Banned weapons (was Re: Its Doctrine, Scouting and Tactics not Fighters)

On Thu, May 09, 2002 at 03:23:52PM -0600, B Lin wrote:
>At one time or another various weapons were banned simply because 
>people thought they were too atrocious or easy to use - crossbows in 
>Medieval Europe, firearms in Feudal Japan, dum dum or hollow point 
>bullets, biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, and now land mines 
>are on the table.

We know from the background that there are merchant starships; FB1's
description of the free trader says it's "operated by a single owner or
a small partnership". So it can't be hugely expensive to buy a starship.
Reasonable?

The most common scales in use suggest that a thrust point equals at
least 1 g of acceleration (otherwise there wouldn't be much need for
acceleration compensators, also mentioned in FB1). Even if ships can't
accelerate indefinitely, they can surely accelerate for the 20-30 turns
that a battle might last.

Assuming those turns are about 15 minutes long, you're looking at over
160 miles per second after constant acceleration. However small your
ship, that's not going to be fun for the planet you smash into. A free 
trader's about 2000 tons; that's the equivalent of a 16,000 megaton 
bomb. Sure, system defences might be able to handle that in core 
systems, if they pick up the ship far enough out; but not everyone 
lives in a core system.

When a weapon of mass destruction - I don't think it's fair to call it
anything else - is so cheaply available, and has been for some time, I
think people will get inured to the idea. (Just as people stopped
cowering when they saw a low-flying plane after last year's events...)
While there may well still be banned weapons out there, I can't see this
ever being a major force in the Tuffleyverse when starships are in
private hands.