I really wish you'd include the sources for all the cool sci-fi clips you use, more than a few times watching these vids I've seen one and wished I could look up the movie or episode it came from and watch that. Like the Star Trek clips at 6:57 and 7:20
i have a question that maybe only you can answer. why do the federation NOT have shipyard sized replicators? so Romulans kick off and bam 1 hour later 300 sovereigns go screaming into the neutral zone with skeleton crews. to my knowledge replicators convert energy into matter and as latnum is the only thing in star trek that cannot be replicated so why cant or DONT the federation just print modern heavily armed ships every time they need them ie dominion war? instead of using mirandas
@@lastechocorp1841 The largest industrial replicators are implied to be somewhat on that scale - just a handful of them would have been enough to rebuild the entire Cardassian manufacturing base. And in Picard, Starfleet's shipyards on Mars were pumping out a rescue fleet for the Romulans at a truly astonishing rate, right up until the android incident devastated their entire production facility.
I've always assumed the legality was to defend against pirates, because at least in Star Wars the government has never been able to provide adequate defense for interplanetary travel.
The last thoughts of a TIE Interceptor pilot over Endor: "I'm in the fastest fighter the Empire has and this freighter is keeping up long enough to shoot us down." While according to Legends all ships come with some weaponry to defend themselves against pirates it's harder to find the technicians to soup up your ride than to find the weapons for a serious upgrade. Especially if you don't mind doing it in the Hutt Sector and have enough credits.
longest possible answer: The limits of spacetime by way of causality would make it difficult, if not impossible to institute rule of the galaxy in a way that is even remotely synonymous with what can be seen today on earth. Even if there were FTL drives that allowed for sidestepping causality problems (EG most sci-fi settings), nothing short of an FTL, instant access from everywhere in the galaxy internet would make it possible, since only then would we be able to efficiently enforce law
The reality of space combat given physics as we know it now would almost entirely preclude the concept of piracy, because: 1) You can't hide a fusion drive 2) It takes days to weeks of high g thrust to go ANYWHERE in the solar system. 3) Every ship is a terrorist nuke waiting to happen. In short, any and every government in the solar system is going to have a vested interest in having a ship tracking and guidance system that puts today's FAA to shame, and anyone who even thinks about taking an unregistered flight is going to be flagged as a terrorist and nuked. Immediately.
You know that saying, "When seconds count, the Police are minutes away." Well, imagine how long it would take armed authorities to reach you in the cold black of deep space. If you were in trouble, you would need the means to defend yourself. Interplanetary travel would be extremely vulnerable to pirates and other threats, so weapons would not only be allowed legally, but would probably be standard issue. Like our real world, I just imagine there'd be restrictions against military-grade weaponry, which depends on the sci-fi universe in question.
Generally it comes down to speed of communication, speed of travel, and area to supervise. I live pretty rural. No one is getting here in less than 20 to 30 minutes. So I'm on my own if the vandals (which we really struggle with) or an aggressive animal start problems...
Yeah I mean even in Star Trek, civvie freighters often have shields and light armament to discourage raiders, or at least hold them off long enough for a Starship to arrive
Iys mentioned that Han Solo actually had illegal weapons (quad laser turrents) on the Millenium Falcon. But frieghters were in fact allowed to have some armaments to combat the pirates.
A few years ago, Somali pirates attacked the tanker with torp boats from the Second World War, which they acquired and converted for themselves. There are several ship cemeteries in the world where you can buy a quiet ship skeleton or even a small ship, such as a torpedo boat or a river escort, etc. Therefore, I think that in space it will be even easier to arm civilian ships than now on earth. Greetings from Poland.
Agreed! If owning a ship becomes as commonplace as a civilian today owning a car, there will likely be salvage yards, and an unbelievable amount of parts and weapons available for a nominal price. Everything from the least powerful turbolasers, to planet destroying mass drivers. Not to mention the possible cargo from derelict abandoned ships that are salvaged or repossessed.
@@johnmullholand2044 In star citizen, even the most gun controlled planet in the Stanton system, they'll sell you guns big enough to crack capital ships.
There may be people who set up illegal ship yard s in space. Just building ship for criminals. Just to do one job. This is a thing going on now. Drug sub are being made to move drugs. If you could find a large chuck of rock with the right stuff. You could mine it and get what you need to make ships.
That's why most sci Fi settings have either heavy materiel shields, or energy shields. Both for deflecting micro meteors, space dust, etc, that can act as a VERY, VERY fast ballistic weapon, or from enemy energy weapons.
@@johnmullholand2044 given high percentage of C or FTL propulsion and the shields you just described, then your ship is a high speed ram (consider Nemo’s Nautilus as an example of a high speed ram).
Micro-meteor defenses would not have to be very powerful or dangerous to another vessel. A torpedo tube is easily distinguishable from a low power laser (or whatever it would take to pulverize small rocks).
@@bertmathricks2024 slightly tangental: You should check out a series called "The Deathworlders." It has some rather... inventive uses of "forcefields" as weapons unto themselves.
@@D3K43: You have machine guns and the ATF has the military on speed-dial. You lose -- the only question is how long you'll hold out and how many bystanders you'll get killed along with you.
For the situations like the Ghost and Falcon from Star Wars, it's important to remember that those ships were most likely heavily modified and armed by their owners and were not necessary built that way.
The stock ship that the Falcon is modified from has a single dorsal quad-turbolaser turret as standard. Han added the ventral turret(which was always an option) and the anti-personnel blaster turret after he acquired it.
@@frankyanish4833 I think your missing my point. Just because a hero ship is armed doesn't mean it comes that way naturally. Yes, within the cannon of Star Wars the YT-1300 does, but it didn't have to in order for the Falcon to have guns on it.
@@frankyanish4833 Again, missing the point. I'm fully admitting that in cannon they are armed, but I'm just pointing out that SpaceDock seems to think that it would be ridiculous for a starship building company to put weapons on a civilian starship, like the Falcon, or for galactic governments to allow them to do so and all I'm trying to point out is that nerf herding smuggler scoundrels rarely worry about following the galactic laws any more so than modern drug smugglers worry about the legality of the assault weapon slung over their shoulder while carrying kilos of cocaine across a border. Think about it this way. I believe in many places it is illegal to modify your car with nitrous, or have mufflers that violate environmental codes, or a dozen other laws related to what is allowed to be put on a person's car, but none of those have stopped people from doing just that. Let's move away from Star Wars and go to the Expanse instead. The fact that Drummer's pirate skiff is armed with missiles should not be taken as evidence that anyone can just walk into their local Tycho Station shipyard and buy a fully decked out cruiser complete with optional railgun. These hero ships tend to be owned by people who are not always interested in following the rules. Now, in the video he does go on to point out that many of these universes they exist in a state similar to the Age of Sail when civilian merchant ships were armed.
@@IphigeniaAtAulis I accept your point, but your original statement says(or maybe implies) that the Ghost and Falcon were “…heavily modified and armed by their owners”. I simply pointed out that both came armed in the basic model and the owners up-gunned, rather than outright armed, them. Also, I think SpaceDock is underestimating how many vessels were armed with cannon during the age of sail.
Same reason you own a gun if you're out in the middle of nowhere: Help might not get there in time, _if_ there's even anyone around to help you, so you're in charge of your own defense. Plus a few laser turrets might be useful if you somehow didn't notice that stray space iceberg and can't get around it in time.
@@Joshua_N-A this is also a good reason to enable space pirates if anyone with enough tech knowledge could just 3d print a railgun or laser turret pirates could very easily manufacture their own weapons and arm civilian ships to the teeth and go swarm and hijack other ships until what was said in the video happens and they get to ambush a battleship and take it for their own.
I've always figured the Age of Sail/Wild West archetype is the way space would end up being when there's no choke points. If the setting has some sort of jump gate/mass effect relay/magic slingshot to travel, that creates choke points that are easy to patrol. Same holds true for spacefold/wormhole drive systems like in Halo, Battlestar Galactica, and Dune, which have either instantaneous travel, or it bypasses dangers through dimensional shifting. But in a setting where ships have their own FTL drives and travel in more-or-less normal space (or can easily be dragged back into it), they need to protect themselves during travel in the vast empty, unpatrolled regions. It's the hours/days/weeks of travel, while you're out of touch with the rest of civilization, that is the perilous time
chokepoints are great until you have need to venture beyond them. then you've got a need for weapons. well, you still do: you need them to deal with other people who might want to take your stuff
@@partytor11 In Dune, travel isn't actually too hard, but it's controlled by a single faction of mutated humans with precognition as pilots. The trip could be done easily with supercomputers and AI's, but those are Illegal due to an earlier AI uprising. The Dune universe is heavily dependent on humans with special powers replacing most of the technology we depend on today in the form of computers etc. because of this. This breeding/genetically engineered approach to technology is what lead into the feudal model of their society. With leadership entrusted to people who are specifically bred to be leaders.
This is exactly how I feel about it. Even with jump gates/etc as patrol points you still have the areas between the gates and the colonies where piracy can and absolutely will happen. It harkens back to the Age of Sail, where merchant vessels were regularly armed to protect them against pirates on the long voyages at sea.
“Have you ever wondered about why these dangerous things are allowed to civilians in space?” As an American, no. Nothing ever seemed out of sorts to me.
It also speaks of the inevitable failure of gun control, even with current technology anyone with basic tools and simple supplies from a hardware store can build a machinegun if they want. With 3D printing taking off for firearms with our current generation of 3D printers, just imagine what people could make when higher grade 3D printers become cheap. You can't stop the signal, and you can't stop freedom.
@@robertharper3754 Not to mention that "gun control areas" are some of the absolute worst places in terms of gun violence, and contrary to what gets pushed, it's entirely because it's like putting up a neon sign with loud music and fireworks screaming "we're defenseless, come rob us and worse!"
I like the mentality of the Star Citizen universe, where armaments are required on civilian ships by law in UEE space, so people are able to defend themselves from pirates long enough for the space-cops to arrive.
It also is due to the UEE's fears about tyranny due to its origin. They actively want their citizens to be able to fight against the government if necessary.
Never thought of controlling it. I have always assumed that interstellar stories/games were the same as the age of sail. Any civilian ship on the fringe, without weapons, is a target for pirates. Further, if space too civilized, it's about as exciting as watching an accountant tabulate figures.
That was my thought too. Lots of space sci-fi is based on 1600-1800 sailing. That time had competing naval empires, with intercontinental trade being both a crucial part of their economies, and a major target for their incessant warfare. They had very low regulation, huge private fortunes, and the states licensed privateers to go after each others' merchant fleets. Partly because their state navies were too busy fighting each other to patrol and police the vast oceans. There must have been a huge gray market for war spoils plundered by state navies and privateers, which I imagine was a necessary condition for outlaw unlicenced pirates to sell their plunder. In this kind of environment, whith big risks, big rewards, low regulation and even lower law enforcement... It makes sense to put some defensive and offensive capabilites on your merchant ships. Which in turn means that the barrier for going from merchant to pirate is lower.
this entire question is confusing. "Why Can Civilians Own Armed Spaceships in Sci-Fi?" Asked by someone from a country, where civilians own guns: pistols, assault rifles, shotguns. But yeah. short answer is: you cant police entire space. So rights for self-defense fall on civilians
@@romanpyatibratov4361 That is a decision the writers can make, certainly. But the chain of reasoning goes in reverse: if you want stories with armed civilian ships, you make space too vast to be policed. If not, you improve scanning, or limit the availability of spacedocks or seed inhabited system with survellance drones or something. It's a writing decision, not an outcome of physics. And I might add that civilians owning and operating armed ships is less like owning handguns and more like owning fighter jets and gunships.
it is worth noting that The Ghost in Rebels is described as having been heavily and illegally modified to be a gunship, and the Falcon is described in non-film source (both legends and canon) as having been illegally up-armed. that said, that CEC designs can be so readily uparmed does suggest they design them to allow it. though i'd guess that the most probable cause would be the fact that they might share a hull and parts with intentionally militarized designs being sold for use as patrol craft or light troop transports.
Even if you go by on-screen evidence at the Battle of Endor where the Millenium Falon keeps up with a TIE Interceptor long enough to shoot it down should tell anyone that the Falcon can't be legal.
@@grayscribe1342 Han tended to be in areas or ports that as long as the local officials where given proper incentives. They did not look closely at a ships weapons, shields, and engine modifications.
The falcon looks more like a Courier or small transport, the ghost in the show is seen carrying shipping container through magnets on the exterior. Hero ships in Star Wars are modified or non standard designs. What changes a car to a police car? Some protection in the doors and maybe bullet proof glass, yes you can do this to your car to a point, AKA you might get 9mm HP protrction but not 5.7AP
CEC ships are designed from the factory to be endless modifiable, part of their selling point, and why they are so popular. Now - there are 'legal' modifications, and 'illegal' modifications. What one does with their ship after they buy it is entirely up them. Example: You can buy a AR-15 semi-automatic and add all sorts of shit to it, and it can still be legal. BUT the minute you go 'military,' aka; full auto operation, it's illegal. Such as the Falcon having a military grade power core, shields, weapons, and whatever else Han and it's owners have put into it.
I think it depends on where. In Star Wars and Mass Effect, the Outer Rim and Terminus Systems are very far from the administrative capitals meaning the care of the authority just stops. Why bother seizing a single armed civilian ship when hundreds of pirates, bounty hunters and rouge ships are active and probably packing more heat then the civilian one.
@@CreamTheEverythingFixer Have no fear. The EDF rangers and their standard-issue rifles will knock it out of the sky for us where upon destruction, the drone's flaming remains will suffer a spontaneous reduction in mass and will be flung away from the battlefield by the rounds shot by our stalwart defenders. If not, a lancer will just boost into the sky and spike it with a spear. There's contingency plans.
I'm glad you brought up the "age of sail"/golden age of piracy. I think there's two more facets to be explored there: civilian ownership of armed vessels can be a local phenomenon (far from policed regions) and/or a transient phenomenon (society has expanded outward faster than enforcement capability could keep up).
Perhaps also, local armed merchants become the governing class, enforcing their own authority on a less armed populace. This has also happened in places like Venice, New York, San Francisco, India, Japan, and the Bahamas, at various times in history.
Piracy in the golden age of sail was frequently authorised by an enemy state, rather than a few enterprising individuals up to no good. Take for instance the pirate captains Piet Heijn or Michiel de Ruijter who were actively employed by the Dutch government to steal silver from Spanish ships in order to cripple the Spanish economic might and thereby their capacity to wage war on the Dutch and their allies.
@@LarixusSnydes that was privateering, not piracy. The difference is vital. (Privateers often turned to piracy after the official conflict was over, though.)
There are pirates active on Earth today, but their armaments tend to be very lite relative to formal military forces. This is a protect of high-end military technology becoming so expensive to produce and maintain. To me that implies the presence of piracy in Sci-fi settings has less to do with the vastness of space, and is more likely an unintended product of post-scarcity economics. Once you have the technology for automated infrastructure which can churn out large numbers of nuclear submarines, lots of people having access to said submarines is just a matter of that technology spreading.
true, I agree its probably that, or else you could just have a tighter control on shipwrights so civilians dont have access to ships capable of viably engaging military escorts, and pirating is just not possible
@@gabrielandradeferraz386 Except weapons control is impossible in a setting like Star Wars where independent governments are numerous and corporations are often more powerful.
@@gabrielandradeferraz386 but that lasts only so long as the systems of control are seen as legitimate. Sadly, systems of control will almost inevitably be used in ways that the maintainers of those systems see as illegitimate, which then prompts those insiders to sabotage them system of control. Consider how Edward Snowden, and inside, leaked the activities of the NSA because he thought they had crossed a line. Now imagine that leak taking the form of auto construction templates for weaponry instead of just a spy agency’s dirty laundry. We’ve already had people develop and circulate 3D printer templates for guns in protest of gun control measures. It’s not hard to imagine a post scarcity society seeing weapon plans proliferate for similar reasons.
Now the only question is, if you have enough resources that regular civilians can afford nuclear submarines, why do any of them feel the need to become pirates?
A post-scarcity society would probably still have way less pirates, even though it's that much easier to be a pirate. Look at the pirates of today, most of them are just doing it because their economy is almost non-existent, they have a starving family to support, and need money however they can get it. It's an "us or them" situation. 99% of the time, piracy is just an act of desperation. In a post scarcity society, I'm sure that there will still be some limits (you couldn't just ask for 100 ships or something), but the nature of a post-scarcity society implies that there's no longer any needs, and very few wants. You'd probably risk your life for food if you were starving, but would you risk it for, say, a marginally better phone, or a slightly better car? Probably not. I'm sure there would still be people who "just want to watch the world burn," but those people are rare, and their personalities tend not to work well together. Plus, at that point it's not piracy, it's terrorism. What are the odds of enough of those people meeting to form a ship crew, somehow establishing a hierarchy and coordinated plan, stealing/creating a heavily-armed ship, then attacking other ships? All without anyone noticing, and nobody snitching to authorities? Seems slim to none. Even if they are successful, and attack a ship, as soon as word gets out there's a pirate on the loose, they will be hunted down by actual government forces. It will be such a rare occurrence that they would be little more than a live training exercise for that government's navies. There's really no conceivable way piracy in a post-scarcity society could be a legitimate threat without some EXTREME failures by the government. The only caveat I could see is if there was an involvement of another major power, basically "Space CIA." This other power would give extremists/terrorists military-grade ships, equipment, and training. These groups would then act as guerillas, raiding people/shipping for more supplies, with the eventual goal of toppling the government. I still might wonder how someone could gather enough extremists to do that, since a post-scarcity society is practically the most utopian society imaginable. Unless the government was being insanely dystopian or oppressive, it would be really hard to convince someone to participate in widespread piracy, violence, and potentially a civil war when the alternative is essentially free food, shelter, and healthcare for everyone.
40k's explanation basically boils down to 'our standard military response time is about half a decade', and to ensure that their actual military ships are significantly better armed than rogue trader vessels can afford (because civilians need to pay for their ships to be outfitted from the excess production above their tithe rate, before the administratum gets round to updating the tithe rate to a higher band, whilst the imperium gets the entirety of the rest of the production capacity, they don't have to worry about being outstripped by the private sector- if it ever tries, they just say that it belongs to the tithe, given they command absolute loyalty when it comes to tithe capacity).
@@warrmalaski8570 and their general response is that revenge is not only justified to the level of killing a planetary population, but if theologically necessary. The imperium only defends itself from the slowest moving threats, and it already did fall from within, given the lectio divinatus was enemy propaganda from the start.
The warp is a fucky thing, such the term 'warp fuckery'. Yet space vessals in 40k don't usually take half a decade to get anywhere, infact sometimes Warp travel is nearly instant, crossing halfway through the galaxy to what for them might be a couple of hours but in reality took a handfull of seconds. But this is as rare as actual years of constantly being in the warp. What's more accurate is that warp travel takes from around 1 to 14 days (That is if we're only talking about pirate response, so the sector defense fleet would only be a couple of systems away. Otherwise large warp journeys could take up to 6 weeks.) Taking in account no warp storms decide to mess with the astropath.
@@legatusmatheus9815 the delay is more due to the fastest possible time for the administratum to actually notice- it's noted that the adeptus terra's standard response time to petitions is longer than the average human lifespan, so even expedited for severity it will taken many years, if not decades. Obviously the response of marines or the inquisition is waaaay faster, but they aren't involved in responses to minor threats to minor worlds- a rogue trader vessel isn't going to have the ability to ask for help outside of manual communication (i.e. going somewhere and filing a complaint. Not like they have astropaths on board, being private vessels, rather than warships sanctioned with soul-bound psykers by the glorious god emperor)
@@reganator5000 while the administratum is comically slow in changing anything as widespread as for example, a law. It is vastly different to responding to actual threats, depending on the region (in Ultramar you get response back quite quickly, but let's say in segmentum obscurus.. well you'd be lucky to even send out a message before whatever lurks there eats you and your vessal whole). What it boils down too is how quickly a ship could ask for help to their most closest navy vessal, as we all know a lot of world's have not only their own planetary defense force, but also their own planetary defense fleet. Not to mention the assigned sector security fleet. To think a ship would litteraly send a message back all the way to the nearest administratum post is a bit silly, then again it's 40k. Nevertheless I'm not one to make grand statements without references to back me up. But seeing as I'm in bed and on my phone you'll have to give me a bit of time first.
Isaac Arthur: "There is no such thing, as an unarmed space ship" -going from the fact that a fast accelerating/fusion reactor ships are by their nature potential weapons of mass destruction
And if you have that much power generation at hand, microwave cannons would be standard armaments. There’s literally no reason not to have them, it’s like opting for cherry on your Sundae or cruise control in your car or a 256 instead of a 128 GB memory on an electronic device
During the Wild West and Age of Sail it was very common to have to surrender (or a least safe) your weapons when you went to a town/port. Opening your gunports or activating targeting systems near a dock would be highly frowned upon to put it mildly.
During the ages of steam and steel, it was highly frowned upon the point one's guns and rangefinders anywhere except fore and aft. A wise policy, when your host probably has a coastal torpedo battery quietly aimed at you.
Incoming Ship: I have 3 antimatter reactors charging these! Dock: And I'm plugged into the entire power grid of a planet. Shut up, and shut 'em down or get atomized.
Black Beard's Queen Anne's Revenge was a small French warship that he added MORE guns to - between 36-40 heavy cannons. But pirates normally preferred quicker, more nimble ships to overtake targets and flee warships.
Actually Blackbeard like most pirates had lots of *smaller* guns then a warship of equal tonnage. And it makes sense when you think about it, as a pirate why would you want heavy guns that are good for sinking ships as opposed to more smaller guns that are better at killing crew.
When the US navy was being created, several civilian ships showed up to help out. Any of them were a match for a military vessel of the same size at the time. On land people could own cannons if they wanted to, and many did. We live in a more restrictive time in history, not an "average" time.
During that age of nautical travel, (1400s and earlier to the 1700s) ships and their cargo were extremely valuable. So civilian trading vessels did need to be armored. Because back then you had to deal with pirates, privateers, and flat out foreign powers attacking the ship and seizing the very valuable cargo inside the ship and the ship itself. Double with the fact that the distances of the ocean are vast and ships weren't too quick. So no naval vessel will save you in time so you got to save yourself.
@@grisom5863 Modern day piracy is a huge problem. Its seen a sharp increase over the past decade, with pirates growing more bold and viscous every year. Many private citizens and corporations are arming their vessels and hiring armed security or private military contractors to protect their lives and assets. Also distances and communication for getting help are still absolutely terrible. When pirates are minutes away, help is still hours away, possibly even days if you're out deep. Sure, if you're close to a country with a good coastguard and you're within 20 miles of shore you might be able to get help within an hour or so. Also, while its mainly relegated to areas that aren't tourist routes, cruises and regular civilian or trade traffic in any ocean is still subject to these attacks. There are hundreds and hundreds of reported attackss every single year, but sadly there are also hundreds more that never get reported because the people on the private boats are killed, or taken into slavery or the sex trade, and their boats are scuttled. They're just another statistic reported as "lost".
@@BastiatC it's nowhere near as bad, nowadays it only takes half an hour or less to notice if something is wrong in the shipping lanes and no to mention pirates doesn't even have the capability to go head to head with a small coast guard gunboat. Even if they have an rpg, they'll have to pray that they land a shot cause a warship's gun with it's advance targeting system is quite accurate and with radars, coast guards and navies will always detect the pirates first.
@@robbieaulia6462 There are pirates with retired frigates, or similarly classed and sized ships, armed with cannon; and they never engage dedicated warships, so they rarely deal directly with coast guards and other military naval vessels. Cargo and cruise ships are "safe" only because of dedicated lanes, not because pirates "only have motor boats", and sometimes not even safe then depending on where the route takes them. Coastal defense ships only defend near the coast, especially near port, and proper navies rarely escort shipping lanes. The positive is they tend to aim for "board and capture"--as far as I'm aware--so it's just as or more effective to have armed guards instead of "big ugly guns" bolted to the deck.
Something about "Age of Sail" warships. It really depends on what part you look at. At the beginning of it, you have very little distinction between what constitutes a warship and a civilian vessel especially given Venetian vessels and the rise of Flyuts that can act as ad hoc line of warship in a larger military force
IIRC fluyts were unarmed and streamlined to both be cheap to produce and be faster than any other ship edit: yeah, here you go: "Unlike rivals, it was not built for conversion in wartime to a warship, so it was cheaper to build and carried twice the cargo, and could be handled by a smaller crew" your overall point is true, but the specific examples are made up bullshit
Regarding Venetian vessels, it depends on the era. Before the Battle of Lepanto, ramming using galleys was considered the most effective tactic in the Mediterranean, and in those cases war galleys were quite different from merchant galleys. After Lepanto, gunpowder took over, so the lean and fast war galleys were no longer as needed, replaced by merchant galleys equipped with cannons (galleasses). But at this point, Venice was in a downward spiral, so its naval design influence outside the Mediterranean was doubtful.
Indeed. Warships -- especially larger ones -- and merchant ships didn't look very different because they were designed with a similar primary goal: cargo capacity. It's nice and all to have a lot of cannons, but they'll be useless if your crew starves halfway along your route. Long-distance travel took _very_ long in the age of sail, so ships were largely designed for endurance more than anything else.
During the "Age of Sail," a lot of pirates were ex-privateers which were naval mercenaries contracted by a nation like England to harass and raid shipping of an enemy nation like France and Spain. When the war was over the privateers either went into merchant sailing or continued raiding for their own sake.
I've always been disapointed that most sci-fi's don't use the term "galleon" as a ship classification, as that is essentially what an armed cargo ship is.
They do have Galleons and Barques in 40k, but they are mostly old ships from a lost age, sometimes seen as a Rogue Trader's ancestral ship, or captured by Orks...
@@FireFox64000000A galleon is actually a ship with a very specific hull and sail layout, and they were often usedby both merchants and Navys (the Spanish in particular loved them).
Speaking of Wild West in Space: Firefly, notably, does *not* have guns on civilian ships. Serenity has made a whole point of it where the crew bolts a small gun to the top of the ship to go through Reaver territory.
That's because the Federation patrolls just enough to prevent civilians from carrying arms. They would arrest anyone with a sensible level of armament, because they fear rebellion more that the loss of merchants.
Yup. Firefly is a great example. The alliance may have the military but civilians just like in real life have access to freighters and other shit. If they wanted guns that would be massive expensive. Remember bushwhacked? Jayne uses vera to attack that space net.
@@hiigara2085 The Alliance patrolled just enough to prevent armed freighters from being profitable. Pirates having near free reign was a bonus, as it suppressed the outer worlds, and maintained inner world economic supremacy
Within the first 30 minutes of “A New Hope”, Obi Wan is taking Luke to a “wretched hive of scum and villainy”. To be fair, this is clear world-building, for Star Wars - it makes clear to the audience, that piracy and similar rackets are everywhere, in such a galaxy. And as such, there could be considered good reason for a faction such as the Empire to exist, as the only bulwark against these criminal elements. That’s not to say the Empire isn’t evil, or indeed that the Republic before it wasn’t corrupt. It’s merely that an impression of such an interstellar government being necessary, is part of the world-building that Star Wars is meant to convey, from the get-go.
Han also describes the Falcon as being "the fastest ship in the system" while The New Essential Guide to Vehicles and vessels describes the Falcon as given military-grade weapons and "illegal hyperdrive capacity." When mentioning "armed civilian ships" my first thought though was the Twilight from Clone Wars
Now I'm no Empire sympathize, but maybe just maybe it was Palpatine that was evil and not the Empire cuz I very much doubt the Death Star would have ever became a thing if it went for good old Papa Palpatine
@@TheGreatAndMightyGoBo the empire acted as a police force and when it comes down to it the rebels were terorists. Also, it turns out the new republic, the thing the rebels formed after the empire, we know for a fact happily funded slavery in certain systems
My go-to argument for this has been to point out that in the days of the Republic, a private corporation - basically, space Walmart - was able to enforce economic sanctions and a blockade of a Republic planet. The rest of the Republic either did not know or did not care until the Jedi made it a Thing. The modern equivalent would be Amazon blockading Hawai'i unless they passed laws in Amazon's favor. The Republic was sick at heart, politically and economically. It's a shame we never received (and under Disney's control, will never receive) a Star Wars story sympathetic to the Empire, because the Sheev actually had a good point.
@@Hoobastomp wasn't the "space Walmart" blockading them because they were paying high taxes, not being protected and had little representation? the thing is though the reason no one cared is because the blockade was legal but the invasion wasn't legal and they just thought it was a blockade, the thing is though the implied plan was the invasion was going to be justified to the senate to cause unrest (this is more what I've read rather than what I've put together) but the actual plan was to unify the senate against a threat and give emergency power to the person who was setting it all up
It really depends on how 'civilised' your bit of the galaxy is. The same way that a homesteader in the Old West might never need to kill somebody, but would absolutely need gun to survive, versus how much a person living there now needs one. And there's always the chance of random rocks and things endangering your ship or station. So in 'frontier' universes like The Expanse nearly everyone needs some way of destroying stuff, whilst in places like The Culture ordinary folks can get along fine never having to worry about someone or something hurting them.
And yet, paradoxically, the denizens of the Culture would be able to get pretty much any gun they wanted. It's the ship they'd have a hard time procuring, since the ship is a free person, with its own plans. If they were viewed as a homicidal risk, they might not get that gun from THAT Mind, and they might be gifted with a new buddy that won't leave them alone, in the form of a slap drone, but they'd be free to procure whatever they liked, from whoever would give it to them. No one would tell them they couldn't have a gun, if they liked, just that they weren't going to be the one who gave them that gun.
There is a long history of people, civilians, having their own weapons while travelling. Guns, swords, knifes, etc. This is mostly for practicality and defence so that if people ran into bandits, they could defend themselves. The same logic would apply to ships in space. So it's not unrealistic, or illogical. In fact I would be surprised if there was a sci-fi series where civilians didn't have weapons on their ships.
That was the case in Firefly (which I always found a little suspect, especially given the ship's leadership). The only guns they had were small arms... one time, they opened the window (so to speak) and shot a rifle at a target because they had no ship-to-ship weapons. They DID strap a real gun on for the movie, and then dropped it at the end. That really felt out of character for, well... the entire crew to me. The government may have been enforcing a no guns law, but they broke the law all the time. AND they had both pirates and psychotic suicide cannibals to deal with.
@@Swiftbow , You need to understand, In the Firefly universe, there wasn't a lot of need for ships to be armed because of there is only a single government... that government pretty much owned every system humans live in. That government also restricted weapons from civilians as they still maintained a large reserve of ships and any armed vessel was considered to be a pirate and impounded, the crew tried... and.. you know... executed. Therefore, it made the most sense for Serenity to be unarmed... so she doesn't attract the attention of the government and the overly officious captains... why, in one episode, they were going to be held and the ship impounded for "illegal salvage operations."
While most of us don't feel a need for a machine gun to be on top of our car, certainly all the stories of modern day piracy like Captain Philips make you wonder about space cargo getting attacked.
@@usul573 funny enough, cargo ships have started hiring private security forces that are based out of international waters to defend themselves from pirates.
@@jasonhenry8067 Yes that’s true, sounds like most of the cargo ships going through regions with the piracy threat are armed now. Though rifles and shotguns seem pretty obviously there to fend off attackers and not blow other ships out of the water with like battleship guns. There are no cargo ships with big guns like that or missiles right?
During WW2, the Allies used arm mercantile ships to counter the “u-boat menace” in the North Atlantic. There would be a need,during the Star Wars conflict, for blockade runners.
Ahh yes, arm ships with *surface* cannons against ships that can go *underwater* Also it just makes the ships a military target then, one less war crimes for the German reich
"There is no such thing as an unarmed spaceship." - Isaac Arthur. Just throwing your trash out the door while traveling a significant fraction of light speed could level cities. Even today, the largest mass killing in the world perpetrated by private individuals was the Bastille Day massacre in Nice, France, and that was done with a truck. In the end, its all just kinetic energy after all.
@Steve Wolcott Babylon 5 had orbital bombardment via "mass drivers." It was essentially just launching your own meteors, but it wasn't at relativistic speeds. Star Trek does it sometimes, but mostly just to ram into another ship.
On the topic of owning guns in space, I would like to point out that contrary to it being called a vacuum space is not in fact empty and you may very well need that gun to shoot something out of your way, especially if you're traveling at a percent of the speed of light. It's either have a gun to remove stuff that you're going to hit with the force of an atomic bomb or have enough shielding an armor that anything you hit is going to get obliterated without doing damage to you way. You now have an armed spaceship and a significantly armed one at that
@@thomgizziz it will if its not within a non practical level, a 1911 or an AK-47 might be a good self defense weapon but not an 88mm gun or a 8inch gun
A point that isn't touched on here, and is just as unused in most settings, is the possibility of pressing armed civilian ships into military service in case of invasion by a rival government/power. Even if that is voluntary you'd still up-size your war assets by a huge margin. Quantity over quality, maybe, but still very valuable.
@@deusexaethera If they're merchant fleets that can self-convoy, that's pretty darn useful of itself, ...as to some degree might be anything that could keep the enemy busy or distracted or cause them trouble. (Some of which depending on what the world's like.)
reminds me of Starsector where the Hegemony has auxiliary ships. "This ship is on the Hegemony auxiliary list and as such its systems have been upgraded to military standard and a rigorous schedule of servicing enforced with the expectation that it can be pressed into military service during emergencies." -description of Auxiliary ship variants such as the Buffalo(A)
Yeah yeah yeah civvies with guns, all very nice, but can we talk about the editing and style in this video? Charles (the editor!) knocked it out of the park!
To a certain extent, we are already here, with "armed" spacecraft owned by civilians. Any rocket can be a weapon. Small ones are regularly used as weapons for aircraft or troops (RPG is a Rocket Propelled Grenade), but any rocket that can go to space can easily be adapted into an ICBM. To go all the way to the extreme, consider Starship with it's heat shield: how much conventional explosives could you pack in that 1,000 cubic meter cargo space? Miners are legally allowed large quantities of explosives to do their job, and that extends to some sci-fi scenarios ("These aren't rockhopper mining nukes.") We don't need something to go a significant fraction of the speed of light to be a weapon, our drives are already more than capable enough for the job.
It's really not that hard to take even just a chemical rocket to an asteroid, use it as a thruster, and send that rock speeding toward Earth. We can do that with our current level of technology. Scarcity of the materials needed (more spacecraft with engines with enough fuel) is the main limiting factor. But that wont be the case forever. Another example is the Beruit Blast from last year. It actually had the same blast energy as a small nuke. And that was accidental.
Technically Elon Musk has the means to level entire cities with RFG strikes. You dont even need explosives, just drop a telephone pole made of tungsten from orbit and the energy it gains on the way down is comparable to a tactical nuke when it hits the ground.
I think there's a different avenue of weapons ending up in pirate hands that wasn't considered here; Privateering. There were many pirates who started out as government-sponsored pirates, who, after the war that they were "used" in was over, turned to indiscrimminate raiding.
@@S_Roach I doubt that's feasable (in a way that it couldn't be removed), and more importantly, I doubt agencies like the CIA even concern themselves with the long-term consequences of their actions. Otherwise they wouldn't be handing out weapons if they candy on halloween. But yeah, it's the same principle.
This naturally raises the question, how would a civilization that could meaningfully enforce "space gun control" look? How far would we need to bend the laws of physics for it to seem like a "realistic" possibility?
Dune/Battlestar Galactica style drive technology (teleportation/instant travel) combined with sensor grids capable of scanning lightyears away at great precision. If a civilization had those two technologies they could enforce basically anything they wanted across their space, if your ludicrous range scanners detect anything illegal you instantly jump a taskforce directly on top of the perpetrators and squash the issue. As scanning fidelty and range decreases civs lose the ability to detect infringements and as FTL response speed decreases you decrease the ability to effectively respond before infringers are gone. So you need near perfect vision at lightyears of range with the ability to nearly instantly intercede when needed.
Alternatively, in a setting like Stellaris where almost all travel has to occur by a static hyperlane system and ship sensors can detect other ships up to 4 systems away an empire could pretty easily suppress pirates within their own borders even with if their ships take weeks to move from one system to the next.
@@NATIK001 Or it could end up with a situation like the Bentusi in Homeworld's backstory, where despite being able to watch it all and respond near instantly, too many fires at once ensues. But that's more an issue of not having a proportional amount of enforcement to the territory at the end of the day.
They would not be able. It’s a matter of scale. The larger the authority the less direct involvement it has in affecting the everyday lives of people under it.
I like the idea of a "post-apocalyptic" setting in space. Pirates, local warlords, and civilian traders have access to things that would require massive industry due to everyone basically just scavenging on what the former galactic empire left behind.
If things are far enough apart you can have this, without going to a post-apocalyptic state. - I think it was the Amnion books where they explained the 'fast travel VS size' conundrum. Basically - your jump-drive/FTL engine or gate can bring you THERE very fast. But once you are THERE it's terrible big. Your pirate hunters could arrive in a system within hours or days (depending on the setting) but it would take years to search every nook and cranny for this elusive pirate base. That - and then it's communication. Yelling distance. If you can't disciplin your vice-king or gouvernor in a reasonable time, your whole empire doesn't work. Because everyone outside your immediate control just does his or her own thing...
You don't really need it to be "post-apocalyptic". There are quite a lot of similar locations on Earth (Abandoned buildings, ships, etc.) that were simply left forgotten, without any apocalyptic event taking place. I can imagine that space will eventually get cluttered with derelict spaceships, ruined space stations, maybe even remains of some failed settlements (Like how Earth's orbit is currently cluttered with sattelites), that scavenging this stuff could actually become profitable. Granted, for space to get "cluttered" we will have to wait for centuries of active extrastellar traver, but still.
Starsector is a great game with this exact kind of setting. You play as a fleet captain in an isolated part of a frontier galaxy, where the Gates that enabled inter-galactic travel shut down for some unknown reason, leading to the collapse of the Domain of Man within the sector. Now everyone is fighting over resources that are in the sector, trying to form some semblance of peace as industry collapses due to excessive DRM by basically every single megacorporation who couldn't predict that the Gates would literally just die out of nowhere. To make it worse, AI has gone rogue and is killing anyone who goes outside the core systems making expansion and exploiting resources of the outer systems of the sector difficult. Pirates are rampant, a sizeable portion of the sector's population turned into luddite terrorists, a megacorp responsible for the AIs have become the AnCaps' wet dream, and an eternal civil war between people who still believe in unity under the Domain of Man's Martial Law against a confederation of seperatist systems.
@@ColdHatch Was going to bring up this suggestion myself. One of the things that fits with that is how rarely new ship hulls are put into service and how every port you go to has both the equipment and willingness (for the obscene credits cost of course) to completely overhaul/refit a ship hull no matter how horribly mangled it is. (D-Mods being the representation of that in game.) Not to mention how many forces make do with ships a functional/prosperous polity would never consider taking out of port save to get it to repairs. The DRM crippled inability for even major players like the Hegemony and League to produce more than a handful of ship hulls even if they HAVE the blueprints for them hammers home how and why you'd see civilians with ships that are clearly military equipment. In part because if you can find one and pay to fix it up, it's not worth arguing with some shipping magnate having his own personal 14th fleet battle carrier.
I've ruminated on this exact subject in the past in my own private thoughts. Nice to see a video on it. Sci-fi space reminds me of the American West crossed with the Gulf of Aden: lots of threats from the environment and other peoples, and help is almost never going to be around - you're on your own. Hence, go armed or go afraid.
I'm also an American civilian who carries a handgun fairly regularly. Police told me flat out they couldn't and wouldn't do anything about the situation I was dealing with, and told me how to get my license.
I could see the Age of Space travel as the culmination of the Age of Sail, the American Wild West and Indian Wars, the Mercenary African Bush Wars, the Mongol Hordes, and Australia.
i would imagine there'd be plenty of "scavenger" type ships and their crews that would keep sensors, eyes and ears on for everytime there was a space battle of any sort....then swoop in weeks later and gather up all kinds of goodies
Pedantic nitpick: La Sirena was actually pretty lightly-armed for a Star Trek ship. I think she only had phasers and had a pretty rough time going one-on-one vs a 23rd century Romulan Bird of Prey. The video clip accompanying that bit was actually a pretty ridiculously large and heavily-armed ship bombarding a planet from about a century and a half prior to La Sirena's time. She probably could do a number to an unprotected planet with the phasers, but the same show she's introduced in also has planetary shields which look more than capable to fend off most smaller attacks.
Not to mention that in order for civilian space travel to be possible, a society needs a good amount of space nerds capable of operating at least a fusion reactor and a plasma thruster. The last one is basically a coil gun, so yeah. It's not too far fetched to imagine those reverse-engineered into actual coil guns.
@@DigitalJedi the difference between a plasma drive, plasma welder, plasma cutter, and plasma lance is merely scale and intended use. (Dumping tungsten BB's into the rocket exhaust to "discourage" high speed pursuit is another favorite of mine)
@@muninrob capitain: "pilot, we are being pursued! poison our thurtsers!" pilot: "aye captain! What should I use? Helium 3? Tritium?" capitain: "T U N G S T E N"
Yeah, with enough technical know how and supply I could totally see Space Pirates being able to jury rig a traditional civilian vessel with weapons capable of destroying other ships, so unless you want all Space Travel to require a light military escort then it’d be in ship owners’ best interest to have some form of defense to protect your ship from opportunists.
I mean, look at todays big freighter ships. Some of those have machine guns and armed mercenaries on board to protect them from pirates. Even if they don`t, most have powerful water cannons that can easily sink smaller craft or even cut through zodiacs or similarily sized craft.
@@adaeptzulander2928 The General Electric M134 Minigun is in the hands of many private collectors, and its legal to own. You can even rent one for use at some gun ranges. They are legal as they cost already a small fortune to fire for a few seconds, as they go though 3000 rounds per minuet and are not man portable.
Americans should be able to own armed merchie cruisers, there is even a provision in the us constitution to allow the government to higher privateers to hazard enemy merchants traffic
During WWII, the government weighed the merits of issuing letters of Marque to the Goodyear company as its blimp fleet was very useful for loitering off shore and spotting enemy submarines. It ultimately decided that it was better to lease the blimp fleet and make them official military vessels, but in practice they were operating as privateers.
There is no law in the USA that prohibits you from owning an armed war ship of any size. The people that make them don't sell to the public though and you would have to pay a tax on every shell. Private individuals have owned armed ships in the past. Just way to expensive and difficult to achieve these days. People really seem to misunderstand 2nd amendment laws.
@@deusexaethera Umm, this is incorrect. The U.S. Constitution applies to any place the U.S. government exercises power or has jurisdiction. So, it applies to U.S. territories; it governs the behavior of U.S. troops in all cases; and crimes committed on the high seas against civilian U.S. vessels get investigated by the FBI, with any assistance needed from the U.S. Navy or the U.S. Coast Guard.
Peter F Hamilton's Reality Dysfunction is a good example of very easily 'legal' combat ships. Multiple fusion drives allows for faster freight (and a lot more combat maneuverability), 8 communication masers (powerful enough to blast a message right through a ship's hull) is just good redundancy. even an antimatter drive is technically legal, as long as you don't actually have antimatter itself on your ship. it does however mean that if problems break out, there'll be some less-than-scrupulous people out there who'll be really willing to hire you
The reasons given for armed civilian spacecraft is something I always thought and agreed with, space is indeed a big damn scary place, and if you're going to travel it, you'll need every advantage you can get to survive.
Star Tours is my favorite example of this trope taken to the extreme. Its the space equivalent of a Greyhound bus with laser cannons and a combat veteran astromech as copilot. How The Empire never objected to a "737 with machine guns" equivalent owned en-mass by a TOUR AGENCY is hilarious to me.
I think one of the best representations of these ideas in science fiction would have to be Proximal Flame's The Last Angel series, where one of the Piratical Factions of the story manages to work their way up from having a few dozen civilian grade ships to capturing military warships to eventually building their own. And although none of their corporate, civilian or self-made craft achieves parity with actual military vessels, they're a lot closer than the central polity in the setting would like to admit (or most officers would believe).
I was thinking of that story the whole way through the video! Plus I believe he even wrote that "civilian grade" is military gear from a generation or two previous. Which would help keep people from getting too devious about acquiring gear, if it's cheap and widely available, and the government now has the safety of knowing that equal size, they have significantly better arms
David Webber's Honor Harrington series explores this to great (IMO) effect during the series. The breakup of major powers leaves their ships captains to their own devices, allowing them to sell off ships to minor warlords who become major warlords, or said captains become the warlords themselves. Edit to add: In addition to this, corrupt officials who have to deal with captured raiders instead sell off the captured ships to the same raiders because money and power are king. In addition to that, you've mentioned Gundam in other videos. Therein, they actually dropped an entire space colony on Earth causing vast devastation.
The millennium falcon and ghost are not standard versions of there classes. The OPA and Marco Inaros got there weapons from black market etc. Some civilian ships would have been given light armemennts for basic anti-pirate defence. Or the civilian ships are supposed to be able to double merchant fleet and standing navy.
@@DIEGhostfish didn't say they don't. just pointing out that just because the falcon and ghost are heavily armed doesn't mean that the class itself is.
@@DIEGhostfish CEC ships were intentionally made to be very customizable, add to the fact that the outer rim was not very well explored and largely beyond the reach of the Republic and Empire that came after it, so civilians being able to have defensive arms makes canonical sense, as does the fact that with that many competing economies and developers it would be more likely that you would find military grade hardware, from the major corporations or some local shop, available to use for your craft for the right price.
i would imagine there'd be plenty of "scavenger" type ships and their crews that would keep sensors, eyes and ears on for everytime there was a space battle of any sort....then swoop in weeks later and gather up all kinds of goodies
The concept of a “Monopoly on Violence” is further food for thought, something that is feasible in a society like our own. But given the vastness of space, and faster than light travel, it’s reasonable to postulate that this concept is something that’s not possible given a large enough scale.
Bingo, and that is one of the reasons why opposition to space colonisation intensifies as the technology for space colonisation improves, since wealthy powerful parties have an obvious vested interest in maintaining their monopoly to the detriment of the common man.
@@basedeltazero714 and how many of them have actually gone to work putting tech that has existed since the 60s to use in a practical heavy lifter, and how many of them are disingenuous pricks who for all their rhetoric are focusing solely on suborbital "tourism"? I can think of only one example of the former and two examples of the latter.
Is it feasible on societies like ours? Doesn't appear to be. On the contrary; the places with restrictions are often, if not always, the most violent. It's almost like gun restrictions lead to less access to self-defense by upstanding populations, while bandits and thugs don't care about the law in the first place, and translating a law on paper into real-world enforcement is extremely hard if not inherently impossible. On top of criminalizing what is really the use of tools, not inherently victimizing anyone unless misused, being you know, highly immoral and authoritarian.
I've been starting to write sci-fi and want to do it for a living and I really just wanna say how much of an invaluable resource channels like this one have been for the realism and thought put into what I write. Thank you so much for helping me with how I think about space fiction and sci-fi as a whole.
Hm I would advise the closer to civilization or the closer you get to a more populated or policed area the less power full weapons you see and more capacity type ships. Less need for big guns when you travel between two worlds within a core sector am I right. But the further out the more armed the ships become or the faster they become.
Time dilation is what confuses me most of the time. Same goes to relativistic stuff and things with mathematics. It seems that hard require more research and practice than soft. Is sci fi always this difficult?
The additional advantage of a person like "black beard" is the experience they and their crews gain from all the ship jacking. If they had to jack dozens of smaller craft, man them, repair, refit and then use them to capture bigger ships, They gain tons of knowledge, skill and tactical advantage over military commanders that are almost always use to having the advantage in battle. I find adversity is a far better teacher than academies, governments and abundance. A lot of "Black Beard" like people will fail but a few will not...
Well most pirates from the age of piracy were former privateers who had benefited from the help of governments and abundance (though not necessarily academies since alot of the British navy were kidnapped poor folks from the lower classes) they just kept on at it once the wars ended because it was a very liberated life style and very lucrative.
A crew that has manned a hundred ship once in battles is far, far less dangerous than the crew who has manned one ship in a hundred battles. The latter crew will know every advantage, flaw, and quirk of their ship, and be able to use it to perfection. The former will likely not even know how to operate their ship at all.
@@jamesharding3459 A crew that has at least some understanding of a hundred ships is far more effective than a crew that only knows their current ship's workings. Sure, knowing your own vehicle's quirks can help you maximize it's efficiency, but getting a ship to perform 5-10% better means fuckall compared to knowing the general weakspots of a hundred different ships; The latter meaning that you can be 5-6 times more efficient, because you know where to focus your fire. I get what you were going for there, but it simply does not translate to vehicle combat of any scale.
@@OzixiThrill Hahaha no. Try "infinitely more effective." You could take crews from vehicles as simple, and similar as a pair of battle tanks, and they wouldn't even be able to start the engine without a lot of futzing about first. Forget trying to operate the electro-optics or fire control system. Do you know how long it takes a tankist or sailor to do the simplest jobs and observe their seniors to learn on the job? Months, often over a year. And that's a _training_ environment. Not some randos trying to figure it out as they go.
@@jamesharding3459 "similar as a pair of battle tanks" Funny you mention tanks, as that was the exact thing that made me adamant about my case. WW2, Tiger against Sherman tanks. Until the British figured out (by luck) what the weakspots of a Tiger tank were, their way of handling a Tiger was sending in 8 Shermans at full speed so 1 would make it far enough to penetrate. After they figured out what made Tigers so powerful, doctrines changed and even the direst tactics have doubled in effectiveness. "and they wouldn't even be able to start the engine without a lot of futzing about first. Forget trying to operate the electro-optics or fire control system." You're talking about completely random people pulled off of the street here. There are only so many ways you can design a vehicle that makes sense and is intuitive enough for mainline military use. Make a crew drive 100 different tanks and then give them a brand new one, and what you'll see is that they are decently effective with most of it's systems within the hour. Also, you seem to be assuming that warfare and piracy is somehow an eternal landscape of exchanging fire; Do you genuinely think that a captured vehicle would immediately be thrown into battle the moment the crew are in their seats? There are so many ways that doesn't make sense that the only way I can see you genuinely making this case is if you're arguing in bad faith, trying to find whatever retarded angle you can to try and weasel out a "win", instead of looking at what would be rational. "Do you know how long it takes a tankist or sailor to do the simplest jobs and observe their seniors to learn on the job? Months, often over a year" Now take someone who has learned across 99 other ships or tanks and see how quickly they pick up on their job - Which is likely the same position they were in on the other 99 ships. I stress, there are only so many ways you can design systems without deliberately making them difficult to learn and utilize. "And that's a training environment. Not some randos trying to figure it out as they go." Except they aren't randos. They are people who have been through the steps of learning several other ships to functional levels before. Two reasons why this assumption is valid: -There is enough time to learn the basics between engagements while on a new ships (unless you somehow believe that all combat-ready vehicles are 24/7 in combat for some reason) -If they didn't learn to utilize their ship to functional levels, they died in the engagement. As for why they do become more efficient, that is due to getting the basic grasp of the armor and system layout of those 100 ships.
I feel like there's one very important thing that I haven't seen mentioned. In stories like Star Wars/Trek, and other Sci-fi, Humanity is not alone. There are plenty of other species with high tech weaponry, that are not always under the authority of something like the Federation. If at any moment a ship from a previously unheard of species could suddenly appear and attack nearby ships as they pleased, I'd want to be able to defend myself as well. Hell that was basically the plot of like 50% of Enterprise!
no species with the technology to wage interstellar war is going to send ships to fight. costs way too much. ya just grab, and throw a few big rocks at them as fast as you can. paint/cover the rocks with radar absorbing and deflecting material and you got cheap, stealthy, and effective planetary kill weapons for minuscule costs. Hell even designing small thrusters and fuel system and attaching to a meteor swarm so you have drone-esque rocks would be cheaper.
@@c.alucard6352 This has one issue. What if you want the planets intact? Hitting a hostile species' planet looks effective, until you wage colonial warfare and want to colonise the place yourself. Then, you need to get your planetside weapons there (Be they soldiers, nanobots, poison, whatever...), and the people you are attacking are going to try to stop you.
In America, our government used to encourage private sailing trade ships to arm themselves with cannons. This just always seemed like a logical extension of that to me.
In a universe that has FTL and space faring civilizations, I would imagine that the legality of having weaponry on your transport vessels would be akin to the wild west, where most frontier's men were armed. Help is several hours or days away and not everyone has your interest. Also if you know how to pilot and fix your own starship, chances are you know enough science and engineering to create your very own weapons systems. Missiles and probes work pretty similarly in most sci fi properties. Current technologies are pretty much the same where ICBMs work just like Rockets to the Moon.
Yep. And in our own world, we would need lasers to deal with space debris, and that's a weapon. Let alone the ship itself. People forget that cars are far more destructive in malevolent hands than any gun. The Terrorist attack in Nice killed 70 people with a moving truck.
@@shorewall laser for space debris is kind of a bad excuse. Due to the nature of space you do NOT want to blast things. all you get is basically tiny shrapnel. space for guns would be better served for engine mods to actually avoid obstacles rather than plow through them.
@@HellecticMojo my fellow I think you are under a misunderstanding. The laser would not be there to blast a hole through things. Rather it would used to evaporate the many microscopic pieces of debris that naturally form in space. That is capable of easily punching at minimum a golf ball sized hole through many inches of aluminum.
Living enemies aside - the main reason for weapons in space is to take out meteors or asteroids, that you are probably travelling too fast to avoid hitting otherwise. That said, most of these weapons would likely be automated, since no human could react in time to target and shoot out a meteor when your or it is traveling up to half the speed of light at that particular moment. Then there is the idea of life in space, even in more optimistic scenarios such as star trek, misunderstandings and cultural differences mean it is better to be armed than not. You dont want to be the unarmed faction in a misunderstanding with an armed one.
Sid Meier's Pirates is the perfect game to visualize exactly what you were talking about with the age of sail, you get a ship through mutiny and then work your way up until you can have galleons and ships of the line
I like how you mention table top sessions at the end - because I'm running a homebrew where I've stated the crew explicitly does not have access to ship-mounted weaponry, which quickly becomes a major plot point requiring the crew employ stealth in order to navigate their ship.
The Kzinti Lesson: the more efficient a reaction drive is, the better a weapon it makes. Let's say your privately-owned spaceship has a fusion engine - turn it around and you have plasma torch emitting a constant stream of high-powered particles. Make strafing runs close to enemy ships and turn them into molten heaps of slag. A communication laser for long-distance comms will also have more than enough power to do major damage to another spacecraft. There actually is no such thing as an unarmed spaceship, so you can just as well put some dedicated weapons systems on it.
The inertialess drive apparently couldn’t be used as a weapon as any ship ‘colliding’ with another would just snuggle up, since the drive works on the moving object having no inertia and thus no momentum to impart on other objects (or itself). Unless I missed something in some later lensman books.
@@andrewz6986 it was an oversized disintegrator ray, which worked by suppressing the electric charge of atoms, causing molecules to fly apart. Humans used this against a Kzinti outpost on the planet Warhead, digging a 12 mile deep canyon, a bit larger than Florida. The weaponized version of that mining tool was even nastier due to it also creating an electric current. The previously non-inhabitable planet was then renamed to Canyon because the planet's thin atmosphere gathered in that hole in the crust and reached a breathable pressure level, so it was colonised by humans and kzinti after they made peace.
@@russellharrell2747 The Kzinti lesson explicitly refers to reaction drives, so inertialess propulsion systems are excempted. Personally, I think that scifi settings with gateway transportation networks use the best way to deal with the problem of weaponized propulsion. Like the hyperspace gates in Babylon 5, the astral gates from Cowboy Bebop or the jumpgates from the X video game series.
"Did you ever wonder about the legality of Han Solo having laser cannons on his starship?" No... Because his entire job involves breaking the law in some way. Without actually watching your video the answer to this question is simple. -Bad people will always find ways to do bad things. Space Pirates/bounty hunters/assassins are known rampant issues. Giving Civilians space travel knowing the dangers that exist and not giving them a way to defend themselves is basically you profiting from handing civilians to pirates.
@@kenbrown2808 Very droll. The slogan I quoted has often been embraced by gun-advocates and lobby organizations like the NRA. They conveniently neglect to mention that it works both ways.
@@pwnmeisterage they also conveniently forget to mention that it's how gun free zones are SUPPOSED to work. - because then anyone with a gun is a valid target for the professional good guys with guns.
When talking about the response times being a factor, I think its funny how in Warhammer 40k lore, there's several instances of mankind dispatching fleets that take hundreds of years to reach their destination, so it's like if you attack a world and loot it, the Imperium shows up 400 years later and kills your distant ancestors? Its crazy to think about.
Very good points, another thing to think about is that a galaxy like StarWars has so many wars over so long a period with so many sub factions, there is undoubtedly a large amount of surplus arms/ships that have been salvaged and, as well as directly sold to private buyers.
I mean, Thomas Jefferson told sailors when asked if the right to bear arms meant they could buy cannons for their ships. And he wrote back yea and even bought one sailor who did write him a cannon
3:10 those weapons are only allowed on a star destroyer sized ship tho. So it would be more equivalent to being allowed naval artillery on an oil tanker.
They actually got alot bigger than 40mm, 'standard' armament if an armed merchant cruiser (as they were called) was six 6inch(150mm) and three 3 inch (76mm) guns. For reference the average light cruiser had 5 120mm and 4 76mm guns at this time. Hence why the armed merchant ships were classified as merchant cruisers.
"How can civies have weapons on their ships?" Shows Inaros a terrorist that got military ships from the military junta. Ghost - a ship that is actively participating in armed rebellion with hidden bases full of engineers capable of fitting guns on a ship. Like, I get the point of the video but those two are terrible examples :D
I mean, those examples make the point that even when normal societal structure would preclude the existence of armed civilian vessels, there likely will arise specific exceptions due to political or social instability that might at least temporarily allow for such cases.
The entire human-centric spacefaring civilization is itself a poor example. Especially when it's essentially just an extrapolation of Wild West (American) and Age of Sail (British/colonial) civilizations. If China were to colonize the stars first, civilian ships might only be armed with deception and kung-fu. If Klingons were to colonize the stars before humans, the whole notion of "unarmed ships" wouldn't exist. If Romulans were to colonize the stars before humans, the whole notion of "civilians" wouldn't exist.
@@pwnmeisterage Yes, different human societies have different concepts of acceptable risk, societal freedoms and so on. Alien civilizations would potentially have an even wider range of possible approaches. That being said, interplanetary ships using known physics would pretty much always be the equivalent of flying fusion bombs (or worse), and its hard to propose a realistic society that would take that proposition lightly - at least, not for long...
The truth is the level of engineering skill required to maintain a si-fi space ship would automatically qualify you to build everything up to and including a railgun, possibly more depending on the specifics of the universe. Resources and policing in civilized areas would be your only issue.
i would imagine there'd be plenty of "scavenger" type ships and their crews that would keep sensors, eyes and ears on for everytime there was a space battle of any sort....then swoop in weeks later and gather up all kinds of goodies
Reminds me of an episode of Andromeda, where the crew encounter a time displaced ship from before the Commonwealth was founded. The ship was mostly engine, but it introduced itself by obliterating a bunch of pirates by pointing the business end of the drive at them an blasting them with it. The Andromeda's AI even said it had firepower on par with their futuristic warship, because engine was also a gun.
I remember that episode (Not a lot of Andromeda I can say that about). If I recall correctly the crew of that ship and their stated mission was a thinly veiled Star Trek pastiche. I think the captain even tried to seduce Andromeda's android avatar.
@@DanceMonkeychg and he did. Tbh, it was a waste to just forget about that ship. Pre-FTL colony ships are real monsters in their own right. It's a ship that is supposed to function for tens of thousands of years, be able to terraform any planet it finds, be able to construct it's own copy, be able to build massive intersolar infrastructure for new colony, must support tens of thousands of active crew(be it generational or immortal or both), carry several millions more in cryosleep, DNA database of billions of individuals and millions species, have such a massive engine and powerplant that allow it to constantly burn, be sturdy enough to survive near FTL collisions, armed with enough kinetic and particle weaponry to neutralize any target approaching it and have laser communication system powerful and precise enough to cross significant portions of the galaxy without losing contact with other ships and colonies. For a small faction struggling to find resources and trained personnel, such a ship would be a massive boon if it could be persuaded to join them in exchange for FTL and help finishing their mission.
it's almost like any readily available item can be converted into a weapon if one is dedicated, desperate, or resourceful enough and pretending otherwise is asinine and just security theatre to make people feel safe even if the reality is they aren't and their continued feeling of safety will ensure that they stay that way through complacency.
Which is complete nonsense if you even take a second to think about it. You would have to get close to the other ship and then maneuver so your thruster is hitting them and they have to kinda let it happen and not fire at you from range. Do you just listen and believe stupid ideas all the time because they sound good or because they are the first thing you heard?
Most of the hero ships we see in SW are in the hands of smugglers or rebels. The CEC ships were always described as very customizable. Using the WEG RPGs info, the YT-1300 came with a single dual laser IIRC. Han had 2 quad lasers on the Falcon (and I think some missiles that never got used in the movies). The Ghost, in the hands of rebels, is super decked out to be able to effectively fight the empire as their small cell. From the RPG, the YT-2400 (another CEC ship) is described as having an oversized power core to allow easy modification/addition. It also came with really strong shields and a heavy gun. The 2400 was one of the better 'stock' ships you could get, if you could convince your GM to give you one :) Would love to see a 2400 appear on-screen somewhere. Since Fav'loni are pulling stuff from the entire expanded universe, perhaps we see the Outrider at some point.
What about just building the weapons. You can built a basic gun today with some relatively simple machine tools. If a civilization is able to set up a colony on other planet they would need to build stuff from scratch and mined resources. That stuff can just as easy be guns and ammo.
When you think about it, that's a very likely story. It takes a lot of technology to make an interstellar colony. So even the creation of weapons slightly more advanced than current military weapons shouldn't be too hard for high tech colonist.
@@marrqi7wini54 Yeah as long as you have the power cells or whatever is required to make blasters work, I can't imagine that constructing the machinery would be any more difficult than any other sort of engineering.
TBH having those few weapons on a "star destroyer" is like having 10 9mm pistols as your only def on a modern air craft carrier (without any air craft).
Actually, its more like having an 18 inch gun on a container ship and complaining that you only have 1. The number of weapons is not a problem, you don't want to fight star destroyers with your giant freigher, you want to deal with pirates, and it doesn't matter that you can level a city with your guns if you can't hit the enemy ships. Replace most of those heavy turbos and heavy ions with laser cannons!
Love the Drake Interplanetary reference Drake: designs the Cutlass Black as a troop transport with a cargo bay and tractor beam Also Drake: nooo, it's totally not for pirates bro, trust me
It also depends on the size and scale of the military. Pirates taking a modern military frigate is a far bigger deal proportionately speaking than losing a sloop in the age of sail. I also suspect the "entry level" weaponry is more likely to be obtained by corruption rather than force - a la the kind of thing we see in Bobby's storyline in The Expanse. Again, a military on a larger scale is more likely to have more significant assets "Fall off of the back of a truck"
I remember reading about a US wargames scenario where the side representing Iran used small water craft loaded with explosives to take down advanced US warships. Look at Vietnam and Afghanistan. Great powers don't always use full power on small fry, and that can allow the small fry to win out.
In a setting without force fields, does every long term space ship an automatic defense system against asteroids and micro asteroids . Such a defense system can easily be weaponized.
blasting rocks is a terrible idea. shrapnel has no friction to limit it in space. Unless you hit it with exact force and angle to not break it but simultaneously slow it or reverse like a billiard ball, you are just widening the area of damage. Best anti environmental hazard designs are simply better maneuverability and detection system, not proactive demolition
I mean, yes, a Star Destroyer sized starship gets alot of heavy weaponry, but we're also talking about a ship that's 1.2km long. If civilians were allowed to own military size aircraft carriers, they too would probably be allowed to carry several artillery cannons. If we were to scale it down to soemthing like a cargo vessel (such as the Ghost or Millenium Falcon) it'd be the equivalent of carrying a heavy machine gun on top of your pick-up truck.
Given the shape of a star destroyer, each weapon has a limited firing arc. Given left, right, top, and bottom, divide the count by 4, and that is not much at all given its size.
@@Imaboss8ball It used to be common for merchant ship to carry at least one cannon for deterrence... as late as *WWII* to scare away submarines and aircraft. NOT warships. Modern world doesn't need that. The ocean is too monitored, too open, no room for big pirates because they get noticed by satellites. This kind of situation would not allow big-ass boat of destruction in civilian hands.
Fun thing on the privately owned Star Destroyer part, the New Republic never expected that such a thing would occur. The Errant Venture remains the only privately owned Star Destroyer to this day, canon or Legends.
To be fair, most planets will have heavy shielding in Star Wars, so, you know, your 10 turbo lasers are probably not going to do much. Planets have a far larger capacity for war than small warships.
@@rescuejake Except the thing that's up there didn't come here naturally. In a universe where spaceships are a normal sight, planets must have lots of orbital infrastructures and means to get things from the ground up, and will have as a result a lot of their economy (and defences) up there. If a planet has the capacity to build orbital shipyards churning out armed spaceships and stations of various kinds, it has the capacity to deploy a defence fleet and an orbital defence network. The whole idea that coming to a planet from space would be an advantage is null and void specifically because the ability to come from space requires planets' ability to get just about anything to space in the first place.
@@rescuejake Moreover, a planet can afford much more 'cost' than a ship. A ship has to bring everything it needs with it. A planet... well, a planet does that already. You can make a defense silo buried under ten meters of concrete, launching missiles with a booster three times their size. You have the room. You have the heat capacity. You have the generator capacity. (Also, this isn't true for lasers - it is equally disadvantageous firing into or out of an atmosphere, and lasers mounted on an airless planet are identical to those on a ship... except bigger because there's more space to put stuff. Lasers, however, have a maximum effective range) Also, to expand on Luc of Paris, as you get more and more powerful Skiffytech, this problem becomes worse. If the power of engines is sufficient that you can trivially achieve megameters of delta-V, then... a planet can still hold thousands of such rockets for every one a ship brings. The main disadvantage of planets is that they're hard to move (and only the Skiffiest of techbases can circumvent that), but still, the level of defensive power they can bring to bear is so high compared to shipborne attackers. Trying to plink a planet this way is likely to result in you running out of ammo and supplies first. Honestly... at that point it's essentially a siege, except the defender has a planet's worth of supplies in their castle.
@@basedeltazero714, it’s not quite true that it’s “equally disadvantageous firing into or out of an atmosphere”. Fixing out of an atmosphere, the atmospheric diffusion & refraction happen right at the source, leading to a larger overall deviation in absolute terms, even if the effect is the same in terms of angle.
Also, considering space weapons, even if there is instant travel times and instant communication, the minute or less of time it would take the authorities to just, respond, is the difference between life and death. I think most space battles would occur in the seconds at most
@@zidniafifamani2378 yep, when someone breaks down your door, cops are 10 mins away. which is why I personally have firearms to defend myself with as I can get to that in a few seconds and then wait for the cops to come clean up the scene whatever happens.
Probably not even seconds. I can imagine a targeting computer locking on to a ship's heat signature/warp field ripple/whatever from the next star system over, then practically erasing it with a railgun slug the size of a bus before it gets the chance to react.
I remember in one sci fi novel I read the viewpoint character questioned why the ship she was on, a civilian merchant..had nuclear missiles. The guide matter of factly said that the blueprints for atomic weapons were public domain and there was any number of asteroid colonies and frontier mining settlements that would sell you uranium if you wanted to buy it.
Yes, especially if you assume any civilisation capable of building and operating faster than light spaceships almost certainly has pretty widespread access to 3D printers/replicators etc capable of making something as (relatively) simple as basics missiles & guns etc.
This is the key I think. Any kind of deep space craft is going to need some kind of manufacturing capability (most likely an advanced form or 3D printing), if only for spare parts.
if you have the know how an the means you can build any thing if you want you can build a damn tank if you have the money for the right materials you could make one that can out classes an Abrams or Challenger.
@@ColinGrealy modern ships all have machine shops, give me the machines and raw materials and I'll have a working gun in a day, 3 if you want a perty walnut stock
I've always felt that having slower than light communication in a setting is a huge factor in making it more of a wild frontier. If you can't just call another solar system or planet for help, if you actually have to travel there to talk to them, then you are far more likely to find scenarios where you have to fight your own battles.
In a Spacemaster SFRPG campaign, there was a running gag about a heavily armed ship owned by a player character, imagining questions asked by officialdom. "Now this ship, the "Havoc" - it's heavily armed. Explain why it mounts two Mark 50 lasers." "Oh, that's simple. They're used for terraforming. Drilling holes in the planet's crust so that high-explosive torpedoes can be fired into those holes to ease seismic pressures." "And that's your explanation for the four Mark 30 torpedo launchers?" "Yes." "Hmm! Moving on... the four Mark 30 disruptors..." "Also for terraforming. They're used to shatter rock strata that the lasers have difficulty penetrating." "Hmm! And the ten Mark 10 laser cannon?" "Isn't that obvious?" "Sorry?" "Self-defence. There are pirates out there, you know!"
It's likely in universes with civilians armed with city destroying weapons, the planets likely have strong defences to compensate whether it be energy shields, railgun/missile satellites, or fleets and stations in orbit. One thing i think Star Trek and Wars is kinda lacking on is how populated the space around major planets would be with stations and drydocks. Less so with Star Trek but there are still instances were the skies around a central planet of a major space fairing government seem quite empty.
Why I stopped watching Discovery. Somewhere around the 4th episode the klingons lay siege to the most important dilithium mining planet the Federation has with 3 ships. The federation would have a large fleet and massive defenses around the most important planets they have.
It's due to the budgets, that many models and or CGI will be way too expensive. Contrast this to animation of space (anything from Futurama to Cowboy bebop to Macross) space around planets (or a fleet of ships) is way more cluttered cause the cost to animate it is far less
It's ridiculous, really. How many times has the Enterprise be "the nearest Star Fleet ship to help" - in the very heart of the federation which should be swarming with ships?
To be fair, I don't think you'd necessarily be able to see San Francisco Fleet Yards or Earth Spacedock from the ground with the naked eye. Maybe a few little specks if you know where to look. Taking Earth as an example, Star Trek Star Charts claims it has a population of ~4.2 billion, c. 2380 (i.e. post-Nemesis, set in late 2379). Most of that population primarily commutes by transporter, with the rest of the trip generally being on foot. Ignoring Kurtzman's shows, the reason the skies weren't dense with shuttles is simply because most people didn't need one to get around, and the ones who did more likely did so out of preference or leisure. Regardless, Fed starships might be huge, but relatively speaking they're not gonna look that big in orbit.
For Star Wars, remember that a lot of the Hero Ships get extra guns slapped onto them because there's a war on. But yes, even normal ships gets guns, simply because there's so far from anything they need some sort of protection.
I’d like to liken it to the golden age of piracy on earth, where perfectly normal business men sailed fully armed ships. And then you point out that many of the more normal weapon systems in sci fi are capable of annihilating entire planets.
Any normal drive system is capable of annihilating entire planets, even without faster than light travel. USS Ford is a 90,000 ton aircraft carrier. Traveling at 27km a second (the calculator suggests 51km/s for comets, for perspective) would create a create a final crater of 479km(298miles) and 1.9km(1.18 miles) Deep. If you are accelerating between planets in years rather than decades you start looking at holes in planets.
Yes; and also during that same age some of those businessmen found more profit privateering for a government than shipping cargoes. And some of those privateers crossed the line into piracy, eventually.
@@OspreyKnight And to ship something from East Asian ( Japan/ Hong Kong) across the Pacific to USA West Coast take close to two weeks by water. Most of Earth's international global shipping economy is base on a two to four week time frame. So cost time table to send something from Mars or Jupiter to Earth has to be within a three week time period. Which is a lot faster than 27km/sec. Humans can't even ship oil across oceans without a spill, so who wants to trust Earth's faith to a computer .. glitch ?
I think a huge thing to consider would also be means of communication - back in the age of sail a merchant didn't have the means to contact a navy ship outside of it's line of sight, so they had to defend themselves. Nowadays a cargo ship under attack can contact war ships via radio and get air support through helicopters
really depends if they have FTL communication or not, it could still take hours for your radio signal to reach the nearest navy patrol and by then you are well and truly dead
Some still do. The guy who lives across from my parents had a large fishing boat with a mount for a harpoon gun (no idea why). But he also had made an attachment so he could rig his rifles to it if he wanted - everything from a bog-standard AR15 to a Barrett 82 he had.
My grand fathers boat had a "deep sea fishing pole,holding mount" that happens to be compatible with a mount for his old m60 machine gun he's finally gotten the stamps to own.
@Ross Outdoors you can often make a solid guess on what culture someone hails from just by their attitude about such things. It's sad how many people are indoctrinated into thinking that they have privileges instead of rights.
Considering that the nearest space police could be tens of light years away then perhaps it's good that your cargo ship is bristling with guns. In the space game, Freelancer, a whole squadron of pirates would be waiting outside the space station or ready to disable a trade lane the moment I bought a shipment of expensive cargo to sell.
In Elite Dangerous I farm bounties by using my heavily armed Asp Explorer as an armed freighter. That said, stations are usually well patrolled, and response time is fast. Pirates mostly stick to resource extraction sites, or beacons, or interdict you in a shipping lane. Whenever I get interdicted, I submit and blow them up, (or high wake out of there, because holy shit, that's a Fer de Lance) which handily increases my profit from my trade runs.
In my scifi universe civilian ships have light weapons (anti fighter turrets) and a few missile launchers for destroying debris that is in the way and general defense from small pirate groups. But really space is so huge that even with FTL it's impossible to fully police it and anyone with the resources, knowledge and technology can build their own battleship or modify large luxury or colony ships into battleships (in my universe you only really need the resources, a facility to build or modify the ship and an AI and you have a pirate ship). But also in my universe military and exploration ships have huge guns built into them that can one shot any civilian ship with ease (and some can even destroy planets), so civilian armed ships aren't that big an issue (as the larger ships have the energy for bigger guns and better shields and thicker armour plating). The biggest problem is the two separate FTL systems that can both destroy ships and one could potentially destroy a planet.
I always took it to be an extension on the USA's 2nd amendment, taken into a place where the need to protect yourself against pirates etc is a very real one. Especially given that much of currently-mainstream western scifi comes from the US.
When you're far away from the Solar System and sending one carrier battle group there is costing taxpayers. So you got to defend yourself. Bring along some printers and blueprints to make toolings to make firearms, missiles, torpedoes and ships. In the future, polymers will be way stronger than steel and CNTs would be much improved along with nano crystal steel. Carbon fibers will be easier to manufacture. Ship blueprints can be purchased online. It'll be similar to a cottage industry but with a bigger scale.
This was my interpretation too. Yes, I agree with the video that the vast "badlands" of space making law enforcement difficult and piracy fair game is a good justification. But this is sci-fi, space is only slow to traverse if you want it to be in your setting. So I actually think the reason in current media is more meta, it is simply because most sci-fi media is either from the US or is based quite heavy-handedly on US Wild West archetypes and values which is why there's weapons everywhere. You'll notice that, for example, British sci-fi like Doctor Who has far far less emphasis on heavily armed spacecraft. Indeed I'm not sure I've ever seen ships duking it out on that show, because it's not the focus of it. Whereas other sci-fi authors are looking for that space combat excitement in their works
I also feel like you should add the very management and use of the weapons being something to think about. You can get a ship but chances are that ship isn't ready to have a gun put on it. Take the behemoth. One hell of a warship. Lots of PDC turrets, rail guns, and torpedo launchers... but the power isn't very good and you have to load the torpedoes from outside the ship. Launching a torpedo took out the lights. Turbo laser batteries take a lot of power. Just because you can get your hands on a turbo laser it doesn't mean your ship can use it without some other upgrades. Maybe i can get a naval cannon for my car but i don't have the space for those shells, or the structure to handle that gun, or even the power to drive WITH that gun on top. I'm going to have to upgrade quite a bit. And now that i can use my naval cannon equipped car. I'm going to have to maintain both. Parts for the car i can easily get, but that naval gun is going to be a bit of a challenge. Not only will i have to find a source of shells to shoot out of that cannon, but i'm going to have to find spare parts for the gun. What happens if a bolt in the loader breaks off? I can probably find a new bolt. What if the loader frame breaks? Where am i supposed to source that?
And not only that, but the hull size and density is incredibly important as it not only limits how many guns you can carry, but on how fragile you will be when you fill the hangar with generators just to fire up 3 more shots from the fancy quad-cannon.
To bring in another universe, they mentioned the Errant Venture, a star destroyer owned by Booster Terrick in Star Wars. It started off with 10 turbo lasers, 8 Ion cannons and and 3 tractor beams. By a few books later, only 3 of the turbolasers worked, with the rest being used for parts to keep the 3 working, and only one tractor beam worked. I can't recall if any of the ion cannons still worked. Outside of a military setting, Booster couldn't afford to keep the weapons or the ship fully maintained or crewed.
@@murphsmodels8853 Before the Vong War broke out, Booster had to park the Errant Venture at the cross roads of multiple space lanes just to maintain business and to save fuel for when he .. really .. needs to make a jump to some where, if the ship will start up to make the jump, maybe .. ? In one of the X-wing: Rogue Squadron novels, the Rogues were making a hit & run bait attack on an ISD to draw away that has been in orbit over a world for the past few weeks. Before the Rogues could make their attack run, the ISD captain asked the Rogues their terms for joining the New Republic. Rogue One, " Wait you want to join the New Republic ?" Imperial captain, " My last and current assignment is to protect this worlds industry out put and trade, and doing so is the choice of this star sector's governor." Rogue One, " I take it you no longer have a near by repair space dock and you are running to low on fuel to waste on needless engagements ?" Imperial captain, " That is correct. Would you happen to have a spare backup hyper drive please ?" Rogue One, " My X-wing is a bit too small to carry one, but I will send aid to your ship and someone to talk to your governor, can't say when they show up." Imperial captain, " The best I can do is wait and read over daily reports. Good luck on your mission." ( It went something like that. Fun part is in the third books of the series I think, that captain did show up with two other Republic ships to give over whelming aid.)
@@krispalermo8133 Which book was that? I thought I had them pretty well memorized. Sounds like it's time for another reread. If only Audible had full versions
another thing to consider is "ports of call". In the age of sail and most sci fi settings, you don't have a network of satilites or even timely naval patrols checking every island [asteroid], port [planetary body big enough to land on], or town [an actual space port, maybe with dock and refit facilities] unless they are under direct military control. In the modern world we have networks of sats and recon aircraft patroling passively and actively that space is just way too vast for. So you get an enterprising ship engineer setting up a shadow port to make quasi legal to illegal modifications to ships if the price is right. Especially in settings where not every port may be friendly to the jack booted thugs of the local, system, or galactic government. "Nah we haven't seen any heavily armed ships around here", says the dockmaster as a suspiciously over engined, or hard to scan vessel sneaks out behind the authorities....with a few more hatches than it needs for moving crew and cargo on it....
Problem is the supposes a world in which radar and sensors have ceased to exist, we can SEE huge amounts of space already, and our ability to do so will increese in the future. It really takes some kind of FTL speeds to break that such that you can evade discovery by going to another star system which no one is monitoring.
@@kennethferland5579 its not a lack of being able to see whats going on. Its not being able to get there in time to do anything about it. The Expanse is a good example. Even a distance as short a 1 AU is about 7 light minutes, meaning the light from the pirate attack you are witnessing through your neat ling range sensors, or that radio destress beacon that your receiver just picked up is 8 minutes old...and even if you could get there at the speed of light, it would take 8 minutes. 16 minutes just to get a response. Now stretch that out across a system. At nearest approach Mars has a 14 minute lightspeed delay. Jupiter is 35 light minutes, one way By the time you know a ship has been attacked, the information is half an hour old and the battle is probably already over
One super big factor that everyone seems to ignore in SF is logistics. Specifically fuel, ammunition and provisions. There is a reason ports are in military or government control in real life and that's because ports are quintessential for logistics and if you keep track of logistics you basically stamp out piracy. But in SF everyone gives a half ass reason for no need for fuel, ammunition or provisions or blatantly trivializing this important aspect of life and piracy seems easily attainable. In Expanse (at least in the books) they make a big deal out of logistics and the need to have the ship as a "legitimate salvage" as they won't be able to dock at any "legitimate" port ever. Pirates in the age of sail were actively supported by different governments, because that was a way to wage economic war without involving the navy. Support that came in the form of free harbor, men, food etc. Remember, real world piracy didn't target warships, but merchants (with few exceptions).
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This was always a fun thing to see how each sci-fi universe approaches.
I really wish you'd include the sources for all the cool sci-fi clips you use, more than a few times watching these vids I've seen one and wished I could look up the movie or episode it came from and watch that. Like the Star Trek clips at 6:57 and 7:20
i have a question that maybe only you can answer. why do the federation NOT have shipyard sized replicators? so Romulans kick off and bam 1 hour later 300 sovereigns go screaming into the neutral zone with skeleton crews. to my knowledge replicators convert energy into matter and as latnum is the only thing in star trek that cannot be replicated so why cant or DONT the federation just print modern heavily armed ships every time they need them ie dominion war? instead of using mirandas
@@lastechocorp1841 The largest industrial replicators are implied to be somewhat on that scale - just a handful of them would have been enough to rebuild the entire Cardassian manufacturing base. And in Picard, Starfleet's shipyards on Mars were pumping out a rescue fleet for the Romulans at a truly astonishing rate, right up until the android incident devastated their entire production facility.
I've always assumed the legality was to defend against pirates, because at least in Star Wars the government has never been able to provide adequate defense for interplanetary travel.
Same on earth though.
The last thoughts of a TIE Interceptor pilot over Endor: "I'm in the fastest fighter the Empire has and this freighter is keeping up long enough to shoot us down."
While according to Legends all ships come with some weaponry to defend themselves against pirates it's harder to find the technicians to soup up your ride than to find the weapons for a serious upgrade.
Especially if you don't mind doing it in the Hutt Sector and have enough credits.
@@amc6169 that’s why I keep a a gun in my house at all times lol
@@hugohom2280 based. Self defense is a necessary skill good on you
in star wars they actually have laws preventing the government from having huge fleets for defense
Short answer: Pirates.
Longer answer: Wild West.
Even longer answer: Age of Sail.
Short answer: it's fun!
Or was that: 'Medium answer'? 😅
Q-ships
longest possible answer: The limits of spacetime by way of causality would make it difficult, if not impossible to institute rule of the galaxy in a way that is even remotely synonymous with what can be seen today on earth. Even if there were FTL drives that allowed for sidestepping causality problems (EG most sci-fi settings), nothing short of an FTL, instant access from everywhere in the galaxy internet would make it possible, since only then would we be able to efficiently enforce law
The reality of space combat given physics as we know it now would almost entirely preclude the concept of piracy, because:
1) You can't hide a fusion drive
2) It takes days to weeks of high g thrust to go ANYWHERE in the solar system.
3) Every ship is a terrorist nuke waiting to happen.
In short, any and every government in the solar system is going to have a vested interest in having a ship tracking and guidance system that puts today's FAA to shame, and anyone who even thinks about taking an unregistered flight is going to be flagged as a terrorist and nuked. Immediately.
You know that saying, "When seconds count, the Police are minutes away." Well, imagine how long it would take armed authorities to reach you in the cold black of deep space. If you were in trouble, you would need the means to defend yourself. Interplanetary travel would be extremely vulnerable to pirates and other threats, so weapons would not only be allowed legally, but would probably be standard issue. Like our real world, I just imagine there'd be restrictions against military-grade weaponry, which depends on the sci-fi universe in question.
Generally it comes down to speed of communication, speed of travel, and area to supervise. I live pretty rural. No one is getting here in less than 20 to 30 minutes. So I'm on my own if the vandals (which we really struggle with) or an aggressive animal start problems...
Yeah I mean even in Star Trek, civvie freighters often have shields and light armament to discourage raiders, or at least hold them off long enough for a Starship to arrive
Iys mentioned that Han Solo actually had illegal weapons (quad laser turrents) on the Millenium Falcon. But frieghters were in fact allowed to have some armaments to combat the pirates.
If you flying through deep space the odds of someone finding you is pretty low
@@DisturbedArcher ehrm.. missile launcher...
A few years ago, Somali pirates attacked the tanker with torp boats from the Second World War, which they acquired and converted for themselves. There are several ship cemeteries in the world where you can buy a quiet ship skeleton or even a small ship, such as a torpedo boat or a river escort, etc. Therefore, I think that in space it will be even easier to arm civilian ships than now on earth.
Greetings from Poland.
Agreed! If owning a ship becomes as commonplace as a civilian today owning a car, there will likely be salvage yards, and an unbelievable amount of parts and weapons available for a nominal price. Everything from the least powerful turbolasers, to planet destroying mass drivers. Not to mention the possible cargo from derelict abandoned ships that are salvaged or repossessed.
Wow
@@johnmullholand2044 In star citizen, even the most gun controlled planet in the Stanton system, they'll sell you guns big enough to crack capital ships.
There may be people who set up illegal ship yard s in space. Just building ship for criminals. Just to do one job.
This is a thing going on now. Drug sub are being made to move drugs.
If you could find a large chuck of rock with the right stuff. You could mine it and get what you need to make ships.
armed with which weapons, that is the question? Military grade weapons should be banned
Another thing that might be relevant to a sci-fi setting: micro-meteor defenses would be indistinguishable from proper weapons.
That's why most sci Fi settings have either heavy materiel shields, or energy shields. Both for deflecting micro meteors, space dust, etc, that can act as a VERY, VERY fast ballistic weapon, or from enemy energy weapons.
@@johnmullholand2044 given high percentage of C or FTL propulsion and the shields you just described, then your ship is a high speed ram (consider Nemo’s Nautilus as an example of a high speed ram).
Micro-meteor defenses would not have to be very powerful or dangerous to another vessel. A torpedo tube is easily distinguishable from a low power laser (or whatever it would take to pulverize small rocks).
A lot of sci-fi:s have static defenses in the form of energy shields
@@bertmathricks2024 slightly tangental:
You should check out a series called "The Deathworlders." It has some rather... inventive uses of "forcefields" as weapons unto themselves.
I think about this often, and it always comes back to that age-old adage:
_"Get out of the tank, Arthur."_
_-"I'm in a tank, and you're not."_
Ah a man of quality...
"The ATF are coming to take your machine guns." Let them come, I have machine guns."
@@D3K43 no no no, AFT (E:grammar :D).
@@D3K43 they have more.
@@D3K43: You have machine guns and the ATF has the military on speed-dial. You lose -- the only question is how long you'll hold out and how many bystanders you'll get killed along with you.
"There is no such thing as an unarmed spaceship." - everyone who understands real rocket science.
Kzinti Lesson, anyone?
Someone has been listening to Issac recently
"one, at sufficient velocity"
"The ship itself is a weapon!"
@@robertgernat2858 After all, Arthurday was not long ago :)
For the situations like the Ghost and Falcon from Star Wars, it's important to remember that those ships were most likely heavily modified and armed by their owners and were not necessary built that way.
The stock ship that the Falcon is modified from has a single dorsal quad-turbolaser turret as standard.
Han added the ventral turret(which was always an option) and the anti-personnel blaster turret after he acquired it.
@@frankyanish4833 I think your missing my point. Just because a hero ship is armed doesn't mean it comes that way naturally. Yes, within the cannon of Star Wars the YT-1300 does, but it didn't have to in order for the Falcon to have guns on it.
@@IphigeniaAtAulis but both ships in your example did come from the assembly line armed. Both were later upgunned, but they did have weapons stock.
@@frankyanish4833 Again, missing the point. I'm fully admitting that in cannon they are armed, but I'm just pointing out that SpaceDock seems to think that it would be ridiculous for a starship building company to put weapons on a civilian starship, like the Falcon, or for galactic governments to allow them to do so and all I'm trying to point out is that nerf herding smuggler scoundrels rarely worry about following the galactic laws any more so than modern drug smugglers worry about the legality of the assault weapon slung over their shoulder while carrying kilos of cocaine across a border.
Think about it this way. I believe in many places it is illegal to modify your car with nitrous, or have mufflers that violate environmental codes, or a dozen other laws related to what is allowed to be put on a person's car, but none of those have stopped people from doing just that.
Let's move away from Star Wars and go to the Expanse instead. The fact that Drummer's pirate skiff is armed with missiles should not be taken as evidence that anyone can just walk into their local Tycho Station shipyard and buy a fully decked out cruiser complete with optional railgun. These hero ships tend to be owned by people who are not always interested in following the rules.
Now, in the video he does go on to point out that many of these universes they exist in a state similar to the Age of Sail when civilian merchant ships were armed.
@@IphigeniaAtAulis I accept your point, but your original statement says(or maybe implies) that the Ghost and Falcon were “…heavily modified and armed by their owners”. I simply pointed out that both came armed in the basic model and the owners up-gunned, rather than outright armed, them.
Also, I think SpaceDock is underestimating how many vessels were armed with cannon during the age of sail.
Same reason you own a gun if you're out in the middle of nowhere: Help might not get there in time, _if_ there's even anyone around to help you, so you're in charge of your own defense.
Plus a few laser turrets might be useful if you somehow didn't notice that stray space iceberg and can't get around it in time.
3D printing. A railgun is easy to construct. Ingenuity is your sword and shield. No guns for the crew? Build some coilguns.
@@Joshua_N-A Hopefully you're well stocked on materials because the nearest asteroid mine could be millions of miles away, at minimum.
@@Joshua_N-A this is also a good reason to enable space pirates if anyone with enough tech knowledge could just 3d print a railgun or laser turret pirates could very easily manufacture their own weapons and arm civilian ships to the teeth and go swarm and hijack other ships until what was said in the video happens and they get to ambush a battleship and take it for their own.
From now on I’m calling ice chunks “space icebergs”
i just though how much better the titanic would been with laser cannons.
I've always figured the Age of Sail/Wild West archetype is the way space would end up being when there's no choke points. If the setting has some sort of jump gate/mass effect relay/magic slingshot to travel, that creates choke points that are easy to patrol. Same holds true for spacefold/wormhole drive systems like in Halo, Battlestar Galactica, and Dune, which have either instantaneous travel, or it bypasses dangers through dimensional shifting.
But in a setting where ships have their own FTL drives and travel in more-or-less normal space (or can easily be dragged back into it), they need to protect themselves during travel in the vast empty, unpatrolled regions. It's the hours/days/weeks of travel, while you're out of touch with the rest of civilization, that is the perilous time
Dune is specifically built around a feudal system born from poor long distance communication and travel, though.
chokepoints are great until you have need to venture beyond them. then you've got a need for weapons. well, you still do: you need them to deal with other people who might want to take your stuff
@@partytor11 In Dune, travel isn't actually too hard, but it's controlled by a single faction of mutated humans with precognition as pilots.
The trip could be done easily with supercomputers and AI's, but those are Illegal due to an earlier AI uprising. The Dune universe is heavily dependent on humans with special powers replacing most of the technology we depend on today in the form of computers etc. because of this.
This breeding/genetically engineered approach to technology is what lead into the feudal model of their society. With leadership entrusted to people who are specifically bred to be leaders.
This is exactly how I feel about it. Even with jump gates/etc as patrol points you still have the areas between the gates and the colonies where piracy can and absolutely will happen. It harkens back to the Age of Sail, where merchant vessels were regularly armed to protect them against pirates on the long voyages at sea.
SW universe hyperlanes seem to provide plenty of choke points.
“Have you ever wondered about why these dangerous things are allowed to civilians in space?”
As an American, no. Nothing ever seemed out of sorts to me.
It also speaks of the inevitable failure of gun control, even with current technology anyone with basic tools and simple supplies from a hardware store can build a machinegun if they want. With 3D printing taking off for firearms with our current generation of 3D printers, just imagine what people could make when higher grade 3D printers become cheap. You can't stop the signal, and you can't stop freedom.
@@robertharper3754 A fellow Captain Mal fan, I see. ;)
@@notyou2353, oh god no.
@@robertharper3754 Not to mention that "gun control areas" are some of the absolute worst places in terms of gun violence, and contrary to what gets pushed, it's entirely because it's like putting up a neon sign with loud music and fireworks screaming "we're defenseless, come rob us and worse!"
God bless America, space America too 🇺🇸
I like the mentality of the Star Citizen universe, where armaments are required on civilian ships by law in UEE space, so people are able to defend themselves from pirates long enough for the space-cops to arrive.
I guess surrendering would look bad for companies as they have abolished the "no confront policy" for employees that extended to spaceship crews.
It also is due to the UEE's fears about tyranny due to its origin. They actively want their citizens to be able to fight against the government if necessary.
Never thought of controlling it. I have always assumed that interstellar stories/games were the same as the age of sail. Any civilian ship on the fringe, without weapons, is a target for pirates. Further, if space too civilized, it's about as exciting as watching an accountant tabulate figures.
That was my thought too. Lots of space sci-fi is based on 1600-1800 sailing.
That time had competing naval empires, with intercontinental trade being both a crucial part of their economies, and a major target for their incessant warfare. They had very low regulation, huge private fortunes, and the states licensed privateers to go after each others' merchant fleets. Partly because their state navies were too busy fighting each other to patrol and police the vast oceans. There must have been a huge gray market for war spoils plundered by state navies and privateers, which I imagine was a necessary condition for outlaw unlicenced pirates to sell their plunder.
In this kind of environment, whith big risks, big rewards, low regulation and even lower law enforcement... It makes sense to put some defensive and offensive capabilites on your merchant ships. Which in turn means that the barrier for going from merchant to pirate is lower.
It would be like watching a commercial flight from New York to London.
this entire question is confusing.
"Why Can Civilians Own Armed Spaceships in Sci-Fi?"
Asked by someone from a country, where civilians own guns: pistols, assault rifles, shotguns.
But yeah. short answer is: you cant police entire space. So rights for self-defense fall on civilians
@@romanpyatibratov4361 That is a decision the writers can make, certainly. But the chain of reasoning goes in reverse: if you want stories with armed civilian ships, you make space too vast to be policed. If not, you improve scanning, or limit the availability of spacedocks or seed inhabited system with survellance drones or something. It's a writing decision, not an outcome of physics.
And I might add that civilians owning and operating armed ships is less like owning handguns and more like owning fighter jets and gunships.
Like living in a democrat city.... I wonder why they want to disarm all the civilians?
it is worth noting that The Ghost in Rebels is described as having been heavily and illegally modified to be a gunship, and the Falcon is described in non-film source (both legends and canon) as having been illegally up-armed. that said, that CEC designs can be so readily uparmed does suggest they design them to allow it. though i'd guess that the most probable cause would be the fact that they might share a hull and parts with intentionally militarized designs being sold for use as patrol craft or light troop transports.
Even if you go by on-screen evidence at the Battle of Endor where the Millenium Falon keeps up with a TIE Interceptor long enough to shoot it down should tell anyone that the Falcon can't be legal.
@@grayscribe1342 Yeah we know it ain't legal, Han all but admitted such in Star Wars.
@@grayscribe1342 Han tended to be in areas or ports that as long as the local officials where given proper incentives. They did not look closely at a ships weapons, shields, and engine modifications.
The falcon looks more like a Courier or small transport, the ghost in the show is seen carrying shipping container through magnets on the exterior.
Hero ships in Star Wars are modified or non standard designs.
What changes a car to a police car? Some protection in the doors and maybe bullet proof glass, yes you can do this to your car to a point, AKA you might get 9mm HP protrction but not 5.7AP
CEC ships are designed from the factory to be endless modifiable, part of their selling point, and why they are so popular. Now - there are 'legal' modifications, and 'illegal' modifications. What one does with their ship after they buy it is entirely up them.
Example: You can buy a AR-15 semi-automatic and add all sorts of shit to it, and it can still be legal. BUT the minute you go 'military,' aka; full auto operation, it's illegal. Such as the Falcon having a military grade power core, shields, weapons, and whatever else Han and it's owners have put into it.
I think it depends on where.
In Star Wars and Mass Effect, the Outer Rim and Terminus Systems are very far from the administrative capitals meaning the care of the authority just stops. Why bother seizing a single armed civilian ship when hundreds of pirates, bounty hunters and rouge ships are active and probably packing more heat then the civilian one.
I know that rouge ships are thermally-inefficient and all, but what's so bad about a ship whose hull is painted red? "Rouge" vs "rogue."
Most of Firefly & Serenity is similarly described as taking place on far-flung frontier worlds, a long way from civilization and Alliance control.
What’s a “rouge” ship? Are they painted red for some specific reason?
@@Galactipod You ever played EDF? A single Rouge Drone packs more firepower than the US airforce!
@@CreamTheEverythingFixer Have no fear. The EDF rangers and their standard-issue rifles will knock it out of the sky for us where upon destruction, the drone's flaming remains will suffer a spontaneous reduction in mass and will be flung away from the battlefield by the rounds shot by our stalwart defenders. If not, a lancer will just boost into the sky and spike it with a spear. There's contingency plans.
I'm glad you brought up the "age of sail"/golden age of piracy. I think there's two more facets to be explored there: civilian ownership of armed vessels can be a local phenomenon (far from policed regions) and/or a transient phenomenon (society has expanded outward faster than enforcement capability could keep up).
Perhaps also, local armed merchants become the governing class, enforcing their own authority on a less armed populace. This has also happened in places like Venice, New York, San Francisco, India, Japan, and the Bahamas, at various times in history.
Piracy in the golden age of sail was frequently authorised by an enemy state, rather than a few enterprising individuals up to no good. Take for instance the pirate captains Piet Heijn or Michiel de Ruijter who were actively employed by the Dutch government to steal silver from Spanish ships in order to cripple the Spanish economic might and thereby their capacity to wage war on the Dutch and their allies.
Simply put space is vast, always somewhere you could go to escape law enforcement.
@@LarixusSnydes that was privateering, not piracy. The difference is vital.
(Privateers often turned to piracy after the official conflict was over, though.)
There are pirates active on Earth today, but their armaments tend to be very lite relative to formal military forces. This is a protect of high-end military technology becoming so expensive to produce and maintain. To me that implies the presence of piracy in Sci-fi settings has less to do with the vastness of space, and is more likely an unintended product of post-scarcity economics. Once you have the technology for automated infrastructure which can churn out large numbers of nuclear submarines, lots of people having access to said submarines is just a matter of that technology spreading.
true, I agree its probably that, or else you could just have a tighter control on shipwrights so civilians dont have access to ships capable of viably engaging military escorts, and pirating is just not possible
@@gabrielandradeferraz386 Except weapons control is impossible in a setting like Star Wars where independent governments are numerous and corporations are often more powerful.
@@gabrielandradeferraz386 but that lasts only so long as the systems of control are seen as legitimate. Sadly, systems of control will almost inevitably be used in ways that the maintainers of those systems see as illegitimate, which then prompts those insiders to sabotage them system of control. Consider how Edward Snowden, and inside, leaked the activities of the NSA because he thought they had crossed a line. Now imagine that leak taking the form of auto construction templates for weaponry instead of just a spy agency’s dirty laundry. We’ve already had people develop and circulate 3D printer templates for guns in protest of gun control measures. It’s not hard to imagine a post scarcity society seeing weapon plans proliferate for similar reasons.
Now the only question is, if you have enough resources that regular civilians can afford nuclear submarines, why do any of them feel the need to become pirates?
A post-scarcity society would probably still have way less pirates, even though it's that much easier to be a pirate. Look at the pirates of today, most of them are just doing it because their economy is almost non-existent, they have a starving family to support, and need money however they can get it. It's an "us or them" situation. 99% of the time, piracy is just an act of desperation.
In a post scarcity society, I'm sure that there will still be some limits (you couldn't just ask for 100 ships or something), but the nature of a post-scarcity society implies that there's no longer any needs, and very few wants. You'd probably risk your life for food if you were starving, but would you risk it for, say, a marginally better phone, or a slightly better car? Probably not.
I'm sure there would still be people who "just want to watch the world burn," but those people are rare, and their personalities tend not to work well together. Plus, at that point it's not piracy, it's terrorism. What are the odds of enough of those people meeting to form a ship crew, somehow establishing a hierarchy and coordinated plan, stealing/creating a heavily-armed ship, then attacking other ships? All without anyone noticing, and nobody snitching to authorities? Seems slim to none.
Even if they are successful, and attack a ship, as soon as word gets out there's a pirate on the loose, they will be hunted down by actual government forces. It will be such a rare occurrence that they would be little more than a live training exercise for that government's navies. There's really no conceivable way piracy in a post-scarcity society could be a legitimate threat without some EXTREME failures by the government.
The only caveat I could see is if there was an involvement of another major power, basically "Space CIA." This other power would give extremists/terrorists military-grade ships, equipment, and training. These groups would then act as guerillas, raiding people/shipping for more supplies, with the eventual goal of toppling the government. I still might wonder how someone could gather enough extremists to do that, since a post-scarcity society is practically the most utopian society imaginable. Unless the government was being insanely dystopian or oppressive, it would be really hard to convince someone to participate in widespread piracy, violence, and potentially a civil war when the alternative is essentially free food, shelter, and healthcare for everyone.
40k's explanation basically boils down to 'our standard military response time is about half a decade', and to ensure that their actual military ships are significantly better armed than rogue trader vessels can afford (because civilians need to pay for their ships to be outfitted from the excess production above their tithe rate, before the administratum gets round to updating the tithe rate to a higher band, whilst the imperium gets the entirety of the rest of the production capacity, they don't have to worry about being outstripped by the private sector- if it ever tries, they just say that it belongs to the tithe, given they command absolute loyalty when it comes to tithe capacity).
The economy of scale would doom the imperium. A.k.a The bigger something is, the harder it is to defend. Both from within and without.
@@warrmalaski8570 and their general response is that revenge is not only justified to the level of killing a planetary population, but if theologically necessary. The imperium only defends itself from the slowest moving threats, and it already did fall from within, given the lectio divinatus was enemy propaganda from the start.
The warp is a fucky thing, such the term 'warp fuckery'. Yet space vessals in 40k don't usually take half a decade to get anywhere, infact sometimes Warp travel is nearly instant, crossing halfway through the galaxy to what for them might be a couple of hours but in reality took a handfull of seconds. But this is as rare as actual years of constantly being in the warp. What's more accurate is that warp travel takes from around 1 to 14 days (That is if we're only talking about pirate response, so the sector defense fleet would only be a couple of systems away. Otherwise large warp journeys could take up to 6 weeks.) Taking in account no warp storms decide to mess with the astropath.
@@legatusmatheus9815 the delay is more due to the fastest possible time for the administratum to actually notice- it's noted that the adeptus terra's standard response time to petitions is longer than the average human lifespan, so even expedited for severity it will taken many years, if not decades. Obviously the response of marines or the inquisition is waaaay faster, but they aren't involved in responses to minor threats to minor worlds- a rogue trader vessel isn't going to have the ability to ask for help outside of manual communication (i.e. going somewhere and filing a complaint. Not like they have astropaths on board, being private vessels, rather than warships sanctioned with soul-bound psykers by the glorious god emperor)
@@reganator5000 while the administratum is comically slow in changing anything as widespread as for example, a law. It is vastly different to responding to actual threats, depending on the region (in Ultramar you get response back quite quickly, but let's say in segmentum obscurus.. well you'd be lucky to even send out a message before whatever lurks there eats you and your vessal whole). What it boils down too is how quickly a ship could ask for help to their most closest navy vessal, as we all know a lot of world's have not only their own planetary defense force, but also their own planetary defense fleet. Not to mention the assigned sector security fleet. To think a ship would litteraly send a message back all the way to the nearest administratum post is a bit silly, then again it's 40k. Nevertheless I'm not one to make grand statements without references to back me up. But seeing as I'm in bed and on my phone you'll have to give me a bit of time first.
Isaac Arthur: "There is no such thing, as an unarmed space ship"
-going from the fact that a fast accelerating/fusion reactor ships are by their nature potential weapons of mass destruction
Makes sense since cars kill more people than guns.
And if you have that much power generation at hand, microwave cannons would be standard armaments. There’s literally no reason not to have them, it’s like opting for cherry on your Sundae or cruise control in your car or a 256 instead of a 128 GB memory on an electronic device
That's the Kzinti lesson.
During the Wild West and Age of Sail it was very common to have to surrender (or a least safe) your weapons when you went to a town/port. Opening your gunports or activating targeting systems near a dock would be highly frowned upon to put it mildly.
During the ages of steam and steel, it was highly frowned upon the point one's guns and rangefinders anywhere except fore and aft. A wise policy, when your host probably has a coastal torpedo battery quietly aimed at you.
Targeting systems... In age of sail?
@@CountingStars333 The gun-captian pointing presumably ;)
@@CountingStars333 It was meant to be a comparison, I think. They’d both mean you were ready to fight.
Incoming Ship: I have 3 antimatter reactors charging these!
Dock: And I'm plugged into the entire power grid of a planet. Shut up, and shut 'em down or get atomized.
Black Beard's Queen Anne's Revenge was a small French warship that he added MORE guns to - between 36-40 heavy cannons. But pirates normally preferred quicker, more nimble ships to overtake targets and flee warships.
true, mostly briggs and sloops
I've been to the shipwreck.
Actually Blackbeard like most pirates had lots of *smaller* guns then a warship of equal tonnage. And it makes sense when you think about it, as a pirate why would you want heavy guns that are good for sinking ships as opposed to more smaller guns that are better at killing crew.
Those naval cannons were *heavy* . It's a wonder it didn't capsize under its own weight.
The Queen Anne's Revenge was a former Slave ship. Slave ships where designed to be large and fast.
When the US navy was being created, several civilian ships showed up to help out. Any of them were a match for a military vessel of the same size at the time. On land people could own cannons if they wanted to, and many did. We live in a more restrictive time in history, not an "average" time.
During that age of nautical travel, (1400s and earlier to the 1700s) ships and their cargo were extremely valuable. So civilian trading vessels did need to be armored. Because back then you had to deal with pirates, privateers, and flat out foreign powers attacking the ship and seizing the very valuable cargo inside the ship and the ship itself.
Double with the fact that the distances of the ocean are vast and ships weren't too quick. So no naval vessel will save you in time so you got to save yourself.
@@grisom5863 This is the case now. We still have all that shit.
@@grisom5863 Modern day piracy is a huge problem. Its seen a sharp increase over the past decade, with pirates growing more bold and viscous every year. Many private citizens and corporations are arming their vessels and hiring armed security or private military contractors to protect their lives and assets. Also distances and communication for getting help are still absolutely terrible. When pirates are minutes away, help is still hours away, possibly even days if you're out deep. Sure, if you're close to a country with a good coastguard and you're within 20 miles of shore you might be able to get help within an hour or so. Also, while its mainly relegated to areas that aren't tourist routes, cruises and regular civilian or trade traffic in any ocean is still subject to these attacks. There are hundreds and hundreds of reported attackss every single year, but sadly there are also hundreds more that never get reported because the people on the private boats are killed, or taken into slavery or the sex trade, and their boats are scuttled. They're just another statistic reported as "lost".
@@BastiatC it's nowhere near as bad, nowadays it only takes half an hour or less to notice if something is wrong in the shipping lanes and no to mention pirates doesn't even have the capability to go head to head with a small coast guard gunboat. Even if they have an rpg, they'll have to pray that they land a shot cause a warship's gun with it's advance targeting system is quite accurate and with radars, coast guards and navies will always detect the pirates first.
@@robbieaulia6462 There are pirates with retired frigates, or similarly classed and sized ships, armed with cannon; and they never engage dedicated warships, so they rarely deal directly with coast guards and other military naval vessels.
Cargo and cruise ships are "safe" only because of dedicated lanes, not because pirates "only have motor boats", and sometimes not even safe then depending on where the route takes them. Coastal defense ships only defend near the coast, especially near port, and proper navies rarely escort shipping lanes.
The positive is they tend to aim for "board and capture"--as far as I'm aware--so it's just as or more effective to have armed guards instead of "big ugly guns" bolted to the deck.
Something about "Age of Sail" warships. It really depends on what part you look at. At the beginning of it, you have very little distinction between what constitutes a warship and a civilian vessel especially given Venetian vessels and the rise of Flyuts that can act as ad hoc line of warship in a larger military force
Very true. Also, I Love your profile picture.
IIRC fluyts were unarmed and streamlined to both be cheap to produce and be faster than any other ship
edit: yeah, here you go: "Unlike rivals, it was not built for conversion in wartime to a warship, so it was cheaper to build and carried twice the cargo, and could be handled by a smaller crew"
your overall point is true, but the specific examples are made up bullshit
Regarding Venetian vessels, it depends on the era. Before the Battle of Lepanto, ramming using galleys was considered the most effective tactic in the Mediterranean, and in those cases war galleys were quite different from merchant galleys. After Lepanto, gunpowder took over, so the lean and fast war galleys were no longer as needed, replaced by merchant galleys equipped with cannons (galleasses). But at this point, Venice was in a downward spiral, so its naval design influence outside the Mediterranean was doubtful.
Indeed. Warships -- especially larger ones -- and merchant ships didn't look very different because they were designed with a similar primary goal: cargo capacity. It's nice and all to have a lot of cannons, but they'll be useless if your crew starves halfway along your route. Long-distance travel took _very_ long in the age of sail, so ships were largely designed for endurance more than anything else.
During the "Age of Sail," a lot of pirates were ex-privateers which were naval mercenaries contracted by a nation like England to harass and raid shipping of an enemy nation like France and Spain. When the war was over the privateers either went into merchant sailing or continued raiding for their own sake.
I've always been disapointed that most sci-fi's don't use the term "galleon" as a ship classification, as that is essentially what an armed cargo ship is.
A galleon is a quite specific armed cargo ship. 'Armed merchantman' is the general term.
They do have Galleons and Barques in 40k, but they are mostly old ships from a lost age, sometimes seen as a Rogue Trader's ancestral ship, or captured by Orks...
Thank you I've been wondering what the hell a galleon was for years.
@@FireFox64000000A galleon is actually a ship with a very specific hull and sail layout, and they were often usedby both merchants and Navys (the Spanish in particular loved them).
Speaking of Wild West in Space: Firefly, notably, does *not* have guns on civilian ships. Serenity has made a whole point of it where the crew bolts a small gun to the top of the ship to go through Reaver territory.
That's because the Federation patrolls just enough to prevent civilians from carrying arms. They would arrest anyone with a sensible level of armament, because they fear rebellion more that the loss of merchants.
Yup. Firefly is a great example. The alliance may have the military but civilians just like in real life have access to freighters and other shit. If they wanted guns that would be massive expensive. Remember bushwhacked? Jayne uses vera to attack that space net.
@@hiigara2085 The Alliance patrolled just enough to prevent armed freighters from being profitable. Pirates having near free reign was a bonus, as it suppressed the outer worlds, and maintained inner world economic supremacy
@@torg2126 Cops need Criminals to justify their jobs.
Well.... Firefly had some of the look of the American Wild West, but it really wasn't.
Within the first 30 minutes of “A New Hope”, Obi Wan is taking Luke to a “wretched hive of scum and villainy”. To be fair, this is clear world-building, for Star Wars - it makes clear to the audience, that piracy and similar rackets are everywhere, in such a galaxy. And as such, there could be considered good reason for a faction such as the Empire to exist, as the only bulwark against these criminal elements. That’s not to say the Empire isn’t evil, or indeed that the Republic before it wasn’t corrupt. It’s merely that an impression of such an interstellar government being necessary, is part of the world-building that Star Wars is meant to convey, from the get-go.
Han also describes the Falcon as being "the fastest ship in the system" while The New Essential Guide to Vehicles and vessels describes the Falcon as given military-grade weapons and "illegal hyperdrive capacity." When mentioning "armed civilian ships" my first thought though was the Twilight from Clone Wars
Now I'm no Empire sympathize, but maybe just maybe it was Palpatine that was evil and not the Empire cuz I very much doubt the Death Star would have ever became a thing if it went for good old Papa Palpatine
@@TheGreatAndMightyGoBo the empire acted as a police force and when it comes down to it the rebels were terorists. Also, it turns out the new republic, the thing the rebels formed after the empire, we know for a fact happily funded slavery in certain systems
My go-to argument for this has been to point out that in the days of the Republic, a private corporation - basically, space Walmart - was able to enforce economic sanctions and a blockade of a Republic planet. The rest of the Republic either did not know or did not care until the Jedi made it a Thing. The modern equivalent would be Amazon blockading Hawai'i unless they passed laws in Amazon's favor. The Republic was sick at heart, politically and economically. It's a shame we never received (and under Disney's control, will never receive) a Star Wars story sympathetic to the Empire, because the Sheev actually had a good point.
@@Hoobastomp wasn't the "space Walmart" blockading them because they were paying high taxes, not being protected and had little representation? the thing is though the reason no one cared is because the blockade was legal but the invasion wasn't legal and they just thought it was a blockade, the thing is though the implied plan was the invasion was going to be justified to the senate to cause unrest (this is more what I've read rather than what I've put together) but the actual plan was to unify the senate against a threat and give emergency power to the person who was setting it all up
"This EFFORT is no longer PROFITABLE!"
-one very funny pirate
I think you mean "The greatest pirate in the galaxy"
That guy needs his own spin-off.
I have to ask but who said that?
@@Hybris51129 Hondo Onaka
I SMELL PROFIT!!
It really depends on how 'civilised' your bit of the galaxy is. The same way that a homesteader in the Old West might never need to kill somebody, but would absolutely need gun to survive, versus how much a person living there now needs one. And there's always the chance of random rocks and things endangering your ship or station.
So in 'frontier' universes like The Expanse nearly everyone needs some way of destroying stuff, whilst in places like The Culture ordinary folks can get along fine never having to worry about someone or something hurting them.
And yet, paradoxically, the denizens of the Culture would be able to get pretty much any gun they wanted. It's the ship they'd have a hard time procuring, since the ship is a free person, with its own plans. If they were viewed as a homicidal risk, they might not get that gun from THAT Mind, and they might be gifted with a new buddy that won't leave them alone, in the form of a slap drone, but they'd be free to procure whatever they liked, from whoever would give it to them. No one would tell them they couldn't have a gun, if they liked, just that they weren't going to be the one who gave them that gun.
There is a long history of people, civilians, having their own weapons while travelling. Guns, swords, knifes, etc. This is mostly for practicality and defence so that if people ran into bandits, they could defend themselves. The same logic would apply to ships in space. So it's not unrealistic, or illogical. In fact I would be surprised if there was a sci-fi series where civilians didn't have weapons on their ships.
That was the case in Firefly (which I always found a little suspect, especially given the ship's leadership). The only guns they had were small arms... one time, they opened the window (so to speak) and shot a rifle at a target because they had no ship-to-ship weapons.
They DID strap a real gun on for the movie, and then dropped it at the end. That really felt out of character for, well... the entire crew to me. The government may have been enforcing a no guns law, but they broke the law all the time. AND they had both pirates and psychotic suicide cannibals to deal with.
@@Swiftbow ,
You need to understand, In the Firefly universe, there wasn't a lot of need for ships to be armed because of there is only a single government... that government pretty much owned every system humans live in. That government also restricted weapons from civilians as they still maintained a large reserve of ships and any armed vessel was considered to be a pirate and impounded, the crew tried... and.. you know... executed.
Therefore, it made the most sense for Serenity to be unarmed... so she doesn't attract the attention of the government and the overly officious captains... why, in one episode, they were going to be held and the ship impounded for "illegal salvage operations."
While most of us don't feel a need for a machine gun to be on top of our car, certainly all the stories of modern day piracy like Captain Philips make you wonder about space cargo getting attacked.
@@usul573 funny enough, cargo ships have started hiring private security forces that are based out of international waters to defend themselves from pirates.
@@jasonhenry8067 Yes that’s true, sounds like most of the cargo ships going through regions with the piracy threat are armed now. Though rifles and shotguns seem pretty obviously there to fend off attackers and not blow other ships out of the water with like battleship guns. There are no cargo ships with big guns like that or missiles right?
During WW2, the Allies used arm mercantile ships to counter the “u-boat menace” in the North Atlantic. There would be a need,during the Star Wars conflict, for blockade runners.
Would a ramming ship with heavy armor be able to plow through those ships?
@@xenozero2128 it's a question of whether your admiral would be happy that you used a multimillion ship as a battering ram.
@@HerrStrackenausf1 think of star wars. It was a company that blockade a planet.
yes in WW1 and WW2 Q-ships they were called.
Ahh yes, arm ships with *surface* cannons against ships that can go *underwater*
Also it just makes the ships a military target then, one less war crimes for the German reich
"There is no such thing as an unarmed spaceship." - Isaac Arthur. Just throwing your trash out the door while traveling a significant fraction of light speed could level cities. Even today, the largest mass killing in the world perpetrated by private individuals was the Bastille Day massacre in Nice, France, and that was done with a truck. In the end, its all just kinetic energy after all.
Larry Niven: "A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive."
Also applies to communication lasers.
@Steve Wolcott well Rian Johnson did in The Last Jedi, but he managed to do it in a stupid way, without thinking it through at all lol.
@Steve Wolcott Babylon 5 had orbital bombardment via "mass drivers." It was essentially just launching your own meteors, but it wasn't at relativistic speeds. Star Trek does it sometimes, but mostly just to ram into another ship.
@Steve Wolcott I believe mostly it's because the story's plot and stakes fall apart when you can just strap a jump drive to a torpedo and kill planets
"Hey man did you flush the toilet?"
"Yeah, why?"
"We haven't left orbit of New New York yet. You might wanna turn on the news."
On the topic of owning guns in space, I would like to point out that contrary to it being called a vacuum space is not in fact empty and you may very well need that gun to shoot something out of your way, especially if you're traveling at a percent of the speed of light.
It's either have a gun to remove stuff that you're going to hit with the force of an atomic bomb or have enough shielding an armor that anything you hit is going to get obliterated without doing damage to you way. You now have an armed spaceship and a significantly armed one at that
The more weight you have the harder it gets for you to get to higher speeds and a gun isn't going to save you.
@@thomgizziz it will if its not within a non practical level, a 1911 or an AK-47 might be a good self defense weapon but not an 88mm gun or a 8inch gun
"there is no such thing as an unarmed spaceship", after all
A point that isn't touched on here, and is just as unused in most settings, is the possibility of pressing armed civilian ships into military service in case of invasion by a rival government/power. Even if that is voluntary you'd still up-size your war assets by a huge margin. Quantity over quality, maybe, but still very valuable.
Such as merchant marines during the second world war.
Irregular forces are rarely valuable for anything more than to distract the enemy while the trained regular forces get into position.
@@deusexaethera If they're merchant fleets that can self-convoy, that's pretty darn useful of itself, ...as to some degree might be anything that could keep the enemy busy or distracted or cause them trouble. (Some of which depending on what the world's like.)
reminds me of Starsector where the Hegemony has auxiliary ships. "This ship is on the Hegemony auxiliary list and as such its systems have been upgraded to military standard and a rigorous schedule of servicing enforced with the expectation that it can be pressed into military service during emergencies." -description of Auxiliary ship variants such as the Buffalo(A)
@@deusexaethera, you need to pick up a few history books. Irregular forces can be quite effective if used properly.
Yeah yeah yeah civvies with guns, all very nice, but can we talk about the editing and style in this video? Charles (the editor!) knocked it out of the park!
Thanks thanks ☺️
@@charlesl2102 Good job
@@lukasperuzovic1429 thanks!
@@charlesl2102 Yes, very good. What was the freighter ship at the end of the video? I can´t remember the ip.
@@danielzaba9913 that's the Fortunate Son from ST Enterprise 1x10
To a certain extent, we are already here, with "armed" spacecraft owned by civilians.
Any rocket can be a weapon. Small ones are regularly used as weapons for aircraft or troops (RPG is a Rocket Propelled Grenade), but any rocket that can go to space can easily be adapted into an ICBM. To go all the way to the extreme, consider Starship with it's heat shield: how much conventional explosives could you pack in that 1,000 cubic meter cargo space? Miners are legally allowed large quantities of explosives to do their job, and that extends to some sci-fi scenarios ("These aren't rockhopper mining nukes.") We don't need something to go a significant fraction of the speed of light to be a weapon, our drives are already more than capable enough for the job.
It's really not that hard to take even just a chemical rocket to an asteroid, use it as a thruster, and send that rock speeding toward Earth. We can do that with our current level of technology. Scarcity of the materials needed (more spacecraft with engines with enough fuel) is the main limiting factor. But that wont be the case forever.
Another example is the Beruit Blast from last year. It actually had the same blast energy as a small nuke. And that was accidental.
*isis theme song intensifies*
@@tearstoneactual9773 accidental my butt man. The isrealis saw it as a threat
Technically Elon Musk has the means to level entire cities with RFG strikes. You dont even need explosives, just drop a telephone pole made of tungsten from orbit and the energy it gains on the way down is comparable to a tactical nuke when it hits the ground.
@@2MeterLP - Aka Rods from God. Yup.
I think there's a different avenue of weapons ending up in pirate hands that wasn't considered here; Privateering. There were many pirates who started out as government-sponsored pirates, who, after the war that they were "used" in was over, turned to indiscrimminate raiding.
That even happens today. I really think the CIA should put remote deactivation systems in the gear we give "rebels".
@@S_Roach I doubt that's feasable (in a way that it couldn't be removed), and more importantly, I doubt agencies like the CIA even concern themselves with the long-term consequences of their actions. Otherwise they wouldn't be handing out weapons if they candy on halloween.
But yeah, it's the same principle.
@@S_Roach good luck deactivating dumb bullets or an rpg.
This naturally raises the question, how would a civilization that could meaningfully enforce "space gun control" look? How far would we need to bend the laws of physics for it to seem like a "realistic" possibility?
Warp-Drive on Crack-Meth
Dune/Battlestar Galactica style drive technology (teleportation/instant travel) combined with sensor grids capable of scanning lightyears away at great precision.
If a civilization had those two technologies they could enforce basically anything they wanted across their space, if your ludicrous range scanners detect anything illegal you instantly jump a taskforce directly on top of the perpetrators and squash the issue.
As scanning fidelty and range decreases civs lose the ability to detect infringements and as FTL response speed decreases you decrease the ability to effectively respond before infringers are gone. So you need near perfect vision at lightyears of range with the ability to nearly instantly intercede when needed.
Alternatively, in a setting like Stellaris where almost all travel has to occur by a static hyperlane system and ship sensors can detect other ships up to 4 systems away an empire could pretty easily suppress pirates within their own borders even with if their ships take weeks to move from one system to the next.
@@NATIK001 Or it could end up with a situation like the Bentusi in Homeworld's backstory, where despite being able to watch it all and respond near instantly, too many fires at once ensues. But that's more an issue of not having a proportional amount of enforcement to the territory at the end of the day.
They would not be able. It’s a matter of scale. The larger the authority the less direct involvement it has in affecting the everyday lives of people under it.
I like the idea of a "post-apocalyptic" setting in space. Pirates, local warlords, and civilian traders have access to things that would require massive industry due to everyone basically just scavenging on what the former galactic empire left behind.
If things are far enough apart you can have this, without going to a post-apocalyptic state. - I think it was the Amnion books where they explained the 'fast travel VS size' conundrum. Basically - your jump-drive/FTL engine or gate can bring you THERE very fast. But once you are THERE it's terrible big. Your pirate hunters could arrive in a system within hours or days (depending on the setting) but it would take years to search every nook and cranny for this elusive pirate base.
That - and then it's communication. Yelling distance. If you can't disciplin your vice-king or gouvernor in a reasonable time, your whole empire doesn't work. Because everyone outside your immediate control just does his or her own thing...
You don't really need it to be "post-apocalyptic". There are quite a lot of similar locations on Earth (Abandoned buildings, ships, etc.) that were simply left forgotten, without any apocalyptic event taking place. I can imagine that space will eventually get cluttered with derelict spaceships, ruined space stations, maybe even remains of some failed settlements (Like how Earth's orbit is currently cluttered with sattelites), that scavenging this stuff could actually become profitable. Granted, for space to get "cluttered" we will have to wait for centuries of active extrastellar traver, but still.
@@ВашеДоверие
There actually is a way to deal with the clutter besides waiting it out. It would also help solve our nuclear arsenal issue as well.
Starsector is a great game with this exact kind of setting.
You play as a fleet captain in an isolated part of a frontier galaxy, where the Gates that enabled inter-galactic travel shut down for some unknown reason, leading to the collapse of the Domain of Man within the sector. Now everyone is fighting over resources that are in the sector, trying to form some semblance of peace as industry collapses due to excessive DRM by basically every single megacorporation who couldn't predict that the Gates would literally just die out of nowhere. To make it worse, AI has gone rogue and is killing anyone who goes outside the core systems making expansion and exploiting resources of the outer systems of the sector difficult.
Pirates are rampant, a sizeable portion of the sector's population turned into luddite terrorists, a megacorp responsible for the AIs have become the AnCaps' wet dream, and an eternal civil war between people who still believe in unity under the Domain of Man's Martial Law against a confederation of seperatist systems.
@@ColdHatch Was going to bring up this suggestion myself. One of the things that fits with that is how rarely new ship hulls are put into service and how every port you go to has both the equipment and willingness (for the obscene credits cost of course) to completely overhaul/refit a ship hull no matter how horribly mangled it is. (D-Mods being the representation of that in game.) Not to mention how many forces make do with ships a functional/prosperous polity would never consider taking out of port save to get it to repairs. The DRM crippled inability for even major players like the Hegemony and League to produce more than a handful of ship hulls even if they HAVE the blueprints for them hammers home how and why you'd see civilians with ships that are clearly military equipment. In part because if you can find one and pay to fix it up, it's not worth arguing with some shipping magnate having his own personal 14th fleet battle carrier.
I've ruminated on this exact subject in the past in my own private thoughts. Nice to see a video on it. Sci-fi space reminds me of the American West crossed with the Gulf of Aden: lots of threats from the environment and other peoples, and help is almost never going to be around - you're on your own. Hence, go armed or go afraid.
Reminds me more of the pirate era than the american west personally .
I'm also an American civilian who carries a handgun fairly regularly. Police told me flat out they couldn't and wouldn't do anything about the situation I was dealing with, and told me how to get my license.
I could see the Age of Space travel as the culmination of the Age of Sail, the American Wild West and Indian Wars, the Mercenary African Bush Wars, the Mongol Hordes, and Australia.
i would imagine there'd be plenty of "scavenger" type ships and their crews that would keep sensors, eyes and ears on for everytime there was a space battle of any sort....then swoop in weeks later and gather up all kinds of goodies
Pedantic nitpick: La Sirena was actually pretty lightly-armed for a Star Trek ship. I think she only had phasers and had a pretty rough time going one-on-one vs a 23rd century Romulan Bird of Prey. The video clip accompanying that bit was actually a pretty ridiculously large and heavily-armed ship bombarding a planet from about a century and a half prior to La Sirena's time.
She probably could do a number to an unprotected planet with the phasers, but the same show she's introduced in also has planetary shields which look more than capable to fend off most smaller attacks.
Not to mention that in order for civilian space travel to be possible, a society needs a good amount of space nerds capable of operating at least a fusion reactor and a plasma thruster. The last one is basically a coil gun, so yeah. It's not too far fetched to imagine those reverse-engineered into actual coil guns.
I love the idea of civilian ships converting thrusters into cannons.
@@DigitalJedi remember to mention me in the credits when your book become famous xD
@@DigitalJedi the difference between a plasma drive, plasma welder, plasma cutter, and plasma lance is merely scale and intended use.
(Dumping tungsten BB's into the rocket exhaust to "discourage" high speed pursuit is another favorite of mine)
Plus you could actually use a plasma thruster to melt a starship if you
Put it close enough to its target.
@@muninrob capitain: "pilot, we are being pursued! poison our thurtsers!"
pilot: "aye captain! What should I use? Helium 3? Tritium?"
capitain: "T U N G S T E N"
Considering the fact that you could get guns with enough money or influence on earth, space would be even more hard to control
Yeah, with enough technical know how and supply I could totally see Space Pirates being able to jury rig a traditional civilian vessel with weapons capable of destroying other ships, so unless you want all Space Travel to require a light military escort then it’d be in ship owners’ best interest to have some form of defense to protect your ship from opportunists.
I mean, look at todays big freighter ships. Some of those have machine guns and armed mercenaries on board to protect them from pirates. Even if they don`t, most have powerful water cannons that can easily sink smaller craft or even cut through zodiacs or similarily sized craft.
Really. Do people think the wealthy DON"T have access to military class weapons?
@@adaeptzulander2928 The General Electric M134 Minigun is in the hands of many private collectors, and its legal to own. You can even rent one for use at some gun ranges.
They are legal as they cost already a small fortune to fire for a few seconds, as they go though 3000 rounds per minuet and are not man portable.
@@lukasperuzovic1429 that and the sort of people who can afford them don't go around performing armed robberies to begin with.
Americans should be able to own armed merchie cruisers, there is even a provision in the us constitution to allow the government to higher privateers to hazard enemy merchants traffic
During WWII, the government weighed the merits of issuing letters of Marque to the Goodyear company as its blimp fleet was very useful for loitering off shore and spotting enemy submarines. It ultimately decided that it was better to lease the blimp fleet and make them official military vessels, but in practice they were operating as privateers.
There is no law in the USA that prohibits you from owning an armed war ship of any size. The people that make them don't sell to the public though and you would have to pay a tax on every shell. Private individuals have owned armed ships in the past. Just way to expensive and difficult to achieve these days. People really seem to misunderstand 2nd amendment laws.
The US Constitution doesn't apply outside US borders or above US airspace, thank goodness.
@@deusexaethera "thank goodness"... you stink.
@@deusexaethera Umm, this is incorrect.
The U.S. Constitution applies to any place the U.S. government exercises power or has jurisdiction.
So, it applies to U.S. territories; it governs the behavior of U.S. troops in all cases; and crimes committed on the high seas against civilian U.S. vessels get investigated by the FBI, with any assistance needed from the U.S. Navy or the U.S. Coast Guard.
Peter F Hamilton's Reality Dysfunction is a good example of very easily 'legal' combat ships. Multiple fusion drives allows for faster freight (and a lot more combat maneuverability), 8 communication masers (powerful enough to blast a message right through a ship's hull) is just good redundancy. even an antimatter drive is technically legal, as long as you don't actually have antimatter itself on your ship. it does however mean that if problems break out, there'll be some less-than-scrupulous people out there who'll be really willing to hire you
The reasons given for armed civilian spacecraft is something I always thought and agreed with, space is indeed a big damn scary place, and if you're going to travel it, you'll need every advantage you can get to survive.
"Hans, load the SMAC, ferric tungsten, full caliber, 0.04c rapid fire"
@@zidniafifamani2378 'brrrr' goes the depleted uranium rounds.....said Madeline.
It makes even more sense in the Star Wars or Trek universe were there are giant hostile alien creates/cultures in space
@@Starfighter-nk4mo And crazy space wizards.
@@madisonatteberry9720 Who them selves own powerful weapons.
Star Tours is my favorite example of this trope taken to the extreme. Its the space equivalent of a Greyhound bus with laser cannons and a combat veteran astromech as copilot. How The Empire never objected to a "737 with machine guns" equivalent owned en-mass by a TOUR AGENCY is hilarious to me.
A P-8 Poseidon is a 737 with wing hard points and a bomb bay compartment.
I think one of the best representations of these ideas in science fiction would have to be Proximal Flame's The Last Angel series, where one of the Piratical Factions of the story manages to work their way up from having a few dozen civilian grade ships to capturing military warships to eventually building their own. And although none of their corporate, civilian or self-made craft achieves parity with actual military vessels, they're a lot closer than the central polity in the setting would like to admit (or most officers would believe).
I was thinking of that story the whole way through the video! Plus I believe he even wrote that "civilian grade" is military gear from a generation or two previous. Which would help keep people from getting too devious about acquiring gear, if it's cheap and widely available, and the government now has the safety of knowing that equal size, they have significantly better arms
I love that someone other than me knows that the last angel exists.
Absolutely love that series and I'm nowhere near done with The Hungry Stars. It's such a fantastically built world and story.
I am shocked but happy to see The Last Angel mentioned somewhere.
(Hey, Spacedock. How about a video on Nemesis?)
David Webber's Honor Harrington series explores this to great (IMO) effect during the series. The breakup of major powers leaves their ships captains to their own devices, allowing them to sell off ships to minor warlords who become major warlords, or said captains become the warlords themselves.
Edit to add:
In addition to this, corrupt officials who have to deal with captured raiders instead sell off the captured ships to the same raiders because money and power are king.
In addition to that, you've mentioned Gundam in other videos. Therein, they actually dropped an entire space colony on Earth causing vast devastation.
Also, pirates are a massive and vicious problem, which is why the Star Kingdom has zero fucks to give when it comes to pirates begging mercy.
The millennium falcon and ghost are not standard versions of there classes. The OPA and Marco Inaros got there weapons from black market etc. Some civilian ships would have been given light armemennts for basic anti-pirate defence. Or the civilian ships are supposed to be able to double merchant fleet and standing navy.
Even stck YT-1330s have double laser cannons.
@@DIEGhostfish didn't say they don't. just pointing out that just because the falcon and ghost are heavily armed doesn't mean that the class itself is.
@@DIEGhostfish CEC ships were intentionally made to be very customizable, add to the fact that the outer rim was not very well explored and largely beyond the reach of the Republic and Empire that came after it, so civilians being able to have defensive arms makes canonical sense, as does the fact that with that many competing economies and developers it would be more likely that you would find military grade hardware, from the major corporations or some local shop, available to use for your craft for the right price.
i would imagine there'd be plenty of "scavenger" type ships and their crews that would keep sensors, eyes and ears on for everytime there was a space battle of any sort....then swoop in weeks later and gather up all kinds of goodies
The concept of a “Monopoly on Violence” is further food for thought, something that is feasible in a society like our own. But given the vastness of space, and faster than light travel, it’s reasonable to postulate that this concept is something that’s not possible given a large enough scale.
Bingo, and that is one of the reasons why opposition to space colonisation intensifies as the technology for space colonisation improves, since wealthy powerful parties have an obvious vested interest in maintaining their monopoly to the detriment of the common man.
@@trippyulyanov2012 ... wealthy powerful parties are the biggest advocates for space colonization.
@@basedeltazero714 and how many of them have actually gone to work putting tech that has existed since the 60s to use in a practical heavy lifter, and how many of them are disingenuous pricks who for all their rhetoric are focusing solely on suborbital "tourism"? I can think of only one example of the former and two examples of the latter.
Not everywhere, but the important places will. Like orbits around planets. The rest will be no man's land.
Is it feasible on societies like ours? Doesn't appear to be. On the contrary; the places with restrictions are often, if not always, the most violent.
It's almost like gun restrictions lead to less access to self-defense by upstanding populations, while bandits and thugs don't care about the law in the first place, and translating a law on paper into real-world enforcement is extremely hard if not inherently impossible. On top of criminalizing what is really the use of tools, not inherently victimizing anyone unless misused, being you know, highly immoral and authoritarian.
"There is no such thing as Unarmed ship."
-Isaac Arthur
Sir Asaac
Rule 1 of warfare
3:03 if I’m thinking of the same novel: tbf that’s about a demilitarized imperial star destroyer, that now floats around as a luxury hotel/casino
I've been starting to write sci-fi and want to do it for a living and I really just wanna say how much of an invaluable resource channels like this one have been for the realism and thought put into what I write. Thank you so much for helping me with how I think about space fiction and sci-fi as a whole.
If you are not already watching Isaac Arthur, I can greatly recommend.
Hm I would advise the closer to civilization or the closer you get to a more populated or policed area the less power full weapons you see and more capacity type ships.
Less need for big guns when you travel between two worlds within a core sector am I right.
But the further out the more armed the ships become or the faster they become.
Time dilation is what confuses me most of the time. Same goes to relativistic stuff and things with mathematics. It seems that hard require more research and practice than soft. Is sci fi always this difficult?
The additional advantage of a person like "black beard" is the experience they and their crews gain from all the ship jacking. If they had to jack dozens of smaller craft, man them, repair, refit and then use them to capture bigger ships, They gain tons of knowledge, skill and tactical advantage over military commanders that are almost always use to having the advantage in battle.
I find adversity is a far better teacher than academies, governments and abundance. A lot of "Black Beard" like people will fail but a few will not...
Well most pirates from the age of piracy were former privateers who had benefited from the help of governments and abundance (though not necessarily academies since alot of the British navy were kidnapped poor folks from the lower classes) they just kept on at it once the wars ended because it was a very liberated life style and very lucrative.
A crew that has manned a hundred ship once in battles is far, far less dangerous than the crew who has manned one ship in a hundred battles. The latter crew will know every advantage, flaw, and quirk of their ship, and be able to use it to perfection. The former will likely not even know how to operate their ship at all.
@@jamesharding3459 A crew that has at least some understanding of a hundred ships is far more effective than a crew that only knows their current ship's workings. Sure, knowing your own vehicle's quirks can help you maximize it's efficiency, but getting a ship to perform 5-10% better means fuckall compared to knowing the general weakspots of a hundred different ships; The latter meaning that you can be 5-6 times more efficient, because you know where to focus your fire.
I get what you were going for there, but it simply does not translate to vehicle combat of any scale.
@@OzixiThrill Hahaha no. Try "infinitely more effective." You could take crews from vehicles as simple, and similar as a pair of battle tanks, and they wouldn't even be able to start the engine without a lot of futzing about first. Forget trying to operate the electro-optics or fire control system.
Do you know how long it takes a tankist or sailor to do the simplest jobs and observe their seniors to learn on the job? Months, often over a year. And that's a _training_ environment. Not some randos trying to figure it out as they go.
@@jamesharding3459
"similar as a pair of battle tanks"
Funny you mention tanks, as that was the exact thing that made me adamant about my case.
WW2, Tiger against Sherman tanks. Until the British figured out (by luck) what the weakspots of a Tiger tank were, their way of handling a Tiger was sending in 8 Shermans at full speed so 1 would make it far enough to penetrate.
After they figured out what made Tigers so powerful, doctrines changed and even the direst tactics have doubled in effectiveness.
"and they wouldn't even be able to start the engine without a lot of futzing about first. Forget trying to operate the electro-optics or fire control system."
You're talking about completely random people pulled off of the street here.
There are only so many ways you can design a vehicle that makes sense and is intuitive enough for mainline military use. Make a crew drive 100 different tanks and then give them a brand new one, and what you'll see is that they are decently effective with most of it's systems within the hour.
Also, you seem to be assuming that warfare and piracy is somehow an eternal landscape of exchanging fire; Do you genuinely think that a captured vehicle would immediately be thrown into battle the moment the crew are in their seats? There are so many ways that doesn't make sense that the only way I can see you genuinely making this case is if you're arguing in bad faith, trying to find whatever retarded angle you can to try and weasel out a "win", instead of looking at what would be rational.
"Do you know how long it takes a tankist or sailor to do the simplest jobs and observe their seniors to learn on the job? Months, often over a year"
Now take someone who has learned across 99 other ships or tanks and see how quickly they pick up on their job - Which is likely the same position they were in on the other 99 ships.
I stress, there are only so many ways you can design systems without deliberately making them difficult to learn and utilize.
"And that's a training environment. Not some randos trying to figure it out as they go."
Except they aren't randos. They are people who have been through the steps of learning several other ships to functional levels before.
Two reasons why this assumption is valid:
-There is enough time to learn the basics between engagements while on a new ships (unless you somehow believe that all combat-ready vehicles are 24/7 in combat for some reason)
-If they didn't learn to utilize their ship to functional levels, they died in the engagement.
As for why they do become more efficient, that is due to getting the basic grasp of the armor and system layout of those 100 ships.
I feel like there's one very important thing that I haven't seen mentioned. In stories like Star Wars/Trek, and other Sci-fi, Humanity is not alone. There are plenty of other species with high tech weaponry, that are not always under the authority of something like the Federation. If at any moment a ship from a previously unheard of species could suddenly appear and attack nearby ships as they pleased, I'd want to be able to defend myself as well. Hell that was basically the plot of like 50% of Enterprise!
and sometimes they are not friendly
@@Razor-gx2dq Exactly.
In any given Sci-Fi, or even real life, even if it SEEMED like humanity was alone, that "fact" could change at any moment. The universe is very big.
no species with the technology to wage interstellar war is going to send ships to fight. costs way too much.
ya just grab, and throw a few big rocks at them as fast as you can. paint/cover the rocks with radar absorbing and deflecting material and you got cheap, stealthy, and effective planetary kill weapons for minuscule costs.
Hell even designing small thrusters and fuel system and attaching to a meteor swarm so you have drone-esque rocks would be cheaper.
@@c.alucard6352 This has one issue.
What if you want the planets intact?
Hitting a hostile species' planet looks effective, until you wage colonial warfare and want to colonise the place yourself. Then, you need to get your planetside weapons there (Be they soldiers, nanobots, poison, whatever...), and the people you are attacking are going to try to stop you.
In America, our government used to encourage private sailing trade ships to arm themselves with cannons. This just always seemed like a logical extension of that to me.
In a universe that has FTL and space faring civilizations, I would imagine that the legality of having weaponry on your transport vessels would be akin to the wild west, where most frontier's men were armed. Help is several hours or days away and not everyone has your interest. Also if you know how to pilot and fix your own starship, chances are you know enough science and engineering to create your very own weapons systems. Missiles and probes work pretty similarly in most sci fi properties. Current technologies are pretty much the same where ICBMs work just like Rockets to the Moon.
Yep. And in our own world, we would need lasers to deal with space debris, and that's a weapon. Let alone the ship itself. People forget that cars are far more destructive in malevolent hands than any gun. The Terrorist attack in Nice killed 70 people with a moving truck.
I think the entire history of sea travel up until the end of WWII might be a better metaphor.
@@shorewall laser for space debris is kind of a bad excuse. Due to the nature of space you do NOT want to blast things. all you get is basically tiny shrapnel.
space for guns would be better served for engine mods to actually avoid obstacles rather than plow through them.
@@HellecticMojo my fellow I think you are under a misunderstanding. The laser would not be there to blast a hole through things.
Rather it would used to evaporate the many microscopic pieces of debris that naturally form in space. That is capable of easily punching at minimum a golf ball sized hole through many inches of aluminum.
@@redstar248 at that point, I would just call it a shield rather than a weapon.
Living enemies aside - the main reason for weapons in space is to take out meteors or asteroids, that you are probably travelling too fast to avoid hitting otherwise. That said, most of these weapons would likely be automated, since no human could react in time to target and shoot out a meteor when your or it is traveling up to half the speed of light at that particular moment. Then there is the idea of life in space, even in more optimistic scenarios such as star trek, misunderstandings and cultural differences mean it is better to be armed than not.
You dont want to be the unarmed faction in a misunderstanding with an armed one.
Better to be a Warrior in a Garden than a Gardener in a War
There's force field or power shield around the ships for meteorites no gun needed
Sid Meier's Pirates is the perfect game to visualize exactly what you were talking about with the age of sail, you get a ship through mutiny and then work your way up until you can have galleons and ships of the line
I like how you mention table top sessions at the end - because I'm running a homebrew where I've stated the crew explicitly does not have access to ship-mounted weaponry, which quickly becomes a major plot point requiring the crew employ stealth in order to navigate their ship.
The Kzinti Lesson: the more efficient a reaction drive is, the better a weapon it makes.
Let's say your privately-owned spaceship has a fusion engine - turn it around and you have plasma torch emitting a constant stream of high-powered particles. Make strafing runs close to enemy ships and turn them into molten heaps of slag.
A communication laser for long-distance comms will also have more than enough power to do major damage to another spacecraft.
There actually is no such thing as an unarmed spaceship, so you can just as well put some dedicated weapons systems on it.
Makes me think of the first Man-Kzin wars where humanity had no weapons so they used mining lasers to fight off the Kzin
The inertialess drive apparently couldn’t be used as a weapon as any ship ‘colliding’ with another would just snuggle up, since the drive works on the moving object having no inertia and thus no momentum to impart on other objects (or itself).
Unless I missed something in some later lensman books.
@@andrewz6986 it was an oversized disintegrator ray, which worked by suppressing the electric charge of atoms, causing molecules to fly apart. Humans used this against a Kzinti outpost on the planet Warhead, digging a 12 mile deep canyon, a bit larger than Florida. The weaponized version of that mining tool was even nastier due to it also creating an electric current.
The previously non-inhabitable planet was then renamed to Canyon because the planet's thin atmosphere gathered in that hole in the crust and reached a breathable pressure level, so it was colonised by humans and kzinti after they made peace.
@@russellharrell2747 The Kzinti lesson explicitly refers to reaction drives, so inertialess propulsion systems are excempted.
Personally, I think that scifi settings with gateway transportation networks use the best way to deal with the problem of weaponized propulsion. Like the hyperspace gates in Babylon 5, the astral gates from Cowboy Bebop or the jumpgates from the X video game series.
The thought that the Kzinti lesson was "The reason mankind no longer practiced warfare was because they were already so very good at it." ;) sm
"Did you ever wonder about the legality of Han Solo having laser cannons on his starship?"
No... Because his entire job involves breaking the law in some way.
Without actually watching your video the answer to this question is simple.
-Bad people will always find ways to do bad things.
Space Pirates/bounty hunters/assassins are known rampant issues.
Giving Civilians space travel knowing the dangers that exist and not giving them a way to defend themselves is basically you profiting from handing civilians to pirates.
no, because I read the books, and knew he was always getting hassled for his level of armament and his thrust/mass ratio.
"If weapons are outlawed then only outlaws will have weapons."
@@pwnmeisterage and if inlaws are outlawed, only outlaws will have inlaws.
@@kenbrown2808 Very droll. The slogan I quoted has often been embraced by gun-advocates and lobby organizations like the NRA. They conveniently neglect to mention that it works both ways.
@@pwnmeisterage they also conveniently forget to mention that it's how gun free zones are SUPPOSED to work. - because then anyone with a gun is a valid target for the professional good guys with guns.
When talking about the response times being a factor, I think its funny how in Warhammer 40k lore, there's several instances of mankind dispatching fleets that take hundreds of years to reach their destination, so it's like if you attack a world and loot it, the Imperium shows up 400 years later and kills your distant ancestors? Its crazy to think about.
i know you meant to say descendants, but considering warp fuckery the dispatched Inperium force could easily end up in the past or something
Very good points, another thing to think about is that a galaxy like StarWars has so many wars over so long a period with so many sub factions, there is undoubtedly a large amount of surplus arms/ships that have been salvaged and, as well as directly sold to private buyers.
I mean, Thomas Jefferson told sailors when asked if the right to bear arms meant they could buy cannons for their ships. And he wrote back yea and even bought one sailor who did write him a cannon
His reaction be like:
"Why do you even ask? Second amendment dude"
“I don’t keep it loaded, you’ll have to find ammo as you go.”
3:10 those weapons are only allowed on a star destroyer sized ship tho. So it would be more equivalent to being allowed naval artillery on an oil tanker.
that did happen in WW2 up to 40mm Cannons WERE placed on tankers, maned by a naval gun crew.
@@Delgen1951 40mm is nothing when it comes to naval firepower,even subs had bigger deck guns,40mm was medium anti air calliber
They actually got alot bigger than 40mm, 'standard' armament if an armed merchant cruiser (as they were called) was six 6inch(150mm) and three 3 inch (76mm) guns. For reference the average light cruiser had 5 120mm and 4 76mm guns at this time. Hence why the armed merchant ships were classified as merchant cruisers.
"How can civies have weapons on their ships?"
Shows Inaros a terrorist that got military ships from the military junta.
Ghost - a ship that is actively participating in armed rebellion with hidden bases full of engineers capable of fitting guns on a ship.
Like, I get the point of the video but those two are terrible examples :D
Indeed.
I mean, those examples make the point that even when normal societal structure would preclude the existence of armed civilian vessels, there likely will arise specific exceptions due to political or social instability that might at least temporarily allow for such cases.
I was thinking exactly the same thing.
The entire human-centric spacefaring civilization is itself a poor example. Especially when it's essentially just an extrapolation of Wild West (American) and Age of Sail (British/colonial) civilizations.
If China were to colonize the stars first, civilian ships might only be armed with deception and kung-fu.
If Klingons were to colonize the stars before humans, the whole notion of "unarmed ships" wouldn't exist.
If Romulans were to colonize the stars before humans, the whole notion of "civilians" wouldn't exist.
@@pwnmeisterage Yes, different human societies have different concepts of acceptable risk, societal freedoms and so on. Alien civilizations would potentially have an even wider range of possible approaches.
That being said, interplanetary ships using known physics would pretty much always be the equivalent of flying fusion bombs (or worse), and its hard to propose a realistic society that would take that proposition lightly - at least, not for long...
The truth is the level of engineering skill required to maintain a si-fi space ship would automatically qualify you to build everything up to and including a railgun, possibly more depending on the specifics of the universe. Resources and policing in civilized areas would be your only issue.
"How can civilians own weapons and armed space ships?"
Laughs in Texan at the small number and sizes of the weapons, hoping that there were more.
i would imagine there'd be plenty of "scavenger" type ships and their crews that would keep sensors, eyes and ears on for everytime there was a space battle of any sort....then swoop in weeks later and gather up all kinds of goodies
This is the concept of lego star wars: the freemakers. Good series btw
Reminds me of an episode of Andromeda, where the crew encounter a time displaced ship from before the Commonwealth was founded. The ship was mostly engine, but it introduced itself by obliterating a bunch of pirates by pointing the business end of the drive at them an blasting them with it. The Andromeda's AI even said it had firepower on par with their futuristic warship, because engine was also a gun.
I remember that episode (Not a lot of Andromeda I can say that about). If I recall correctly the crew of that ship and their stated mission was a thinly veiled Star Trek pastiche. I think the captain even tried to seduce Andromeda's android avatar.
@@DanceMonkeychg and he did. Tbh, it was a waste to just forget about that ship. Pre-FTL colony ships are real monsters in their own right. It's a ship that is supposed to function for tens of thousands of years, be able to terraform any planet it finds, be able to construct it's own copy, be able to build massive intersolar infrastructure for new colony, must support tens of thousands of active crew(be it generational or immortal or both), carry several millions more in cryosleep, DNA database of billions of individuals and millions species, have such a massive engine and powerplant that allow it to constantly burn, be sturdy enough to survive near FTL collisions, armed with enough kinetic and particle weaponry to neutralize any target approaching it and have laser communication system powerful and precise enough to cross significant portions of the galaxy without losing contact with other ships and colonies. For a small faction struggling to find resources and trained personnel, such a ship would be a massive boon if it could be persuaded to join them in exchange for FTL and help finishing their mission.
it's almost like any readily available item can be converted into a weapon if one is dedicated, desperate, or resourceful enough and pretending otherwise is asinine and just security theatre to make people feel safe even if the reality is they aren't and their continued feeling of safety will ensure that they stay that way through complacency.
Which is complete nonsense if you even take a second to think about it. You would have to get close to the other ship and then maneuver so your thruster is hitting them and they have to kinda let it happen and not fire at you from range. Do you just listen and believe stupid ideas all the time because they sound good or because they are the first thing you heard?
@@thomgizziz Read the comment again, fail, and then get an adult to read it for you.
Most of the hero ships we see in SW are in the hands of smugglers or rebels. The CEC ships were always described as very customizable. Using the WEG RPGs info, the YT-1300 came with a single dual laser IIRC. Han had 2 quad lasers on the Falcon (and I think some missiles that never got used in the movies). The Ghost, in the hands of rebels, is super decked out to be able to effectively fight the empire as their small cell. From the RPG, the YT-2400 (another CEC ship) is described as having an oversized power core to allow easy modification/addition. It also came with really strong shields and a heavy gun. The 2400 was one of the better 'stock' ships you could get, if you could convince your GM to give you one :)
Would love to see a 2400 appear on-screen somewhere. Since Fav'loni are pulling stuff from the entire expanded universe, perhaps we see the Outrider at some point.
What about just building the weapons. You can built a basic gun today with some relatively simple machine tools. If a civilization is able to set up a colony on other planet they would need to build stuff from scratch and mined resources. That stuff can just as easy be guns and ammo.
When you think about it, that's a very likely story. It takes a lot of technology to make an interstellar colony. So even the creation of weapons slightly more advanced than current military weapons shouldn't be too hard for high tech colonist.
@@marrqi7wini54 Yeah as long as you have the power cells or whatever is required to make blasters work, I can't imagine that constructing the machinery would be any more difficult than any other sort of engineering.
@@SRosenberg203
And that's in a star wars like setting. Current sci-fi has moved towards magnetic slug weapons. Which we can make now/in development.
TBH having those few weapons on a "star destroyer" is like having 10 9mm pistols as your only def on a modern air craft carrier (without any air craft).
Indeed
Actually, its more like having an 18 inch gun on a container ship and complaining that you only have 1. The number of weapons is not a problem, you don't want to fight star destroyers with your giant freigher, you want to deal with pirates, and it doesn't matter that you can level a city with your guns if you can't hit the enemy ships. Replace most of those heavy turbos and heavy ions with laser cannons!
Love the Drake Interplanetary reference
Drake: designs the Cutlass Black as a troop transport with a cargo bay and tractor beam
Also Drake: nooo, it's totally not for pirates bro, trust me
"I don't give a shit where we are, I'm using the 2nd ammendment even in space!"
It also depends on the size and scale of the military. Pirates taking a modern military frigate is a far bigger deal proportionately speaking than losing a sloop in the age of sail.
I also suspect the "entry level" weaponry is more likely to be obtained by corruption rather than force - a la the kind of thing we see in Bobby's storyline in The Expanse. Again, a military on a larger scale is more likely to have more significant assets "Fall off of the back of a truck"
god remember that video where a dude just finds 4 bradleys on the middle of a freaking railroad just waiting to get taken?
I remember reading about a US wargames scenario where the side representing Iran used small water craft loaded with explosives to take down advanced US warships.
Look at Vietnam and Afghanistan. Great powers don't always use full power on small fry, and that can allow the small fry to win out.
In a setting without force fields, does every long term space ship an automatic defense system against asteroids and micro asteroids .
Such a defense system can easily be weaponized.
Exactly.
blasting rocks is a terrible idea. shrapnel has no friction to limit it in space. Unless you hit it with exact force and angle to not break it but simultaneously slow it or reverse like a billiard ball, you are just widening the area of damage.
Best anti environmental hazard designs are simply better maneuverability and detection system, not proactive demolition
"Big fleets are conspicuous and not what you want when you're a criminal."
*laughs in Zheng Yi Sao*
Ah yes the woman with four fleets.
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised at all if we started seeing the rise of Pirate Empires again, only in SPACE!
At that point, you've made the jump from criminal to warlord
I mean, yes, a Star Destroyer sized starship gets alot of heavy weaponry, but we're also talking about a ship that's 1.2km long. If civilians were allowed to own military size aircraft carriers, they too would probably be allowed to carry several artillery cannons. If we were to scale it down to soemthing like a cargo vessel (such as the Ghost or Millenium Falcon) it'd be the equivalent of carrying a heavy machine gun on top of your pick-up truck.
Given the shape of a star destroyer, each weapon has a limited firing arc. Given left, right, top, and bottom, divide the count by 4, and that is not much at all given its size.
There are artillery cannons on oil tankers? I didn't know.
@@Imaboss8ball It used to be common for merchant ship to carry at least one cannon for deterrence... as late as *WWII* to scare away submarines and aircraft. NOT warships.
Modern world doesn't need that. The ocean is too monitored, too open, no room for big pirates because they get noticed by satellites. This kind of situation would not allow big-ass boat of destruction in civilian hands.
Fun thing on the privately owned Star Destroyer part, the New Republic never expected that such a thing would occur. The Errant Venture remains the only privately owned Star Destroyer to this day, canon or Legends.
And it proved to be so expensive to maintain that keeping the 'legal armament' proved to be impossible for a civilian anyway.
To be fair, most planets will have heavy shielding in Star Wars, so, you know, your 10 turbo lasers are probably not going to do much.
Planets have a far larger capacity for war than small warships.
Space is the ultimate high ground though, and getting something up from a gravity well has significantly more cost than to get something down.
@@rescuejake Except the thing that's up there didn't come here naturally. In a universe where spaceships are a normal sight, planets must have lots of orbital infrastructures and means to get things from the ground up, and will have as a result a lot of their economy (and defences) up there.
If a planet has the capacity to build orbital shipyards churning out armed spaceships and stations of various kinds, it has the capacity to deploy a defence fleet and an orbital defence network.
The whole idea that coming to a planet from space would be an advantage is null and void specifically because the ability to come from space requires planets' ability to get just about anything to space in the first place.
@@rescuejake Moreover, a planet can afford much more 'cost' than a ship. A ship has to bring everything it needs with it. A planet... well, a planet does that already. You can make a defense silo buried under ten meters of concrete, launching missiles with a booster three times their size. You have the room. You have the heat capacity. You have the generator capacity.
(Also, this isn't true for lasers - it is equally disadvantageous firing into or out of an atmosphere, and lasers mounted on an airless planet are identical to those on a ship... except bigger because there's more space to put stuff. Lasers, however, have a maximum effective range)
Also, to expand on Luc of Paris, as you get more and more powerful Skiffytech, this problem becomes worse. If the power of engines is sufficient that you can trivially achieve megameters of delta-V, then... a planet can still hold thousands of such rockets for every one a ship brings.
The main disadvantage of planets is that they're hard to move (and only the Skiffiest of techbases can circumvent that), but still, the level of defensive power they can bring to bear is so high compared to shipborne attackers. Trying to plink a planet this way is likely to result in you running out of ammo and supplies first.
Honestly... at that point it's essentially a siege, except the defender has a planet's worth of supplies in their castle.
@@basedeltazero714, it’s not quite true that it’s “equally disadvantageous firing into or out of an atmosphere”. Fixing out of an atmosphere, the atmospheric diffusion & refraction happen right at the source, leading to a larger overall deviation in absolute terms, even if the effect is the same in terms of angle.
Also, considering space weapons, even if there is instant travel times and instant communication, the minute or less of time it would take the authorities to just, respond, is the difference between life and death. I think most space battles would occur in the seconds at most
Not all that different than typical law abiding self defense situation.
@@zidniafifamani2378 yep, when someone breaks down your door, cops are 10 mins away. which is why I personally have firearms to defend myself with as I can get to that in a few seconds and then wait for the cops to come clean up the scene whatever happens.
Probably not even seconds. I can imagine a targeting computer locking on to a ship's heat signature/warp field ripple/whatever from the next star system over, then practically erasing it with a railgun slug the size of a bus before it gets the chance to react.
I remember in one sci fi novel I read the viewpoint character questioned why the ship she was on, a civilian merchant..had nuclear missiles.
The guide matter of factly said that the blueprints for atomic weapons were public domain and there was any number of asteroid colonies and frontier mining settlements that would sell you uranium if you wanted to buy it.
Sounds awesome, what was it?
Yes, especially if you assume any civilisation capable of building and operating faster than light spaceships almost certainly has pretty widespread access to 3D printers/replicators etc capable of making something as (relatively) simple as basics missiles & guns etc.
This is the key I think. Any kind of deep space craft is going to need some kind of manufacturing capability (most likely an advanced form or 3D printing), if only for spare parts.
if you have the know how an the means you can build any thing if you want you can build a damn tank if you have the money for the right materials you could make one that can out classes an Abrams or Challenger.
@@ColinGrealy modern ships all have machine shops, give me the machines and raw materials and I'll have a working gun in a day, 3 if you want a perty walnut stock
I've always felt that having slower than light communication in a setting is a huge factor in making it more of a wild frontier.
If you can't just call another solar system or planet for help, if you actually have to travel there to talk to them, then you are far more likely to find scenarios where you have to fight your own battles.
“The right to bear giant space laser guns on your cargo ship shall not be infringed”
-James Madison, probably
In a Spacemaster SFRPG campaign, there was a running gag about a heavily armed ship owned by a player character, imagining questions asked by officialdom.
"Now this ship, the "Havoc" - it's heavily armed. Explain why it mounts two Mark 50 lasers."
"Oh, that's simple. They're used for terraforming. Drilling holes in the planet's crust so that high-explosive torpedoes can be fired into those holes to ease seismic pressures."
"And that's your explanation for the four Mark 30 torpedo launchers?"
"Yes."
"Hmm! Moving on... the four Mark 30 disruptors..."
"Also for terraforming. They're used to shatter rock strata that the lasers have difficulty penetrating."
"Hmm! And the ten Mark 10 laser cannon?"
"Isn't that obvious?"
"Sorry?"
"Self-defence. There are pirates out there, you know!"
It's likely in universes with civilians armed with city destroying weapons, the planets likely have strong defences to compensate whether it be energy shields, railgun/missile satellites, or fleets and stations in orbit. One thing i think Star Trek and Wars is kinda lacking on is how populated the space around major planets would be with stations and drydocks. Less so with Star Trek but there are still instances were the skies around a central planet of a major space fairing government seem quite empty.
Why I stopped watching Discovery. Somewhere around the 4th episode the klingons lay siege to the most important dilithium mining planet the Federation has with 3 ships. The federation would have a large fleet and massive defenses around the most important planets they have.
It's due to the budgets, that many models and or CGI will be way too expensive. Contrast this to animation of space (anything from Futurama to Cowboy bebop to Macross) space around planets (or a fleet of ships) is way more cluttered cause the cost to animate it is far less
It's ridiculous, really. How many times has the Enterprise be "the nearest Star Fleet ship to help" - in the very heart of the federation which should be swarming with ships?
To be fair, I don't think you'd necessarily be able to see San Francisco Fleet Yards or Earth Spacedock from the ground with the naked eye. Maybe a few little specks if you know where to look.
Taking Earth as an example, Star Trek Star Charts claims it has a population of ~4.2 billion, c. 2380 (i.e. post-Nemesis, set in late 2379). Most of that population primarily commutes by transporter, with the rest of the trip generally being on foot. Ignoring Kurtzman's shows, the reason the skies weren't dense with shuttles is simply because most people didn't need one to get around, and the ones who did more likely did so out of preference or leisure.
Regardless, Fed starships might be huge, but relatively speaking they're not gonna look that big in orbit.
@@BlueSatoshi You can see the ISS from the ground.
For Star Wars, remember that a lot of the Hero Ships get extra guns slapped onto them because there's a war on. But yes, even normal ships gets guns, simply because there's so far from anything they need some sort of protection.
I’d like to liken it to the golden age of piracy on earth, where perfectly normal business men sailed fully armed ships. And then you point out that many of the more normal weapon systems in sci fi are capable of annihilating entire planets.
Any normal drive system is capable of annihilating entire planets, even without faster than light travel.
USS Ford is a 90,000 ton aircraft carrier. Traveling at 27km a second (the calculator suggests 51km/s for comets, for perspective) would create a create a final crater of 479km(298miles) and 1.9km(1.18 miles) Deep.
If you are accelerating between planets in years rather than decades you start looking at holes in planets.
Yes; and also during that same age some of those businessmen found more profit privateering for a government than shipping cargoes. And some of those privateers crossed the line into piracy, eventually.
@@Aelric78 literally was a plantation owner that just said "fuck them kids", built a boat and abandoned his bitch wife.
@@Aelric78 keyword: some
Good people is good people, don’t matter how much power you give a good man if he’s truly a good man
@@OspreyKnight And to ship something from East Asian ( Japan/ Hong Kong) across the Pacific to USA West Coast take close to two weeks by water. Most of Earth's international global shipping economy is base on a two to four week time frame. So cost time table to send something from Mars or Jupiter to Earth has to be within a three week time period. Which is a lot faster than 27km/sec.
Humans can't even ship oil across oceans without a spill, so who wants to trust Earth's faith to a computer .. glitch ?
I think a huge thing to consider would also be means of communication - back in the age of sail a merchant didn't have the means to contact a navy ship outside of it's line of sight, so they had to defend themselves. Nowadays a cargo ship under attack can contact war ships via radio and get air support through helicopters
And yet somehow piracy still happens.
really depends if they have FTL communication or not, it could still take hours for your radio signal to reach the nearest navy patrol and by then you are well and truly dead
Because civilians have armed ocean ships in real life in the past
Some still do. The guy who lives across from my parents had a large fishing boat with a mount for a harpoon gun (no idea why). But he also had made an attachment so he could rig his rifles to it if he wanted - everything from a bog-standard AR15 to a Barrett 82 he had.
@@bobojo37 exactly
My grand fathers boat had a "deep sea fishing pole,holding mount" that happens to be compatible with a mount for his old m60 machine gun he's finally gotten the stamps to own.
@Ross Outdoors you can often make a solid guess on what culture someone hails from just by their attitude about such things. It's sad how many people are indoctrinated into thinking that they have privileges instead of rights.
Considering that the nearest space police could be tens of light years away then perhaps it's good that your cargo ship is bristling with guns. In the space game, Freelancer, a whole squadron of pirates would be waiting outside the space station or ready to disable a trade lane the moment I bought a shipment of expensive cargo to sell.
In Elite Dangerous I farm bounties by using my heavily armed Asp Explorer as an armed freighter.
That said, stations are usually well patrolled, and response time is fast. Pirates mostly stick to resource extraction sites, or beacons, or interdict you in a shipping lane.
Whenever I get interdicted, I submit and blow them up, (or high wake out of there, because holy shit, that's a Fer de Lance) which handily increases my profit from my trade runs.
In my scifi universe civilian ships have light weapons (anti fighter turrets) and a few missile launchers for destroying debris that is in the way and general defense from small pirate groups.
But really space is so huge that even with FTL it's impossible to fully police it and anyone with the resources, knowledge and technology can build their own battleship or modify large luxury or colony ships into battleships (in my universe you only really need the resources, a facility to build or modify the ship and an AI and you have a pirate ship). But also in my universe military and exploration ships have huge guns built into them that can one shot any civilian ship with ease (and some can even destroy planets), so civilian armed ships aren't that big an issue (as the larger ships have the energy for bigger guns and better shields and thicker armour plating).
The biggest problem is the two separate FTL systems that can both destroy ships and one could potentially destroy a planet.
"Civilian ships may only possess weapons with an output of x"
"But the average pirates shields have a capscity of x^15"
"Sucks for you!"
I always took it to be an extension on the USA's 2nd amendment, taken into a place where the need to protect yourself against pirates etc is a very real one.
Especially given that much of currently-mainstream western scifi comes from the US.
SHALL. NOT. BE. INFRINGED!
@@InsolentCrow TALLY HO, LAD!
When you're far away from the Solar System and sending one carrier battle group there is costing taxpayers. So you got to defend yourself. Bring along some printers and blueprints to make toolings to make firearms, missiles, torpedoes and ships. In the future, polymers will be way stronger than steel and CNTs would be much improved along with nano crystal steel. Carbon fibers will be easier to manufacture. Ship blueprints can be purchased online. It'll be similar to a cottage industry but with a bigger scale.
This was my interpretation too. Yes, I agree with the video that the vast "badlands" of space making law enforcement difficult and piracy fair game is a good justification. But this is sci-fi, space is only slow to traverse if you want it to be in your setting. So I actually think the reason in current media is more meta, it is simply because most sci-fi media is either from the US or is based quite heavy-handedly on US Wild West archetypes and values which is why there's weapons everywhere. You'll notice that, for example, British sci-fi like Doctor Who has far far less emphasis on heavily armed spacecraft. Indeed I'm not sure I've ever seen ships duking it out on that show, because it's not the focus of it. Whereas other sci-fi authors are looking for that space combat excitement in their works
I also feel like you should add the very management and use of the weapons being something to think about.
You can get a ship but chances are that ship isn't ready to have a gun put on it. Take the behemoth. One hell of a warship. Lots of PDC turrets, rail guns, and torpedo launchers... but the power isn't very good and you have to load the torpedoes from outside the ship. Launching a torpedo took out the lights.
Turbo laser batteries take a lot of power. Just because you can get your hands on a turbo laser it doesn't mean your ship can use it without some other upgrades. Maybe i can get a naval cannon for my car but i don't have the space for those shells, or the structure to handle that gun, or even the power to drive WITH that gun on top. I'm going to have to upgrade quite a bit.
And now that i can use my naval cannon equipped car. I'm going to have to maintain both. Parts for the car i can easily get, but that naval gun is going to be a bit of a challenge. Not only will i have to find a source of shells to shoot out of that cannon, but i'm going to have to find spare parts for the gun. What happens if a bolt in the loader breaks off? I can probably find a new bolt. What if the loader frame breaks? Where am i supposed to source that?
And not only that, but the hull size and density is incredibly important as it not only limits how many guns you can carry, but on how fragile you will be when you fill the hangar with generators just to fire up 3 more shots from the fancy quad-cannon.
Not to mention the average 12 inch shell weighed anywhere between 600-800 pounds
To bring in another universe, they mentioned the Errant Venture, a star destroyer owned by Booster Terrick in Star Wars. It started off with 10 turbo lasers, 8 Ion cannons and and 3 tractor beams. By a few books later, only 3 of the turbolasers worked, with the rest being used for parts to keep the 3 working, and only one tractor beam worked. I can't recall if any of the ion cannons still worked. Outside of a military setting, Booster couldn't afford to keep the weapons or the ship fully maintained or crewed.
@@murphsmodels8853 Before the Vong War broke out, Booster had to park the Errant Venture at the cross roads of multiple space lanes just to maintain business and to save fuel for when he .. really .. needs to make a jump to some where, if the ship will start up to make the jump, maybe .. ?
In one of the X-wing: Rogue Squadron novels, the Rogues were making a hit & run bait attack on an ISD to draw away that has been in orbit over a world for the past few weeks. Before the Rogues could make their attack run, the ISD captain asked the Rogues their terms for joining the New Republic.
Rogue One, " Wait you want to join the New Republic ?"
Imperial captain, " My last and current assignment is to protect this worlds industry out put and trade, and doing so is the choice of this star sector's governor."
Rogue One, " I take it you no longer have a near by repair space dock and you are running to low on fuel to waste on needless engagements ?"
Imperial captain, " That is correct. Would you happen to have a spare backup hyper drive please ?"
Rogue One, " My X-wing is a bit too small to carry one, but I will send aid to your ship and someone to talk to your governor, can't say when they show up."
Imperial captain, " The best I can do is wait and read over daily reports. Good luck on your mission."
( It went something like that. Fun part is in the third books of the series I think, that captain did show up with two other Republic ships to give over whelming aid.)
@@krispalermo8133 Which book was that? I thought I had them pretty well memorized. Sounds like it's time for another reread. If only Audible had full versions
another thing to consider is "ports of call". In the age of sail and most sci fi settings, you don't have a network of satilites or even timely naval patrols checking every island [asteroid], port [planetary body big enough to land on], or town [an actual space port, maybe with dock and refit facilities] unless they are under direct military control. In the modern world we have networks of sats and recon aircraft patroling passively and actively that space is just way too vast for.
So you get an enterprising ship engineer setting up a shadow port to make quasi legal to illegal modifications to ships if the price is right. Especially in settings where not every port may be friendly to the jack booted thugs of the local, system, or galactic government.
"Nah we haven't seen any heavily armed ships around here", says the dockmaster as a suspiciously over engined, or hard to scan vessel sneaks out behind the authorities....with a few more hatches than it needs for moving crew and cargo on it....
Problem is the supposes a world in which radar and sensors have ceased to exist, we can SEE huge amounts of space already, and our ability to do so will increese in the future. It really takes some kind of FTL speeds to break that such that you can evade discovery by going to another star system which no one is monitoring.
@@kennethferland5579 its not a lack of being able to see whats going on. Its not being able to get there in time to do anything about it. The Expanse is a good example. Even a distance as short a 1 AU is about 7 light minutes, meaning the light from the pirate attack you are witnessing through your neat ling range sensors, or that radio destress beacon that your receiver just picked up is 8 minutes old...and even if you could get there at the speed of light, it would take 8 minutes. 16 minutes just to get a response.
Now stretch that out across a system. At nearest approach Mars has a 14 minute lightspeed delay. Jupiter is 35 light minutes, one way
By the time you know a ship has been attacked, the information is half an hour old and the battle is probably already over
One super big factor that everyone seems to ignore in SF is logistics. Specifically fuel, ammunition and provisions. There is a reason ports are in military or government control in real life and that's because ports are quintessential for logistics and if you keep track of logistics you basically stamp out piracy. But in SF everyone gives a half ass reason for no need for fuel, ammunition or provisions or blatantly trivializing this important aspect of life and piracy seems easily attainable.
In Expanse (at least in the books) they make a big deal out of logistics and the need to have the ship as a "legitimate salvage" as they won't be able to dock at any "legitimate" port ever.
Pirates in the age of sail were actively supported by different governments, because that was a way to wage economic war without involving the navy. Support that came in the form of free harbor, men, food etc. Remember, real world piracy didn't target warships, but merchants (with few exceptions).