What is the lore approach to nukes and other weapons of mass destruction? Its been 900 years and I cant help but look at a Mist or Retaliator and imagine all the forbidden technology treaties and regulations that are behind having explosion based missiles.asked by TrentHawkins
TL;DRNuclear payloads have been discussed but nothing is decided; they say a line exists for "mil-spec" weapons that civilians can't buy legally, though exactly where it falls is still being worked out.
I'm not sure if nukes are a specific missile payload or not..?
Ummm. There's definitely been talk about having nuclear payloads. I'm not sure where that's gonna end up, but...
The funny thing is, at the end of the day, it is interesting - I mean this a society where common people can go out and buy really heavily armed... warships (in a nutshell). Fighters and stuff like that. So it's a bit of a different society. Mostly that's just because it's dangerous out there, you know - there are Vanduul, there are pirates, there are slavers, there's all sorts of craziness happening outside that, you know, you'd have to protect yourself.
Space is too big to police fully, with a unified force...
Yeah. As far as nukes, I mean, specifically that's more of a design thing. I would imagine that yeah, if you're-... you've seen the size of these frigates - they're huge. You would have to use some kind nuclear payload to put a dent in that thing.
It's interesting because we have the notion of "mil-spec" weapons. Like, when we release a military ship to civilians we say that they don't include everything, so we have this line of there being some technology that's too powerful, too dangerous, or that the military wants to contain an advantage over the civilian population. So that's implying that there is a certain level of devastation that's considered inappropriate for commercial use, and in order to get that, you start having to go to the black market. So, like an off-the-shelf ship made by a major manufacturer wouldn't really have any forbidden tech in there 'cause they wouldn't want to lose their manufacturer license and put themselves long-, wrong end of the log-, wrong end of the-... what the hell am I saying? They wouldn't want to lose their manufacturing license!
Yeah. So there is a line. It's just that what that definition of the line is-... 'cause the thing also, I mean, part of the devastation of nuclear weapons is atmosphere. Radiation, fallout, air carrying particles beyond the blast radius and the fallout zone, and all that stuff... which you don't really get in space I would imagine.
Yeah, just being in space is awful for you radiation-wise...
Yeah. So maybe nukes lose a little bit of their luster? You know, obviously I don't think it's restricted to nukes - I don't think you could try and do an orbital strike on a planet - they would shoot you down in a second.But yeah, so I guess it's a long way around - yes, there's a line because like Will said there's the "mil-spec" thing, but what that division is I think we're still sort of trying to figure out. And a part of that is also just with game balance. With Arena Commander there's a huge amount of focus put on making sure that what weapons does what, and is countered by what, and what are it's strengths and weaknesses, and stuff like that. So just getting a basic baseline understanding of what civilian weapons do, then you could figure out what the mil-spec weapons do, and why they're so much more powerful.
Yeah. And just like we're gonna have to handle you walking around with weapons on a planet's surface, I think it'll be the same way of like, when you're flying into ArcCorp and you have a nuclear payload missile, we'll have to figure out ways why you're not firing 5 of them off into the middle of the city. Not sure what, but something to think about!