Merchants weapons

[Condottiere]

I think they have to be licensed, in order to dock at an Imperium starport.

 

[MonsterX]

It is possible to check if missiles are radioactive. You could keep them in a lead-lined magazine (a good idea anyways), but this is likely to arouse suspicion. If they're stored next to the fusion plant, the radiation might be hard to differentiate. But storing your missiles next to the fusion plant instead of the turret is kind of suspicious in itself. If customs want to check, it can. Penalties for smuggling nukes might be a little harsh, given that this is likely to be strongly associated with terrorism or insurrection.

Not only ships' weapons but the ship itself is a WMD. Ram it into a city after accelerating 6Gs for a few days and you'll get a big crater. Planets will have at least minimal defenses against this if they can afford them - even if they have to important them from expensive high tech planets. I assume that basically every planet with any kind of decent economy and or infrastructure is protected well enough to prevent a typical PC ship from succeeding at doing this kind of thing.

 

[Firedrake]

REGULAR ship weapons are WMDs, even lasers, against civilian targets.

Depending on which version of M-drive you're using, the ship on its own is also a WMD (either as a high sublight kinetic weapon or by hovering over a target). But if you follow that chain of reasoning, you don't get independent merchants, you get starship captains picked and trained like ballistic missile submarine captains.

 

[Condottiere]

Automated mass driver bay, to place a couple of boulders in the way.

 

[Sigtrygg]

It’s not economically feasible for merchantmen to use disposable weapons. Missiles are for naval forces.

Is it economical to carry around an oversized power plant for the laser you never use? For the price of that extra power plant you could pay for a lot of missiles.

 

[Sigtrygg]

But than you get the whole WMD issue as well as the tonnage the mines take up. Though I will admit it’s harder to tell you have mines aboard since there doesn’t seem to be a mine rack system

A starship is in itself a weapon of mass destruction. A single beam laser on the ground is a weapon off mass destruction.

Imagine a free trader sitting on the ground in the middle of a city with its laser turned on burning through building after building...

 

[Sigtrygg]

Kind of late if you’re doing an inspection after the ship could dock. It’s just common sense to be worried about a MERCHANT SHIP with missile racks that make no sense on such a ship. All energy weapons on a ship have a blast of 10 that’s far smaller than the area of damage that a nuclear missile can produce. It’s just common sense which like I said before is why you never see a freighter with missile weapons in the real world at least not a legitimate one.

The difference is the nuke is a one off, the energy weapon can be fired every combat turn until the power runs out. A month of non stop ship scale energy weapon or laser into a civilian area...