How did you get your hands on that?!

It is one thing for characters on the wrong side of the law to steal a crate full of rifles and a few rocket launchers, but it another thing to steal a working tank or attack helicopter.

The sheer un-subtlety of the objects in question makes it hard for me to come with any chain of events that doesn't break suspension of disbelief.

edited 19th Mar '15 11:10:26 PM by Worlder

Well it depends, where is this character and how does he rob things?

I'd always figured that if someone needed to get their hands on something implausible, there should be a plot chain or the like to lead up to it.

One character, whose viewpoint we only rarely visit, is enough of a rulebreaker sort that the black-market revolver isn't too much of a surprise, for instance. But for the mains, it'll take the events of a whole story to kit up with a WWII-era rifle and some unfused explosives.

Honestly, and this might just be my lack of imagination shining through, if a character is powerful enough to manage to steal an attack helicopter (to say nothing of being able to fly the damned thing), he's unlikely to need it.

If the protagonists need to outrun and/or fight such a vehicle or aircraft piloted by an enemy, we generally don't pay much attention to the logistics of how the bad guys got their hands on it in the first place.

But if the plot calls for the protagonists to unveil a secret weapon, then an explanation must be provided lest people start asking distracting questions in their heads.

edited 21st Mar '15 8:02:40 PM by Worlder

I would say this extends even to the opposition, at least if you want a consistent, well-made world. Most cities tend to notice when a minigun-equipped helicopter opens fire, and the folks over at Boeing/Agusta-Westland don't hand out Apache helicopters to just anyone who asks.

I mean, if the opposition is the agent of a nation-state, or a proto-state insurgency that controls a fair amount of territory and presumably looted stocks and enough of a governance structure, it'd make sense that they'd have access to heavier weapons (though pickup trucks with cannons and machine guns are more likely than attack helicopters, due to logistical reasons). If they're a corporation that has to maintain a legal face in the state that they're operating in, it'd obviously depend from state to state (you can make a case for some corporation hiring the equivalent of Blackwater out in the jungles of the D. R. Congo), but generally they're going to top out at personal weapons.