z30 wrote:Chuck, you're more of a WC buff than anyone here - where would you expect to run into a Ferret,Sabre and newer ships in the Gemini system?
Hahaha, well, only circumstantially. I never played the WC games; only Privateer, RF and Priv 2. I started studying WC history by reading the books and timelines and whatnot, while doing research for WCU projects like Priv 0, WC 0 and Priv 3
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/MOD:WCU:PR0
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/MOD:WCU:WC0
http://www.deeplayer.com/doku/doku.php/wcu:priv3
What ships would be around? Well, Confed ships in pirate hands, we know they came originally through Menesch.
In my mental model of the hidden background to the Priv storyline, I place Menesch as governor of some system in Avalon, couple of years before the start of the war. The way I've been seeing it, and just got it confirmed while reading Action Stations, is that the Confed political parties were cutting the military budget again and again and again in the years before the war; so the military were forced to mothball ships, reduce personnel, etc.
At the same time, there's an organization nobody's yet heard of called the Belisarius Group, who are a secretive bunch within Confed, with members in Black Ops and other spy-like agencies. By 2669, Belisarius have grown in strength and numbers. This is a matter of canon: Tolwyn gets a visit from an old friend, in 2669, David Whittaker, who invites him to become a member of Belisarius. Tolwyn is ambivalent about Belisarius, then and through the rest of WC; trying to stop them --like frustrating their plans to restart the war with the kats, yet trying to do the same kinds of things himself, like when he tries to start a war with Border Worlds.
Anyhow, I would think that, at the beginning, Belisarius was born out of necessity: If the Confed politicians were not going to approve ANY new military projects, they'd have to be done without their knowledge, and financed somehow.
But to get back to Mensesch, I think he's a former Secret Service or Black Ops bureaucrat with a lot of connections, and his becoming a governor is a great opportunity for money laundering, which allows Belisarius to begin selling massive quantities of ships slated for mothballing to the pirates. Pretty soon, Belisarius becomes a second funding source to the military, and being an illegally funded, secretive organization, it soon becomes a massively corrupt organization. By 2669 they have their own Black Ops branch, called Y12, who seem to be "suicide" specialists. Actually, they didn't suicide David Whittaker; I think they just killed him when he disagreed.
But yeah, ships. Well, we got several "waves":
Wave 1:
Before the war, we got a wave of ships sold to pirates. Basically, anything that would have been mothballed at that time is fair game. Just keep in mind that Confed Militias would probably get the same mix of ships as are sold to pirates.
Then we have the start of the war, and Menesch getting deposed. In my Priv 0 storyline, Menesch takes refuge in the Grovsner Colonies. There he meets all sorts of other corrupt, terrorist and secret service types. Grovsner could in fact be where the organizational seat of the Mandarins, who might in fact have been organized by Belisarius. Read the Priv 0 link above for more details.
The mothballing stops at the start of the war, and it's not until a lot of newer ships start coming out of the assembly lines, that Decommissionings get a steady stream of ships sent to them again.
Wave 2:
By then Menesch is gone, and Belisarius will use new distributors for their pirate sales renewal, such as Roman Lynch's father and Dieter Lang. This wave is slow and steady.
Wave 3:
False Peace, 2668. The Kats sue for piece, while using the time to rebuild from their heavy losses. During this time, the Confed politicians swallow the pill and immediately start downsizing the military. That's the time when Menesch decides to come out of hiding, seeing the huge opportunity opening up.
Unfortunately for Menesch, Lynch, Lang and others already own the illegal ships business. They own the Confed suppliers, and they own the pirate consumers.
Wave 4:
That's why Menesch picks a new consumer (the retros) and a new supplier (the kats). He makes a lot of enemies, in the process, including the Merchants Guild (Murphy) and Belisarius (Goodin), so he ends up dead, but not before destroying Lynch's empire.
Wave 3 is the one that really concerns ship balancing concerns in Privateer Universe, because it was the most massive and most recent. So I would say, the question to ask, and research to do (haven't done it yet), is what ships would be the most commonly "mothballed" during the false peace in 2668. I would assume it would be mostly WC2 era ships, as most WC1 era ships would have been sold during Wave 2, and the pitates would probably have wrecked them by 2669.