Originally posted by Kurega Gikur:
Issues I have to deal with:
They have a kick ass sensor suite on board. Military style stuff.
Tricked out computer
The good sense to physically account for all that stuff black box stuff.
Their issues
A really tricked out ship with the low rider package.
The inability to pass up a sweet target like this.
Here is what happened. Their ship looks like a 200 ton far trader. Right. It has a 6G acceleration, hull armor and two triple turrets. One of their favorite weapons are EMP missiles purchased from the mob on the black market. (It is a long story. The campaign is almost two years old playing weekly.)
They lie in wait for weeks to take THIS ship (4000 ton Super freighter in a small ship universe). They wait until the right time and BAMO. The freighter fires off a few shots and so do they. They are on board fast enough and give the crew the option of fighting or taking the lifeboat.
Just to add my .02 credits to this all...
As a rule, high-end criminals are smarter than the guys who investigating them. However, most of these criminals are caught because there's a lot more of these "dumber" investigators, they have more resources, and they have more time to comb over places and find the tiniest details.
I don't think military starship sensors would have the sensitivity to pick up events in any detail from a distance measured in light-days. They most likely have excellent sensors, but they're not adapted for that kind of profiling (probably from lack of baseline size).
However, there might be people with sensor arrays that sensitive in the area. Perhaps like a deep-space observatory array from a nearby system's university? If the incident occured near a national border perhaps there might be a military deep-space listening post eavesdropping across the border? A secret Longbow collector station that could be retasked for 15 minutes on a given day to collect info?
While visible light might not be detectable, perhaps there are other "fingerprint" signals unique to starships (similar to the screw noises on submarines). Perhaps each fusion reactor has a unique radiation profile?
Certainly a 6G manuver drive on a Free Trader would be more than a little unusual. Perhaps the radiation spectrograph from that could be read from afar (even if it wasn't ever operated at full power). Not to mention if they ever used that 6G during the encounter, the Navy would know it's a "sleeper" ship - a 6G maneuver array (I don't know if you're using jets or thrust plates or whatever) would probably have a pretty big footprint on the hull of their ship - obvious on visual inspection for anyone who knows what to look for.
If such devices have a distinctive "footprint" the Navy might not just have general details, they might know exactly what ship to look for.
In addition, the major weakness of such modified vessels (you may replace "modified" with "tricked out", "tweaked", "blinged", "riced", or whatever) is that they often have a need for special repair parts:
* The Navy might start making enquiries on people who've bought repair parts for a 6G maneuver system in the last five years or something. It's even easier if the players are dumb enough to bring their ship in for repairs.
* Illegally purchased EMP missiles? This is intriguing. Exactly how common are these missiles? Are they deep-black military tech or somewhat common? I assume they're military only if they had to buy them from criminals. Even if the players are careful to cover their tracks, perhaps the MoJ or INI got a break on the EMP missile thieves. With the proper coercion, they confessed about who they sold the missiles to. In turn, the mob might make a deal (especially with the INI) to give descriptiosn of who actually bought the missiles.
