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For me its a non issue.

Considering any fool with enough money can get his hands on most old (pretty much anything older than the F-22) military craft (mind you, without the ammo) and from a not so legal source, get a hold of missiles and fuel, I see no reason why they couldn't do the same in the future (in whatever form it takes).

I'm not sure how easy it would be to get enough parts to make a nuke... don't want to think about it.

Except your scope is completely off. One nut in a fighter could kill a few hundred to a few thousand if he really worked at it and got lucky. One lone nut with a shuttle craft can kill a few million. One lone nut in a starship can exterminate all life on an entire planet killing billions.

It's about four to seven orders of magnitude worse.

But the mechanism is the same. Further, most of the privately-held craft we're discussing seem to be outside of the jurisdiction of the major powers. The Klingons allowed ownership by the gentry, in return for vassal-type service in wartime... no different than the fact that a knight owned his own armor, weapons, and horse, but was required to employ them in service to the state. The Romulans have only seemed to allow ships in governmental service. The Cardassians enforced control of even freighters under the auspices of the military. The Ferengi - well, rule of law in the name of right and wrong wasn't their strong suit.

The mechanism is similar but again, the magnitude is so much greater. It's like saying, "Well, we let people buy BB guns at Walmart, I don't suppose letting them buy .50 Cal miniguns is all that different." When the level of personal mayhem potential escalates from killing a few dozen or hundred people to exterminating all life on an entire planet people might start to think about things differently.

No doubt, but that's beside the point. What Stitch was talking about (I believe) and what I supported was a different issue:

Tyyr wrote:It's like saying, "Well, we let people buy BB guns at Walmart, I don't suppose letting them buy .50 Cal miniguns is all that different."

No, it's not like saying that at all. What it is like is saying that people can purchase BB guns through a monetary transaction; they can also do so with a .50-cal minigun (I believe Miniguns are NATO 7.62, however.) It doesn't speak to the ubiquity of availability or to the ease of such a purchase.

Tyyr wrote:Except your scope is completely off. One nut in a fighter could kill a few hundred to a few thousand if he really worked at it and got lucky. One lone nut with a shuttle craft can kill a few million. One lone nut in a starship can exterminate all life on an entire planet killing billions.

It's about four to seven orders of magnitude worse.

An earlier point of population magnitude is quite significant. On the planet, a quick search got a result of around 6.7 billion people. In that sense, the destruction of a city by say a nuclear weapon is quite major but its a possibility. In an empire in SW terms that spans thousands of worlds. several billion people on a world might well be rather inconsequential compared to the population of the whole empire. it might be a bit more significant if it were a ST style empire with 100 worlds at best with that kind of population admittedly.

Even then, its all relevent. As was mentioned before, in a small town if four people die in a fire, it impacts everybody. In a big city, four people die, and your lucky if it even makes the news. On a global scale for us, seven billion dead is unbelievable, but on a galactic scale with hundreds of other worlds with similar populations, its going to lose some impact.

All true, but not really germane. The absolute scope of destruction that can be caused by a particular device is independent of the perceived impact on the affected society. My point wasn't that the scope wasn't different between or RL examples and a 'Trek example; rather, that the examples we gave are valid regarding the mechanisms of acquisition involved.

Reliant121 wrote:In an empire in SW terms that spans thousands of worlds. several billion people on a world might well be rather inconsequential compared to the population of a planet.

Not just might be, but is. The Lusankya killed tens or hundreds of millions when she left Coruscant, and the reaction was muted to say the least. Hundreds of thousands of Falleen were killed when Vader sterilised the area around a breached biowarfare lab, and the only people who paid any attention were those who'd lost family. It takes something like the Alderaan or Caamas attacks to provoke a similar reaction to 9/11, and even then it was the nature of the inhabitants as much as the death toll that was responsible for the widespread shock.

In my writing project, the human race will have maybe 8 major inhabited planets, and there will be a couple alien empires that have maybe a few dozen each - not a scale where planetary annihilation can be written off easily. I think I'll take some inspiration from B5 and other sources to try to minimize the problem: make sublight travel much slower than in ST (maybe .05c for the fastest ships), with long acceleration times; make fast spacecraft too expensive for individual citizens; and make FTL travel dependent on hyperportals (maybe at one of the Earth's Lagrange points, or one of Jupiter's). Still, I think the Earth should have a large defense network extending for several AUs to make sure that nobody travels at a dangerous velocity near the planet.

.05C is still a tremendous velocity though, 15,000 km/sec. A few tons of material hitting a planet at that velocity is still a city killer easy. In fact, thanks to the wonders of math, a 10 ton shuttle hitting the surface at 0.05c is equivalent to a 269 megaton bomb. That's just a shuttle the size of a fully loaded Learjet 45.

So if you want to avoid these problems I'd advise picking a much lower limit. The problem is that you can't make it low enough. Even if your civilization can only accelerate at 1G they will still be more than capable of wiping out cities. Again, a 1G capable Learjet 45 equivalent with 5 days of run in time can still hit with 21 megatons of force.

If you really want to avoid this problem you have to restrict your vessels to 0.1G or less top acceleration or have them severely fuel restricted so that boosts of more than a few minutes or at most hours is all the can pull off.

I'm a little late, but I'll say it anyway,

My point was that comparatively the magnitude is irrelevant.

How many people would die on here in the situation of a nut with a fighter would be similar (proportionally) to the number killed by a nut in a shuttle in the Federation.

Yes, the absolute magnitude is greater, but the relative magnitude is the same, if not smaller.

Or have acceleration and deceleration take long enough that you can easily tell if someone is slowing down as they should. A "deadline" would make sense. If a ship ISN'T slowing down say by the time they come up on Mars, scramble fighters and blast the thing to hell before it can get close enough.

And perhaps a detachable FTL gizmo, they can leave at a safe distance so the core can't do any damage?

In the grand scale of an interstellar empire a large city or even an entire planet is not a big deal. The problem is that it would work if you comparatively had as many lone nuts wanting to blow up planets as you do now spread out across the entire empire. However if you have as many per planet as we do now it would get messy. It wouldn't be a continent getting blown up on one nothing planet every few years it could potentially be a city getting blown up every few weeks on each planet in the whole fucking empire.

You have to do something to restrict access to interstellar vessels and keep them out of the hands over every average joe.

Mark wrote:Or have acceleration and deceleration take long enough that you can easily tell if someone is slowing down as they should. A "deadline" would make sense. If a ship ISN'T slowing down say by the time they come up on Mars, scramble fighters and blast the thing to hell before it can get close enough.

Doesn't really work. By the time you decide to scramble to take them out they're already going so fast that you can't make the intercept unless you have the ability to accelerate tremendously harder than the first ship could. Alternately if you've got good aim and a really big gun you can pop them in passing.

However if you have as many per planet as we do now it would get messy. It wouldn't be a continent getting blown up on one nothing planet every few years it could potentially be a city getting blown up every few weeks on each planet in the whole f***ing empire.

You have to do something to restrict access to interstellar vessels and keep them out of the hands over every average joe.

Now I see your point...

And am starting to agree with you a bit too.

At least in the Federation its sort of hard for civilians to get a hold of the fastest and largest ships.