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Originally posted by ArcAngel Counterstrike:
**Well, Bureau civ ships would just look like civ ships.... most of the time. When you press fire, the "weapon open" animation (like the roid miner) would activate and show all these pannels flipping over, and mabe some hull changes, to then show all the guns.
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Ah, yes. The infamous "Q-Ship". Used in World Wars I and II. The idea was to take a nice, slow, bulky freighter, and give it the flag of a neutral country, such as Sweden or Finland. Strip out the guts of the ship, give it biga** engines, and mount a few anti-aircraft guns on the inside, usually 150mm or higher. During the early part of WWII, German AA gun emplacements came under attack by ground forces, and quickly found that an AA gun wreaks havoc on just about anything made out of sheet metal, from tanks to ships. Anyway, when it found a somewhat defenseless convoy, the Q-Ship would sidle up to them, usually claiming to want to hear the news, then run up its actual colors (the German Navy ensign), flip up the hinged side panels, and open fire. Today, a Q-Ship would be more likely to have about four 20mm 'Phalanx' air-defense cannon. Their fire rate is so high that you don't hear the individual explosions, just this incredibly loud buzz. And a big poof from that MiG-29 that was trying to cross your airspace. Another likely weapon would be the Tomahawk cruise missile and the Exocet anti-ship missile (heavily modified, of course, since the Exocet is designed to be fired from a Mirage aircraft). I would probably also strap on a few 5-in deck guns for good measure.
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Suddenly, the little scoutship disappeared and then reappeared right behind the alien warfleet. The gravitic ship's captain hailed the armada. "You are going to be destroyed, but I will give you a choice as to how you want to spend eternity: big pieces, little pieces, or quarks?"
Dead silence.
"Quarks it is, then."
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