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- #21
Drakevarg
Troubadour
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Interesting ideas. I'd note that for my setting at least though, one of the themes is that humanity is pointedly not at the top of the food chain. Near it, sure, but the food chain is scaled up in general and there are enough apex predators that for some of them the only leg up humans have on them is numbers, even with the consideration of technology. In this scenario eat least, you'd run out of ships before you ran out of predators who might try eating them.
More broadly relevant though, is the observation that these traps are by nature single-use. Once something bites into the decoy or predator mine and pays for it, you're left without a defense for the rest of the voyage. Carrying extras means less cargo space for other essentials. Worse still once you reach the gunpowder age and you're left with cargo that not only explodes, it's deliberately designed to do so when tampered with.
While the idea of painful if not outright lethal dissuasion is a perfectly valid approach - my own initial suggestion involved a spiked hull or other such methods of maiming biters - I think that a separate device dangled near the ship is inherently problematic for the simple reason that if a predator needs to tear it in half to tell it's dangerous then you're going to lose the device the first time something big gets curious. And at least in the case of my setting you'd only be able to hope to get wherever you're going before another one investigates, not that you'd eventually kill every big thing in the water.