On Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 10:59 PM, Craig Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

Yes, but no matter what happens, it won't be the xboat "pilot" playing that game. The entire control panel of an xboat consists of a big button labeled "JUMP". :)

On Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 7:57 PM, Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 10:45 PM, Craig Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
You'd think there would be an exemption for ships without m-drives. :) A suicidal xboat pilot isn't much of a threat to anyone other than himself, and to anything other than a databank full of mail.

Since a ship exiting jump retains it's initial vector and velocity, that just makes using an xboat as a WMD a matter of somewhat chancy timing. If you can manage to have the ship emerge somewhere/when ahead of the planet along it's orbital path, then it's going to hit the surface *somewhere.*

Consider the time period when the xboat service was inaugerated. The period immediately following the Imperial Civil War was probably a fairly unsettled time. Even if the powers that be were willing to used unmanned drones as the actual couriers, someone may have pointed out a couple of inobvious benefits of having a sentient pilot aboard. One such benefit could have been to serve as an increased gaurantee that the ship would not be shot at or boarded . . . since destroying or stealing an unmanned drone would be a lot less provocative than doing the same to a manned ship.

Richard Aiken

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