Well isn't this thread just Trogdor's personal question thread now?
It always was my personal question thread. It just kind of flows back and forth between questions and discussion. I figure it's better this way, rather than me flooding the forum with new threads every time I get a new question or a suggestion comes to mind.
Hm. When you mentioned space pirates, I was initially thinking you were referring to the bumbling terrorists on Tarkus. Based on their codex page, calling the Black Void "pirates" is a bit like calling Al Capone's Mob "a bunch of muggers." While occasionally correct, it's completely misleading. Black Void is effectively the "Space Mafia," with (relative to the nations it works in) comparative clout to the prohibition-era Mob before Elliot Ness.
Well, it just strikes me as a bit odd. There was a time when pirates and state navies and privateers were evenly matched and would fight naval battles using comparable technology. But that obviously went by the wayside. Nowadays it would be impossible for organized crime or pirates to build a ship that could stand up to a modern navy vessel in a fight. And I'm no historian, but I doubt Capone's mob was sinking money into R&D to develop new weapons and stuff.
I encountered a similar phenomenon (and forgive me while I kind of go off on a loosely-related tangent here) when I was playing a mod called Discovery for a space shooter RPG called Freelancer. In Freelancer, there are many different factions of varying legitimacy, controlled territory, and goals, and so part of the game was navigating this complicated web of relationships amongst pirates, traders, revolutionaries, and state actors.
Then along comes the Discovery mod, and they decide they're going to give players the ability to control not only the fighters and freighters they had in vanilla, but bombers, transports, gunboats, cruisers, and battleships. And they kind of willy-nilly decided that lots of factions were going to get these new toys, and write the story in around them to justify their presence. Now of a sudden you have what were a bunch of goons who descended from survivors of a cryo-ship that crashed out in irradiated edge-world hell, whom in vanilla were struggling to fight off aliens in their backyard, rival pirates, genetic mutation caused by radiation, and their own inability to even grow enough food for themselves, suddenly tooling around half the galaxy in the biggest ships the game had to offer, of their own faction's design.
I don't want to get into details, but this caused an awful lot of headaches and hurt feelings, as suddenly the people roleplaying those pirate factions went from 'we need these other guys to live because their quasi-lawful status lets them bring in food from the garden worlds' to 'Hey look at this powerful tech I have, I must not need any help anymore, fuck yo couch charlie murphy!'
Needless to say, despite how much time I invested in that community, this attitude of 'well the pirates can just do whatever they want now because reasons' drove me away.
tl;dr Vanilla had realistic space pirates, Discovery had OP space pirates that gained shipyards and mineral wealth and technological capabilities they really had no justification for, aside from 'this is how things are now'. They gained those capabilities because it suited the stuff the devs wanted to put in the game, not because it made any sense for those groups to develop that kind of tech on their own. It's one thing to have money and access to corrupt politicians and business executives in order to skirt the reach of the law; it's quite another to build space stations and shipyards out in buttfuck-nowhere and crew those things with sufficient cooperating people, yet still call them 'pirates' or 'criminals'.
We are really going off on a tangent here with the pirate thing, though; this whole topic started out as a discussion on what stats a couple of guns should have, and I think I'm about done with the topic.
As for getting frustrated, well, what Karretch said.
