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

Michelle Bottorff wrote:
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.

Coast Guard ships are about as small as military vessels get, but even on those some of the personnel are armed, and all of them can BE armed.

Also, you said "station", not "ship". A space station is like a military base, and I assure you the people on such a base are armed, or can be armed on short notice. Not civilian contractors and so on, no, but any military personnel, especially those with the possibility of being assigned to guard duty.



Especially if it was hostile territory.


Hmm. I think maybe "hostile territory" isn't a very sensible sort of a
concept for the setting.


You said something that implied it.

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.


This depends partly on technology. Space is only big if your scanners are incapable of locating the stuff you're interested in. Then it may be a long trip, depending on your drive systems, but it's not "big" in the sense of "we may never meet". If there's hostiles out there interested in you, they'll find you.


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.

Then they'd be insane to NOT be armed.



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*.

If this space station was HUGE, your latter point might still make the third point meaningful; i.e., your pirates board and capture or destroy ships like, oh, cargo ships, and the space station is like, oh, the San Diego Naval Shipyard, yeah, there's no reason to expect pirates to attack -- although they WOULD still have many, MANY armed guards and patrols to deal with espionage, potential terrorist threats, etc.

And if the pirates might have something to gain by a commando strike, they'd still have to assume the pirates might try.

If, OTOH, the space station is of the same rough order of magnitude of size and capability as the ships the pirates have taken, they'd be nuts to assume that the pirates -- especially if they suspect the station's purpose -- would NOT attack and take, or destroy, the station.



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.)

If you can't prevent it from happening within distances equalling "Plenty of Time for Warning", you'd better have at least *SOME* armed guards always on alert, or the first enemy to pop an assault shuttle up to within a few meters of your doorway has your ass.


This is sounding in some ways **VERY** similar to the opening for "Demons of the Past", a novel I wrote about 40k words for and proposed to Baen. (they didn't take it, but I'll keep trying until someone does. I've been wanting to tell this story for 20+ years.)

If you'd like, I can send you the opening chapters and see how I dealt with a somewhat similar situation.




--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://seawasp.livejournal.com

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