Stategic Thrust - Pirates, mercs, and Letters of Marque

In a message dated 97-09-03 21:28:15 EDT, you write:

<< > In other words, if a spin-off group doesn't have any starships or
the
> means to manufacture and/or maintain starships, then what relevance

Little relevance to FT, esp. brand new colonies. But older or rebel splinters
could have ships, good for small fleet actions. And just getting
 to a colony could be an FT senario itself -- say one splinter group,
 already established, attacking the colonial fleet/ship of a rival group
to
 continue hatreds/disputes from Earth. Eg. one Balkan (Yugoslavian)
group vs another, in old little ships, in some asteroid belt somewhere...

 And  SG/DS ideas are natural, and even easier, esp. SG.
> [quoted text omitted]

My thought is that a look at the naval situation in the 18th and 19th
Centuries where letters of marque were issued by all sorts of powers ( even
some land locked ones I'm told!!) One doesn't have to be a pirate, one could
cover onesself with the figleaf of legality by obtaining a letter of marque
from some splinter colony with more grudge than brains (besides, a letter of
marque generally involves giving a percent of the loot to the issuer of the
letter!!!) Next posit a mercenary company who solicits letters to keep itself
in business. I could see a light cruiser, several destroyers, and merchantmen
coverted to carriers in their fleets. This might not appeal to the big gun
boys ( my superduper dreadnaught can beat your regular super dreadnaught!!)
but I can see a lot of cutting out actions using SGII on spacestations and
ground actions. Squadron level fleet actions & convoy actions with
Q-ships in
FTII.

Let's see "John Teach, Inc." or "Blackbeard, Ltd." with the ship designation
LM (Letter of Marque.) Do you think the head of the company would call himself
Admiral Naismith, or would that be too much of a steal? Oh yeah, that causes
me to think of another reason for the merc companies, plausible deniablity!
This is how the merc companies gain access to ship class weapons, but I would
suspect there is a real size limit to the weapons sold by the major powers (no
capital vessel weapons!) On ground actions I suspect that a merc co. would be
no larger than a reinforced co. but a fleet might hire a couple to form a
composite battalion for larger actions. This sort of scenerio would be good
for a campaign or RPG players.

The mission parameters of the merc's would be quite interesting, just how far
could they go before their Issuer of Letter would pull their letter and
declare their action piracy? They would have to get a certain amount of loot
or they would loose, military ordinance is verry expensive!!

Anyway I thought a little political background for the small scale warfare
going in the fringe areas might help.

> On Thu, 4 Sep 1997 TEHughes@aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 97-09-03 21:28:15 EDT, you write:
This is getting a bit long, but here's more from me...

The leters of marque idea sounds really good, and given the sheer size of
space, there could be a lot of stuff going on -- privateers, mercs,
flat-out pirates, and on and on.

I have to agree that no sane government is going to allow capital class
weapons into private hands (eg A batts), and even B Batts would be controlled.
I'd say there'd be lots of Escort class, a smattering of Cruiser class, and
converted merchant vessels for the rest, as 'Adm. Hughes' has said. There
could be a fair number of fighter groups in merc
fleets however, operating off those converted merchant ships - which
would also hold ground units, supplies, surplus equipment, you name it...

On a similar but related idea, how about space nomads? Fleets of ragged small
ships, mostly merchants, roaming around the edges of society, living by small
trading, smuggling, salvage, the odd bit of asteroid mining, and
odd jobs. There's been some sf books on this sort of thing -- Heinlein's
'Citizen of the Galaxy' comes to mind. That could be good RPG material, or
just senario ideas. A clash between nomad clans over good mining asteroids,
say, or something like that...

Okies in space, anyone? (US history, 1930's depression. look it up...)