Re: Cause this isn't Star Wars...

Sea Wasp <seawaspObvious@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

So, what do you all think? Do the military personnel inside the station
carry sidearms? If they don't, what happens when they discover that
they have an intruder? Would they carry sidearms while on their ships?

Unless your universe never has any boarding events -- either violent
or subtle -- they'd be armed.

Since this is counter to what Ric is saying, could you expand on your
reasoning? Surely in our universe there have been boarding events, but
apparently on small ships nobody is armed.


Especially if it was hostile territory.

Hmm. I think maybe "hostile territory" isn't a very sensible sort of a
concept for the setting. I mean space is huge and planets are small,
and habitable ones few and far between. Right? So you would have some
well travelled routes between planets, where you are reasonably likely
to meet friendly people, (only they probably will be going the other way
and you won't have time to do more than wave at them as the two of you
zip past each other), and then you have the whole rest of the universe
in which you are unlikely to meet anyone at all.

They may know that there are hostile elements out there, but they
wouldn't normally be *expecting* those elements, because athough they
could be anywhere, wherever you are the odds are that it's not the right
place.

On the other hand, these people are here, specifically, to try hunt down
and destroy some of those hostile elements. My space pirates, in fact.
So it's not that they are in hostile territory so much as they are a
reasonably high risk target.

On the third hand, there is abosolutely no history whatsoever of my
pirates attacking a space station.

But on the forth hand my pirates do make a living boarding *ships*.

(I think I've switched hands too many times, I'm getting dizzy)


In the space battles I've worked out for the first book, the defenders
on the ship under attack would have lots of time to get their weapons
out of an armory.

But on the ... (I'm a squid, obviously) ...fifth hand it is
theoretically possibe to drop anything out of subspace directly into
anywhere. The problem being that it really does land *inside* whatever
it lands inside, and the molecule mixing involved tends to do nasty
things to anything er... delicate, (organisms for example, and tech) and
dropping anything into a moving target and actually hitting it is
trickier than all get out because from subspace your target is
practically microscopic, and, well, everything in the universe does seem
to be whizzing about a bit.

And on the sixth hand there are safeguards in place to prevent this sort
of dropping because, after all, explosives aren't necessarily delicate.
If these safeguards can be relied on at all, they should easily prevent
a person from dropping in unexpectedly which would be very difficult to
arrange anyway. (Except that I do arrange it, one of the benefits of
being an author is that I get to tuck a few Aces up my sleeves.)


Maybe not EVERYONE would be armed, but there'd be a fair proportion
of people armed.

Well, I'm thinking its reasonable to have more people armed than might
usually be the case.

I'm not sure how that would work exactly, though. These people call
themselves Marines. They are used to going somewhere and then shooting
at people when they arrive. They aren't much used to shooting at people
in the middle of a trip -- my comments about waving to friendly people
also apply to non-friendly people.

Hunting pirates is a brand new game for them.

And I really think that on a station they are expecting to have at
*least* as much time to hit the armory as they would if they were on a
ship, so I don't think everyone would be armed. At *most* it would be
people on duty, and I think even that would depend on what their duties
were?

--
Michelle Bottorff -> Chelle B. -> Shelby
L. Shelby, Writer http://www.lshelby.com/
Livejournal http://lavenderbard.livejournal.com/
rec.arts.sf.composition FAQ http://www.lshelby.com/rasfcFAQ.html
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