Capships + Traders

[Jinx]

actually - both examples ... pirating traders - or stopping smugglers can cause absurd situations.

it happened in the past that tradeships passed close ( like really within inches ) of pirate warships - mocking the pirate and even yelling the location of the warship to the lawfuls publicly.

in that case - the pirate warship might not even have moved to the trader at all - - it was the trader that approached the pirate - exploiting his protection.

in such a situation - the pirate is usually quite vexed by the behaviour of the trader - and there is just no single reason ( in RP ) not to blow him apart. - its not like the bad warship captain chased a helpless little trader around and applied the unfairness of his big bad ship to the situation.



turn it around - and you can get the same with lawfuls. - a smuggler - full to the rim with cardamine approaches planet manhattan. - it happens that there is currently only one Liberty Navy BC in orbit. NO other ship is available to stop that smuggler, easy as that.

then you sometimes get really smart smugglers that make a mockery out of the situation - being sure they are protected by the rules - and quickdock - just to undock with passengers or something.



both situations describe not a theory, but actually happened quite often. - of course a warship "should" engage the trader... just as a battleship SHOULD kill a light fighter if the light fighter is approaching the battleship with a hostile ( but utterly silly ) attitude.

so - yes, a battlecruiser "might" not activly hunt for smugglers ( although - that is subjective what a battlecruiser should and should not do.... just cause someone feels that its too much means that its wrong to do so - other people might think that its just appropriate - hard to say who s right and who s wrong )



i think what warship players complain about is not that they are not allowed to **chase** a smuggler all around the place. - the reason they feel helpless is cause they cannot do something even if the smuggler is dumb enough to present himself on a silver platter. - and yes, some smugglers ARE so smart to prance around a lawful battleship talking tosh like "oi, captain, i got 5000 tons of cardamine and now i ll take the mooring fixture and ruin your planet some more!"

and the warship captain thinks to himself *right, calm down, you must not get upset and shoot at him, - temper, temper - do not shoot at him!" .... when everyone would agree... he "should" open fire.



problematic is that what is needed is commen sense and responsibility. - without that ... there s no solution for the problem.

allowing a warship captain to engage a trader if the situation makes sense in RP is nice, too bad - everyone has a different idea of whats appropriate ( also see: engagement notice in RP, which every player interprets differently ) - disallowing engaging leads to frustration and .... these complaints.



result of it all is - there are situations when a trader should be pulverized by a battleship, there are situation when it should not happen. - since every player is different, some players are even activly seeking for loopholes, others just randomly step into a loophole, others know loopholes and try to avoid them - its almost impossible to make a simple rule for this situation - and simple is what we need.

so the "don t engage a trader" is the rule at the expense of the smallest bit of RP plausibility. - its not perfect, but to get a perfect rule, we d need either a lawyer to make the rules - and lawyers to play the game... or - and there is even less chance to get ... 100% responsible players with a highly developed social competence, the ability to compromise ane experience with common sense. - if we had that - the world would be a better place - not only discovery freelancer.

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