A realization.

[Shagohad]

I have been seeing ship names like the 'Hessian Cruiser', 'Rogue Cruiser', 'Lane Hacker Battleship', and 'Dragon Battleship'. At first I thought it was cool for pirates to be getting capital ships, then it hit me:

"Pirates aren't designed for full-fledged combat. They like fast little ships that are tough enough to prey on the weak and get out before the cops show up."

In history, pirates never had three masted ships or larger. They had two/one masted sloops that let them harass a trader, board, then load up as much loot as possible. And a larger ship for a pirate would not be feasible for this reason:

"A pirate would not have enough resources to get MILITARY grade ships."

Three masted frigates were not available to civilians or pirates. Manning them, equipping them, and making them seem harmless was just too hard for your average pirate. If a ship like a frigate were seen in civilian hands, it would have been destroyed/impounded unless proper papers were presented. This brings me to my next point:

"Even while pirate factions wage war with each other, they have periods of time where they do pirate things."

You can't pirate in a cruiser in this mod. This TOTALLY eliminates the purpose of a pirate character in this mod. Yeah, I can kick the living crap out of a Navy ship, but I can't make money from helpless traders. That's not a pirate, that's an anarchist. This leads me to my proposition:

"Instead of making capital ships, why not just oversize/tweak/modify gunboats?"

We can have gunboats that can mount two cruiser weapons to give a 'powerful' feel of a normally cap-ship ineffective vessel. Maybe we can have gunboats that can mount one battleship weapon. A gunboat with a heavy mortar wouldn't be able to fire often, but it could be devastating if there were five of them and the fired at the right time at the same topic. Bigger is not better. I've seen three bombers dismantle a cruiser in a matter of minutes. Imagine five gunboats that equal the power of three battleships with more maneuverability. So you should make light, medium, and heavy gunboats. Perhaps this is the weapon system:


Light: All gunboat weapons. Most pirate gunboats have 8 weapon mounts. Let's use this balance for the sake of this topic.

Medium: 2 cruiser turrets and 4 gunboat turrets.

Heavy: 1 battleship turret and 2 gunboat turrets.

Just chew on this for a bit and see if it would be feasible. These would be the resources and methods available to pirates. Battleships and cruisers would be useless to pirates in the sense that you can only do ONE thing with them: Kill your enemies when and if they do show up. With this, you'll be able to easily chew up a capital ship then pirate traders afterward.

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"THE HULL HAS BEEN BREACHED AND THE SCIENCE IS LEAKING OUT!"