Tranports vs Caps

[Zapp]

6.7 Attacking freighters, transports, liners or demanding cargo from the same is not allowed for cruisers and battleships.

Exceptions to this rule are:

a) Official faction tagged house ships in their respective house space ONLY.
b) Terrorist, Nomad, Wild, Phantom ID players;
c) LSF or Liberty Navy Guard vessels operating within Zone 21 or Alaska;
d) Order Guard vessels operating within Alaska or Omicron Minor;
e) Blood Dragon Guard vessels within Chugoku;
f) Corsair Guard vessels within Omicron Gamma;
g) Outcast Guard vessels within Omicron Alpha;
h) Guard ID players in their -own- associated Guard system.
i) Special OP players within the guidelines of their approved RP.


Traders whom are attacked in these areas may be pursued and destroyed beyond them

There have been two threads recently centered around this rule. Both were seeking for ways to remove it. It is indeed a very cumbersome rule, with no less than nine exceptions. Why? I'll pull my opinion out of one of those threads:

My opinion: screw transports, they get off too easy anyways. Remove the rule altogether with no changes. The number of pirate cruisers is really low compared to how it used to be, plus it'd finally give some use to SRPing a Scylla or Rheinland Pirate Cruiser.

If a transport can't escape a battleship, it deserves to die.

Many balance issues were raised regarding transports and capital ships in those threads. What it comes down to, however, is that transports don't have to fight their way out of everything. They can avoid situations, they can 'hire escorts' (I won't go further into that, as it's been beaten to death), they can watch the chat menu for questionable names and levels. Most cases of transports being pirated is sheer carelessness. Why should there be rules to protect that? They already get out of the 4-hour rule. We've already beefed up transports so that there are ones on par with gunboats as far as firepower.

The question is, should this rule be removed entirely or not?

Also, I'd like an admin to come in and give the reasoning behind the rule. Is it just to protect transports, or is it to avoid abuse of capital ships being used? If it's the latter, keep in mind that most pirate (not counting Outcast, Corsair, and Hessian) factions no longer have access to cruisers without an SRP. And why bother going for the SRP? There's not really much reason beyond attacking other capital ships.

Vote, express opinions, argue with me. I will ignore flame posts, and I'd rather they were deleted. We can discuss this like rational human beings.

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[Charo]

I agree!
Case closed!

http://peruron.com/blol/wp-content/uploads...of-approval.jpg

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[Colonel.Tigh]

I would agree to let Cruisers participate in Piracy if, they got their Cruisedisrupters removed compleatly.
So Cruiser pirating would be a group effort (well at least 2 players), that may be hard for the trademan, but police bombers get something to do for a change.
Sometimes i misse the lolwut days, when Outcast cruisers were everywhere.

Damn i need Targets.

[Zapp]

It was said earlier but I can't find it: if you remove cruise disruptors from Cruisers, you're removing a large part of their role (being able to stop battleships from running). Battleships already have no cruise disruptor and no thruster, and those are about the only things the cruiser class has over the battleship class.

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[casero]

Personally, I don't think that corsairs or outcasts built their destroyers and battleships for piracy. The ships don't fit into that role, if they are good at it? Sure, but that doesn't mean they fit into that role. I doubt they have built these ships for the purpose of pirating, they did to fight against house military and their other enemies. Or from another view, to balance the lawful capital ships (yes, god forgives us, we added ship for OORP reasons).

Think about it, a ship that requires many persons to fly it, hundreads, with a huge firepower, the mother of all the ships.... sitting in a trade lane, dropping it and saying "hey, give us two million credits or die".

Same go for lawful capital ships, jumping out of trade lanes to attack a sabre... yeah, it's priceless RP.

Or a lawful capital ship chasing a smuggler with 10 units of cardamine.

Now, you are probably going to say, you won't use them like that, but people will, perhaps not everyone, but some will, and the next thing will be rant threads about that people using caps in stupid ways, the next thing will be discussing who should fly caps, restrict them or not, and the next thing will get caps not shooting at transports. It goes in circles.

But if I have to answer your question Zapp. Yes, capital ships should be able to shoot transports. What makes the difference is how is that played.
Should we keep the police cars or let the army to patrol the streets in tanks?

If this is to get capital ships to commit piracy quickly? I say, keep the rule as it is.

[Akura]

Transports like the Yachts can already easily outrun a cruiser.

Cruiser would need some buddies anyway.


I agree though, would be nice to see those Scyllas used more often. And for a decent role, like the Rheinland Pirate Cruiser actually being... well yeah.


If a transport can't pay, it dies anyway, a Cruiser would just speed up the process. Navy caps wouldn't hold back on smugglers and pirate transports, transports get it good anyway.

I'd like to see Cruisers in piracy.

[tansytansey]

The thing is, Transports can't get away from Cruisers. Cruisers have a CD and the same thruster speed, and the firepower to blow a trader to bits in seconds.

Change that, then you can let caps attack transports. Until then, no.

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|Ashes and Draya's Epic Adventure|Ashes "Nighthawk" Yotaka|Nightfall|Eva Jones|
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[Akura]

The thing is, Transports can't get away from Cruisers. Cruisers have a CD and the same thruster speed, and the firepower to blow a trader to bits in seconds.

Change that, then you can let caps attack transports. Until then, no.

Agreed there as well, removing the CD for Cruiser vs Transport is fair, but it ruins Cruiser vs Everything else.

[Sprolf]

Shooting unlawful or smuggling transports with capital ships and pirating with capital ships are two entirely different things.

The first should be allowed, and I'd like if cruisers and destroyers could pirate, but that will probably never happen with balance as it is.

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[Harcourt.Fenton.Mudd]

I've been against this rule since be fore it went into effect, and if it wasnt for me Gafwmn and others spaming the thread when it got started, power smugglers would have been save from the navy in Z21 and Alaska.

However, I think that SOME of the protections should remain, when it comes to priate caps.

If a person smuggles, they made a CHOICE. And running things like slaves is also usualy a big clue it may be illegal.

EVERYONE has to make credits, and trading is supposed to be one of the big ways of doing that.

Combine that with the fact that unlike the houses the pirates dont have endless numbers of capitals to risk on risky piracy runs, and the general fairplay issue, and caps shouldnt be able to pirate.

That, or make ALL pirate caps SRP and allow them to pirate, BUT if a pirate cap (or any cap really) is caught essently going 'lol thanks for hte ore' (or any other item) followed by pew pew w/o giving the t ransport a chacne to respond (Or otehr rule violations, or general 0.0 type abuse) the cap in question should cease to exist, along with quite potentely a good chunk of the players stuff.

Now, even better, and this would stop the fighterwhores from being able to cry about the capwhores, make ALL caps SRP.

Remove the power plant from all caps when sold, add it back in to the new ships when someone gets OKd.

Make all currently existing caps exempted from it.

Then start weeding out the bad ones.

Have in the rules that BUYING one w/o premession means you need to wait another two weeks then apply again, and the one you bought that you now cant launch due to a missing power plant will NOT get the power core added.

This will be a HEAVY reminder for folks to read the damned rules.

I dont know about other folks, but Im tired of all of the new players that dont bother to read the rules, then seem *gasp* shocked when they get a sanc. It's annoying, and retarded.

But we restrict NEW caps and weed out the bad ones from the currently existing ones, and that would go a LONG way to making the relaxing or removal of this rule actualy worth it.


As for why it was added, remember back in .84 the height of RP was for a nightly unlawful cap raid on the NY system, a camping trip of sortts, one in which basicly every base in NY would usualy be camped for at least part of an hour by a swarm of pirates, those pirates were also there to protect their smuggeling buddies, who the lawful caps were able to blow up, becasue the smugglers tended to be absolute idiots and either just go direct via the lanes, or run right thru Z21, or do rotues that involved skipping from guard system to guard system (why DO they link up like that anyway, its not like the admins need the backdoor route), then they would wonder why they kept getting shot by battleships, and cry about it to the admins, then his rule was born. Yeah, there were some idiots back then house navies and their indies had a LOT more discression for shooting the hell, repeatedly, out of some idiot misusing a cap (or anything for that matter).