' Wrote:I prefer to compare Space to the 1800s Oceans than to modern day life.
How many pirates did you see robbing merchants in a dinghy?
I think I'll go research that.:P
On topic, Tomtom the reason why must people dislike the thought of a police faction having access to gunboats is usually because in reality they wouldn't have access to them. However that being said, with the recent increase in pirate activity, if I ruled a government I'd hand a few gunboats out to the police just to back them up.
So really. Ignore all the idiots making real world analogies. This is a game. Set in space. Where anything with a reasonable amount of credits can get access to a ship and guns capable of killing a military/police vessel. So claiming a gunboat to be akin to a tank in real life, is pointless.
Space is not a city. Don't compare it. The main life still goes on on planets.
While space is very chaotic place to be. Everyone with a gun can make law there since it's hard to control something you can't manage (ye, space !) becouse it's simply too big. And here all the military comes. It's not like it's dictatorship, they are for protection, becouse there is always someone armed from who to protect someone.
' Wrote:I prefer to compare Space to the 1800s Oceans than to modern day life.
How many pirates did you see robbing merchants in a dinghy?
The following is my personal opinion, not that of the admin team:
DING! Someone is a winner, here, because you get the scale. The actual analogy of:
Quote:Let's say that systems are cities. New York is New York, New Berlin is Berlin, Stuttgart is Stuttgart
is flawed.
City of New York has about 10,000,000 people, with a police force of about 40,000 officers (including things like Port Authority, Transit Authority, etc., not just regular NYPD. That's all those people in an area of about 370 square miles. Assume that since it's built up and down, to include cubic space, and you still only get 370 cubic miles.
Now, let's translate that into solar systems reality. The distance between Earth and Jupiter is just under 400 million miles. (Our orbit is 93 million miles out, Jupiter is 483 million miles out - forgive the rounding, but it's easier for calculations.) Area of a circle is pi times the radius, squared. So we simply consider the 'washer' in space that is the area volume - and again, assume that we only stay right on the plane, we have 2,450,442,228 square miles, or roughly 8 million times the surface area of New York City. And of course, since space isn't flat - there's a LOT of space out there.
Cops are going to sit near the planets, do customs patrols right there, and enforce planetary law. It really IS going to be up to the Navies to patrol that vast distance - and they're not going to do a good job of it, simply because space is so darned big - which is what happened during the age of pirates. Police cutters would work close in to shore, catching smugglers (or not) as they came in close. But out on the open seas, it's was the navies against the pirates - and lots of times, the pirates won their battles.
Move this up in scale now to our fictional Freelancer universe. There are, for rules purposes, 26 official house systems. You're going to do what, with more than 50 billion square miles of space between those small chunks of rock called planets? (Again, that's assuming you stay on the plane. You start figuring cubic, and then it gets really ridiculous. That's when the old mariners prayer comes to mind - Lord, your ocean is so vast and huge, and my boat is so small....)
(Again, to reiterate for the hardcore science guys out there - I'm only considering the area between Earth and Jupiter - if we consider the total volume of just OUR solar system, the numbers get astronomical in size - pun intended.)
(11-21-2013, 12:53 PM)Jihadjoe Wrote: Oh god... The end of days... Agmen agreed with me.
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' Wrote:So we've been chatting in the RFP Skype chat, and somebody brought up the phrase when we were requesting a Gunship. It was something like "You don't see Police in RL driving tanks."
but RL crims know that should they go on a rampage with a tank, the military would be called in to WTFPWN them in a short space of time. even the somali pirates know that the tanks they stole are worth more to the legit govts of the world, than to any rebel/revolutionary in africa.
anyone remeber the BH gunship? a very nice vessel, manoeuvrable and decent firepower. by itself, a skilled vhf pilot could pop it, but as support vessel, :ylove:
police cars are faster, and better equipped than most criminals cars police interceptors
not many peeps can drive an evo 8 every day.
reskin the bh gunship, and distribute to the police factions
![[Image: 17pswi.jpg]](http://i39.tinypic.com/17pswi.jpg)
![[Image: DA_arpaio_tank.jpg]](http://www.doney.net/aroundaz/celebrity/DA_arpaio_tank.jpg)
