TL9 Ships: GURPS High Tech and ISW

[Apache]

IIRC there was an old JTAS article (as in when GDW published it old) that talked about mounting autocannons and other such weapons in your free trader/scout turret, for such things as seeing off the natives, cost, and legality issues.

As for using them in the point defense role, sandcasters can do the exact same thing, better. And have anti-laser uses as well....

However, for a civilian ship, having a triple 40mm autocannon in your pop-up turret (which fires APFSDU rounds...) can be a rather lethal surprise to any would-be pirate that was just about to dock.....or send over some boarders in vacc suits...

[doulos05]

Originally Posted by Apache

IIRC there was an old JTAS article (as in when GDW published it old) that talked about mounting autocannons and other such weapons in your free trader/scout turret, for such things as seeing off the natives, cost, and legality issues.

As for using them in the point defense role, sandcasters can do the exact same thing, better. And have anti-laser uses as well....

However, for a civilian ship, having a triple 40mm autocannon in your pop-up turret (which fires APFSDU rounds...) can be a rather lethal surprise to any would-be pirate that was just about to dock.....or send over some boarders in vacc suits...

Any pirate dumb enough to 'just send over some boarders in vacc suits' isn't gonna be in business very long. Any pirate ship large enough to have sufficient warm bodies to send over a prize crew without affecting shipboard operations is large enough to send them in a 20 dton gig. There are so many trivial ways to kill vacc suited boarders drifting through the vacuum between two ships that don't involve weapons that it's almost pointless to mount a weapons system specifically for that purpose.

[Apache]

So?

Most 'pirates', if you go by most Traveller articles on the subject, use converted merchant ships, and are usually not 'career pirates'. Yeah, if you happen to run across The Dread Pirate Roberts in his shiny pirate cruiser, you are screwed, but odds are the 'pirates' boarding you were, until recently, merchant crew themselves.

And if you happen to be of a raiding bent yourself, putting some rapid-fire autocannons in your turrets is alot cheaper than pulse lasers or missiles, and works well enough versus primitive opponents.

[ak_aramis]

Originally Posted by Apache

So?

Most 'pirates', if you go by most Traveller articles on the subject, use converted merchant ships, and are usually not 'career pirates'. Yeah, if you happen to run across The Dread Pirate Roberts in his shiny pirate cruiser, you are screwed, but odds are the 'pirates' boarding you were, until recently, merchant crew themselves.

And if you happen to be of a raiding bent yourself, putting some rapid-fire autocannons in your turrets is alot cheaper than pulse lasers or missiles, and works well enough versus primitive opponents.

Most of those articles don't match the CT/MT Pirate careers, nor the T4 and MGT equivalents.

The Pirates tend to be professional boarders, with ship skills gained with rank. What percentage are of this type one can't extrapolate from the CGen process.

[Apache]

Again, so?

By definition, a PC created using the Pirate career is, no surprise, a career pirate. Or was, at any rate.

Given that all you need to embark on a career of piracy is a ship and some guns, having a crew of ex-Merchants, ex-Navy, etc, isn't going to stop Captain Kidd from grabbing a fat trader when he thinks nobody is looking.

[ak_aramis]

Originally Posted by Apache

Again, so?

It shows what the successful pirates are doing to be successful. The very different skill mix from both Navy and Merchant may be lost on GURPS players, but it was very evident when running high-PC-turnover Classic Traveller. It also awards purpose built ships. (Not well designed ones, IMO, but..)

I'll point out also that there is no entry in Advanced Merchant CGen for "Gone Pirate" as an assignment, either. So, either it's pretty rare, or requires a sufficiently different skill set as to BE a different career, or is unsustainable in a merchantman.

CT and MT setting is as much, if not more, inferred by Rules, especially Character Gen, as explicitly written. And the existence of lots of pirates is in the Encounter Tables.

[nik1979]

in ISW ammo is 1dton 7 short tons of ammo. Applying it to the ff:

56,000 rounds of .50 browning
24,561 rounds of 20x102mm