Nanook wrote:
He wanted the biggest. And that's the Atmospheric Lander. Why settle for second best?
The pragmatic man would have spotted the fact that you can liberate five dozen of those Mammoth thingies the Argon fly around in for the same effort and less risk. That's what pragmatic means
That was the definition of pragmatic. He needed access to the Duke's HQ in order to upgrade his fleet. And the only way to do that was to destroy the HQ so it respawned blue. In the process, he took advantage of the situation to cap some ships rather than just destroy them, which meant his all-important pirate rep didn't drop as drastically. Daring? Yes. Well planned and executed? Pretty much. Just for the heck of it? Not in the least. Pragmatic? You betcha!
Pragmatic would have been to do a handful of missions for Pirate stations so the Duke's HQ goes blue of it's own (you don't need to destroy it - I never have in any of my pirating games.) and get access that way. To do something entirely impractical and risky in such a way that you maximise your gains at the end merely means you're expeditiously doing things that you shouldn't be doing in the first place.
Let me use an example. I live and work abroad, and when I go home to my family and friends, it's a 400+ mile drive (650 km) most of it through Germany. I can either do 650 km in five and a half hours on the direct route or do 750 in between 5 and 7 hours depending on traffic if I take another route which doesn't have a speed limit on it most of the way.
When I take my own car, I usually take the "short" route and just drive 20 km/h over the speed limit and get there in five and a half to six hours. If I borrow one of my father's sport cars, I take the long route and see what it's like to go full throttle in a Corvette or similar boy-toy.
If traffic is light, the long route takes me to my destination in about 5 to five and a half hours (slightly less if I drive at night, a good deal more if traffic is not light or if some zombiefied kids start throwing stones off a highway overpass) but at greater risk, at greater exertion, and at the cost of four refills for the 70-something litre tank (20 gallon?).
That's what Sluggie did: instead of going for the easy, safe, low trouble and quick option of nicking all the Mammoths that weren't actually tied down at a shipyard, he went for the high effort, great risk and expensive option of wiping out a sector to build a fleet to wipe out another sector to grab a single ship, which he then needed to retry after much money spent on training since his guys didn't actually make it though they would have walked onto any Mammoth and cut through those defences like a hot chainsaw through butter.
Definitely a stunt you pull for the kudo's rather than for the efficiency.
And you have to admit, he got the kudo's, the style, the fans, and all of that good stuff. It isn't efficient, it is the stuff of a good story to do daring risky stuff instead of boring efficient stuff.
I've sent a colleague the PDFs of Squiddy's Short Life during the morning meeting and he went and bought X3TC during his lunch break. I'm pretty sure he wouldn't do that if he just read a story of how to efficiently acquire a fleet in some space game he doesn't know and doesn't care about.
We are all explorers of the deepest reaches of space.
We don't just watch space on our monitors and listen to the sounds in it:
We, all of us, each and every one of us, owns, to a man, as many operational Space Shuttles as NASA does.
Yes, we're all that awesome. Give yourself a hug.
