Pyromancer said:
This makes a great historic backdrop. I will put a statue of one of those at a prominent place on Inurin, with people remarking how stupid military technology was 100 years ago.
The land battleships did work at one point or else they wouldn't be noted as "breaking a stalemate" suggesting that the power that built them went on to win the conflict(s).
This would mean it'd In fact, they'd probably be remembered romantically (extremely fondly). Good comparisons would be how people call for the return of battleships today; it'd have been the Manhattan Project of their day, the "war winning weapon." Armchair militarists on the world often calling for the return of land battleship idea to win wars anytime conflict or the threat of conflict emerges ("imagine how deadly this would be if we put in a fusion reactor instead of the oil boilers and crystal-aligned armor instead of face-hardened iron!") in a similar vein to how any visit to a naval warfare forum will result in threads about how to battleship will return again as a dominant weapon or how RPG forums periodically are hit with threads about how to make swords deadly weapons of the future.
Pyromancer said:
They are OLD, TL9 designs upgraded to jump-2 a few hundred years ago, and most sensors and some of the secondary weapons are removed, but they do have spinal mount particle accelerators.
The Imperium isn't going to have TL9 starships lying around. If they did, they'd be old ships, kept around in museums; perhaps they're some notable ship or just an example of what naval technology was like
centuries ago.
If the Imperium sells them a warship, you're likely looking at like TL12, maybe TL13. I think you are correct if the Imperium doesn't want to a world too dominant, they'd probably sell the world "nerfed" warships - the hull, power systems, maneuver drive, and so on all would all be high tech. However, the ship might not have much in the way of weapons; like no spinal mount, but it might have bay weapons.
However, if I might make a suggestion, one or two TL13 starships isn't actually going to be overpowering. It'd be like how some nations in Africa or something purchase like five Sukoi-27s. It makes a bold statement and is certainly going to make enemies of the world think twice about causing trouble, but they'd be too valuable to use. I'm sure players might think "well we could set up some ambush and provided we can determine the time and the place, we can destroy these ships" ... I'm a believer that players are not significantly more bright than someone in the Inurin military - if the players can think of a scenario like that, so will the Inurin military. The maintenance drain on having weapons that are superior to what they have would also be significant; they'd be stuck in a situation like modern-day India where they have these shiny weapons, but logistical burden of keeping them operational and training the crews would be pretty great.
It's likely to trigger an arms race in the region, at least enough to deter attacks by Inurin; they don't need a comparable military force, just a few TL13 SDBs or something and they'll mortgage their worlds to the Imperium and its megacorps to get them (win-win for the Imperium). However, a pair of TL13 starships isn't going to stop a determined fleet of small commerce raiders; yes, a force of small converted Far Traders may lose one or two ships in a raid, but before even ten merchant hulls are lost, that world is going to be reclassified as an Amber Zone and merchant traffic is going to dry up, which is something Inurin definitely cannot afford, given the promises they made to get the ships in the first place.
