Oh my god the salt levels are so high I'm gonna have a heart attack just from reading this thread Hahaha
Some of you are taking this way too seriously. It's a GAME! People are having FUN! That is all!
No one wants to be a wet blanket smothering other people's fun. It's not as if I hadn't considered whether I'm too sensitive to this issue. Let me explain a moment why I think I'm not.
During the late 80's and early 90's I was both an undergrad and graduate student in philosophy of technology. That's basically what many call a "futurist" , who looks at developments in technology and assesses their long term impact, primarily on society. Anyone who grew up in the Cold War can recount the seeming hysteria about possible thermonuclear war, based upon what seemed the obvious possible outcome of inventing nuclear weapons. Oddly enough, people are much less concerned now than they were then about nukes despite the world is far less stable and more likely to so indulge in catastrophic stupidity.
One of my specializations was the growth of the internet, and one of my chief findings and the thesis of several papers was that online anonymity would breed trolls, despite no one had yet coined the term "trolls".
My answer to the problem was and remains that the only remedy for troll behavior was that the public at large would not stomach it by turning a blind eye, and call it "harmless". If you collude with troll behavior by calling it "harmless", you damn well better have thought through your position. Refusing to sanction evil behavior leads directly down the path of more evil behavior.
So just saying, the trolls who voted a ship with no Q drive as the best ship, knew exactly what they were doing. They KNOW that such a ship could not be "best" by any reasonable definition. It's not an accident, and it's not "harmless". If you think this is harmless, lets take up the issue a year from now when we see whether there are any future such competitions. IMHO, that's over with, because we refused to sanction the trolls for their behavior.
BTW, I don't have a dog in this fight. I didn't vote. I posted here what I thought would be the top three most popular ships, and seems I was right except I didn't include the troll vote.
I think it's a perfectly healthy distraction for ship owners to advocate that their choice is the best choice. That's fun. Having those efforts shit all over by trolls is not fun, IMHO.
Peace, and civilization itself, both require deterrence. That's a tragic consequence of the human condition.