You Might Be a Pirate ...

If you trawl through the fansite database, skimming past the walkthroughs and mission advice, until you get to the good stuff: Jafs mods!

If Maas can cleverly stop you from saving the galaxy by placing several large, well-laden freighters in your path.

If you spend most of your time waiting for Jafs.

If you hear voices in your head while scanning cargoes: "Cal, we're pirates, not garbage collectors," or, "Oooh, lovely loooot!"

If the imaging module and subsystem targetters have their own joystick buttons ... not that you care what the cargo is, you'd just rather target the freighter's thrusters so as not to damage any of the pods!

If Jafs, fully loaded and on his way home, has ever gotten trapped inside a huge clump of cargo pods, requiring you to move them out of his way so he can fly home and return for another load.

If you've ever docked up to a 13th pod (21st for CustomJafs users) and returned it to base yourself.

If you've set your MP3 player mod to play a continous loop of "The Streetbeater", the theme song to Sanford and Son, while watching Jafs collect pods, and thought to yourself, "It doesn't get much better than this."

If you wish the HUD could sort the contact list into freighters, cargo pods, and "other".

If frozen sewage is where you get most of your cutting beam practice.

If you know the exact number of shots required at any given range to open a mega-pod.

If you've ever opened two or more mega-pods with one swipe of the cutting beam.

If, after waylaying a freighter in a convoy, you've ever raced through a cloud of fighters to get a clear shot at another freighter.

If Maas and SOLAN have been forced to invoice customers in crayon for want of office supplies.

If you've bought every mod, upgrade, and enhancement you could possibly get your hands on, yet continue to compulsively LOOT instead of finishing the game.

YOU MIGHT BE A PIRATE!

Heh, heh... here's a couple more:

If Hoffer's Gap has to wait for their gunstars for more than two weeks (real time) because you're having too much fun hunting the space lanes... you might be a pirate.

If you tend to damage megapods so that the explosion of one causes the destruction of the others in a chain reaction... you might be a pirate.

If you've ever tagged cargo pods before they stop moving (either from a mega-pod or a freighter ejection)... you might be a pirate.

If you've ever shot up a friendly ship just because they were carrying too much damn cargo... you might be a pirate.

If, when approaching a station, you quickly cycle through the targets in a hunt for any outbound freighters before they escape... you might be a pirate.

If you've ever gone home because you've hit every single L-point in Hoffer's Wake until all system traffic ceases... you might be a pirate.

<font size="1"><font face="Book Antiqua"><font color="black">"Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. This was no disciplined march; it was a stampede-- without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of Civilisation... of the massacre of Mankind."
--H. G. Wells The War Of The Worlds</font id="black"></font id="Book Antiqua"> </font id="size1">

If you spend a year learning to pog so you can mod the MP game to allow for online trade; to get get people to go online with freighters full of juicy cargo they pirated in their single play game... you might be a pirate.


Have Gun, Will Travel

If you make use of licensed material without permission in a work of fiction...oh wait. That's a different kind of pirate. Nevermind.

--
Hot4Darmat

Just fiction? Hey, Doris Kearns-Goodwin would resent that statement! Non-fiction authors pirate, too!

What makes her example particularly egregious was her authoring of Harvard's "zero tolerance" plagiarism policy.

History's Harvard elite
told her students that they should not cheat!
but the words that she took
when she published her book
was the history doomed to repeat.

- Me

(This is straying off-topic, isn't it?)

's okay. It's your topic to wander off or on.

I do most of the things mentioned in your first post, and recognized my evil ways instantly. I also rush our to 'save' those in distress, but I tend to kind of hang back and wait until they're dead or almost dead at the hands of the marauders before I wander in and pick up the leftovers.

Ever hang around a station and scope out loading ships, then followed them and their convoys for awhile, only to hit them out in the deep with an LDSi?

The worst is the successful pirate's greedy urge to get just a few more, after filling an L-point up with loose pods. Another juicy convoy jumps in and you think, "Oh I can take this I just owned everyone else that came here," but somehow, their escort gets the better of you, and no matter how hard you pour on the thrust to try to get away, the damage alarm is going, missile lock on alarms are going, the hull's getting pounded and you know you're toast when that next missile makes contact with you, and you think, "I just had to get greedy, didn't I." Fade to deathscene and stats screen. Dang.

--
Hot4Darmat