, but additional shielding and hull to make up for it. They're still nowhere near as powerful as the other capships, but maintain the size and agility required to move through debris and asteroid fields. They also dont draw the attention that something like a battleship or dreadnaught does.





EDIT:

As an example, earlier today I saw a player that was a member of a trading corporation, who had a bounty hunter tag and a freelancer ID. The ID goes up to gunboat... this player was flying a bounty hunter battlecruiser, right outside manhattan. I get the feeling a lot of players, such as this guy, dont ever take the time to read, much less understand, the rules here.

I wont mention his name though, I gave him a friendly warning about the ID limitation and he said he 'didnt realize it' and would switch as soon as he could.

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