rinku said:
I think the general idea with mustering out benefits are that they are personal effects the character has picked up over the years, not souvenirs lifted from the employer.
This...
To reflect this, I like to have the players make the muster out roll(s) for a term at the end of each term. Gives us an idea of when they actually acquired an item, and how they might have come about it.
In the real world, depending on one's career and hobbies, it's not unusual to pick up some rather unique items - this goes for military personnel as well. Most militaries/governments have some sort of surplus equiment sales program, and active duty personnel are often the ones who hear about them and attend them early. I've seen some pretty military specific stuff offered up at those sales. While I personally didn't pick up any weapons or armor during my time in the service, I did pick up quite a bit of specialty electronic test equipment, including a couple pieces that were only made for the US military. Furthermore, parts of equipment also get sold at those sales - parts that have little to no use or value by themselves, but theoretically a knowledgable person with enough diligence and bit of luck could acquire enough of these parts to assemble their own.
While military and government aren't so creative with their retirement benefits, companies and corporations can be. An arcade I worked at gave a departing employee a video game cabinet, a car wash manufacturer gave a retiring employee his own self serve wash pump stand to put in his garage, and the last company I worked for gave all the departing employees their computers when they closed their doors. I know none of those are similar to BD, my point is that people acquire not so normal stuff all the time.
That's legitimate acquisitions - sometimes acquistions aren't so legitimate. One of the overseas bases I was stationed was the cause of a fleet wide order that modified how certain type of surplus equipment was sold. It used to be that bases were able to determine their own surplus needs and hold local sales - however, a couple of enterprising calibration techs would "surplus" nearly brand new electronics test equipment, then have their friends buy it for them at the base surplus sale. When they got caught, the fleet command issued an order that any equipment over a certain value to be surplused had to either be shipped to fleet headquarters in Hawaii, or had to have special authorization from headquarters to be sold locally. Put an end to that little racket.
Then there is simply outright theft. While simply taking a piece of battle dress might be noticed, stealing pieces of them under the guise of maintenance is pretty hard to notice. At one of my bases, my supply clerk, one of my techs and I caught someone above us in our chain of command stealing supplies to outfit the sailboat he was building. No one above him questioned the base ordering things like anchors, compasses. cleats and spools of rope/cable, because it was a navy base, and it did have a small boat unit. It was those of us working the radio transmitter department that started receiving these supplies to question these "unordered parts" - and of course, the person we had to report these mis-shipped parts to was the one doing the stealing. At first it was just "Hey, we got the boat unit's order again" and he'd say "Ok, I'll drop it off to them", but finally after a couple of months we got suspicious and started to compile some real data to catch him. A less diligent crew might not have noticed, nor challenged a boss like that. Or if it had been at the tugboat unit where that stuff wasn't unusual.
So I see no issues with the occassional Marine being able to acquire BD during their term of service. If it came up during the character generation process, as long as the player could come up with a decent storyline as to how they got it and they were aware and acknowledged that I would use it against them in ways similar to those that have been mentioned already, why not? After all, Traveller PCs often end up in ships that armed with far more dangerous weapons - a triple laser turret on a scout ship is just as dangerous - if not more so - than a PC in BD.
