Non-Lethal or Disabling Ship to Ship Weapons

[endersig]

All pirates want a weapon that can paralyze a prize vessel without actually screwing up said prize. Shooting out the power plant or computer is an option, but those cost serious MCrs, and could pull in a nice pay day. What kind of disabling weapons could/do you use in your campaign?
I have a few of my own: an EMP weapon. treat it as a Nuclear Missle to hit, ignore dampners, and only have it damage on the "Radiation Table" in High Guard. GFG packets. a combination tracker/gravity force generator. Make the ship INCREDIBLY heavy, "fooling" the ship into "thinking" it is much heavier than it actually is, rendering it's drives useless. What ideas do you have?

 

[TheDS]

If the simple THREAT of force isn't enough to stop them, then it's going to cost you too much in damage repair to be worth your while. You'll have to fight it out, and either or both ships will be disabled due to heavy damage.

However, ignoring the realities of the situation, I suppose we could take a chapter from MOO2 and use troop shuttles or something along those lines. Your target ship would have to be unaware (so it didn't maneuver) and your assault shuttles come in and attach to an airlock and force their way in, then take the ship from within, securing engineering first.

Of course, again, the target would have to be caught unawares to avoid having to play a losing game of grav-pong. otoh, maybe grav pong isn't so powerful, maybe you can't do a whole lot with the internal gravity, and if your battlesuits have their own CG field, then I suppose that would help too.

Since an EMP is good for you, a lightening gun of some sort would be better. Hit the enemy hull with a high voltage and you blow the electronics just as surely as if you had EMPed. Within the next couple years or so, cops will have a tool like this for use in disabling cars. Get hit with it and you'll probably need thousands of dollars of repairs to get your car working again: the computer gets fried, among other things.

 

[mike wightman]

What you need is some form of electronic attack that can disable or subvert the controlling computers on the target ship...

some form of transmitted virus should do the trick

 

[Ran Targas]

One of my conspiracy theory friends thinks On*Star is a government plot to allow authorities to track the movement of all private vehicles and if you attempt to evade capture, they'll shut you off.

It has also been theorized that certain American made weapon systems may be "disabled" to prevent their use against American ships and aircraft. Call it ECM, but in any case the weapons system could, by design, be electronically shutdown if it targetted an American platform.

Maybe the Imp government has the ability to shut down a civilian ship's drives or weapons systems(i.e. Wrath of Khan) by transmitting a code directly through the comm system to the ship's computer. If a pirate, or privateer, had access to the code bank, they'd become pretty efficient. Of course, they could only hope that their ship was sufficiently firewalled to prevent the same situation.

 

[far-trader]

My secret pirate weapon? An insider. Somebody on board the catch, posing as a passenger or crew (preferably, ideally engineering). I sidel up and demand you surrender, just about the same time the insider:

informs you he has released a nerve toxin and his friends, that'd be us, have the antidote that must be administered within the hour, or...

shuts down all power leaving the ship dead in space, or...

etc, etc...

We don't need to shoot you

Everybody's happy. Nobody gets hurt. The insurance company pays you for the lost cargo and you get back to work with your ship and hide all in one piece. We get a cargo for free. Heck if'n it weren't for a little piracy the insurance companies would be out of that little bit of business so even they aren't too sad. They only get real mad when some idiot destroys an expensive ship, and usually it's the owner causes that.