I think most posters here underestimate how difficult it can be to retrofit a ship for combat. Especialy a vessel so small and highly specialised as the Tempest.
Weapons take up space. Not just for the guns themselfes (remember the guns seen aboard the Kett flagship? They were huge!).
Just making room for some meaningfull guns allone would be next to impossible on a tiny ship like the Tempest. And that's not even thinking about magazines for disruptor torpedoes. Those would be pretty much out of the question.
It's not like WW1, where you could just bolt a few small guns and machineguns to the deck of a merchantman or cruise ship and call it a naval auxillary or Q-ship.
You also need room for the powerlines and targeting systems. And off course the capacitors to feed the guns, as the ship's powerplant was most likely never designed for the aditional power draw of anti-ship weaponry.
And don't forget: Anti-Ship weapons in ME are mostly railguns and particle cannons. So they do have recoil. If the ship's structural members aren't designed for taking that recoil, just firing the guns could - over time - literaly shake it appart.
I think what's being underestimated is TIME. Remember we are all in a hurry to find a new world, solve problems, explore etc., and all tinkering Gill does is between missions, always busy adapting the Tempest for keeping its healthiness, and all that still having Kallo observing how disturbing that feels for him: imagine trying to find time for a big structural augmentation such as adding a weaponry suite integrated with the Tempest, without affecting its primary goals.
Well, given how much time you can spend faffing about on petty sidequests like "confiscating" popcorn or doing the laundry for random passerbys, while putting off the "urgent" mission to save the galaxy with no ill effect, I think hitting the drydock for a refit shouldn't be an issue.
It's the technical issues in my book.
Yeah i agree, the tempest does need bays for interplanetary missiles, a close range defense system (PD) and how about something like the iron legion controled by SAM?
Oh this topic is meant serious? Then nevermind...
@BirdDog021 wrote:
Well, given how much time you can spend faffing about on petty sidequests like "confiscating" popcorn or doing the laundry for random passerbys, while putting off the "urgent" mission to save the galaxy with no ill effect, I think hitting the drydock for a refit shouldn't be an issue.
It's the technical issues in my book.
You can spend, but given we are talking about the critical necessity for doing critical jobs, not popcorn fetching things, it'll still require time for doing technical issues such as retrofits, which loops back again the urging needs of the Initiative. If we take into an account that we can spend time fetching the lost cousin because he's skipping school between critical missions and we can afford not doing them straight away, we can also ignore the need to equipping the Tempest any further, because, why not?
