Onno Meyer wrote:
There is an infamous 'undead thread' about the impossibility of piracy
in Traveller. Instead of another regurgitation of the pros and cons, I
thought about it from the other side: what technology would allow or
even encourage piracy and raiding?
In both cases, I'm thinking about the Hollywood image: pirates of the
carribean, boarding merchantmen, quaffing rum, and forcing prisoners
to walk the plank; raiders as vikings in a longship, swilling beer,
ravishing maidens, and torching farming villages, both translated
into space.
I had to already answer/consider many of these questions/concepts
whilst putting together my own homebrew 'GURPS Space Vikings
- Freelancers of the Frontier' setting (this is not based on H. Beam
Piper's book 'Space Viking'.)
* I'm excluding military commerce raiders and letters or marque from
consideration, since they are not free agents of mayhem.
Sometimes there is a very thin line between a privateer and a pirate,
the only difference might simply be a small piece of paper..
..In my setting there are pirates, space vikings and privateers, all of
whom engage in commerce raiding activities. Their difference is mostly
about professionalism and attitudes - Pirates are the true scum of the
spacelanes with very little in the way of honor, Space Vikings are more
professional groups with a well-defined way of life/code of honor
which forbids them from mistreating captives (captives are always set
free on some nearby neutral ground) or from targeting relatively poor
independents. Space Vikings mostly target the shipping of frontier
megacorporations and governments, whereas Pirates tend to target
anything they think they can take easily enough and have no qualms
about selling people to slavery or worse.. Privateers OTOH
are basically mercenaries who have been contracted to target
exclusively enemy shipping, at least in theory (sometimes
the temptation is simply too high to go after more lucrative targets
not covered by the 'letter of marquis').
* It must be an universe where relatively small warships are feasible.
It must be easy to refit unarmed merchanters into lightly armed
merchanters, and a big, armed merchanter must have decent chances
against a light warship.
I tweaked the rules so that starship hitpoints depend on hull mass and
volume more than surface area. OTOH, I do not cuberoot the damages
of big beam weapons - Beam damage is square root all the way.
Thus, a relatively lightly armored merchanter can have considerable
amount of hitpoints, allowing it to survive long enough to deliver
notable damage in a fight, especially if it mounts some concealed big
beam weapons in its front cargo bays.. A smaller armed civilian
transport/yacht with powerful thrusters might be agile enough to
actually dodge incoming fire and thus be a viable space combat threat
even without much in the way of hitpoints or armor.
Another rules tweak I use is a dodge modifier based on both the ships
size modifier and it's sAccel rating on a logarithmic scale - This
means that large ships (capships in particular) cannot dodge beam
weapons fire, but small ones might. A rule like this is absolutely
required for the space combat viability of light starfighters (one
or two beam cannon hits is all it takes to cripple/destroy a light
starfighter).
* For piracy, it must be possible to board a resisting starship.
Either boarding can be done under power, or it must be possible to
disable drives with precision shooting and not too much collateral
damage.
For my setting, I introduced some tweaks for the 'neural blaster'
beam weapon type, also allowing it to knock out/disable electronics
as well as human nervous systems. Only one percent of neural blast
damage is 'real' permanent damage, the rest can be repaired with a quick
ten minute maintenance work.. Of course, it is possible for the attacker
to keep on disabling the target vessel repeatedly untill the boarders
have gone in.
* Pirates need to sell their goods. Ports looking the other way are a
social requirement, not a technical one, but limited communications
might encourage them.
There are many ways to go around selling the loot - In my setting
there usually is at least one large pirate base in a typical frontier
sector (in case of SagDEG Alpha Sector, 'Tortuga Base' is a widely
known pirate battlestation, where only outlaws are welcomed) where
various outlaw organizations (crime syndicates, pirate groups, space
viking clans etc) trade their ill gotten gains, but there are several
small pocket empires which (knowingly or not) trade with pirates,
not to mention some independent merchants who have trade relations
with some pirate groups and also supply those pirates with intel on
other shipping routes and ships.
* For raiders, the technology must encourage offense over defense, so
that taking a world is much easier than holding it. That encourages
a succession of warlords, one weaker than the next because each
change of control destroys some industry. Until the barbarians from
the fringes move in ...
Pirates in my setting typically favor agile light starfighters with
fairly skilled pilots (Combat Reflexes and 3e pilot skill 16-20 or
so is typical), which do not have much armor but do carry some
firepower (beam weapons and missiles), can dodge attacks and have
basic stealth and ECM. However, for operating a hyperspace
interdiction field generator, the pirates will need at least
one larger ship like a freighter or a frigate to set up an
effective ambush along an FTL trade route. Also, a separate craft
which carries a boarding party is typical, but it can be left out
of the main space battle, jumping in after all of the target ships
have been disabled.
As a result, typical commerce raiding outfit flies an externally
innocent tramp freighter equipped with a hyperspace interdictor,
which carries up to a dozen or so light starfighters in it's cargo
bay and has a few front firing concealed big beam weapons (neural
blast cannons mostly) for disabling target vessels in addition to
the original point-defense lasers which all frontier merchanters
carry. Boarders might be carried either on the tramp freighter or
could have a separate transport for docking with disabled vessels.
* Even if there are pirate-friendly ports, there won't be much in the
way of pirate homeworlds. Raiders might have homewords, but again
little heavy industry.
In the frontier, a large pirate battlestation with full starport
facilities may be possible - It might be inconvenient for neighboring
pocket empires for sure, but taking it out might have a too high
expected military cost.. These pocket empires are also propably wary
of each other - If one empire suffers significant capship casualties
in taking down the pirate battlestation (almost a certainty with
powerful beam weapons in the hands of the outlaws), another empire
might take advantage of the situation and invade. Balance of power
can be a very delicate thing in the frontier.
So, instead of destroying the Tortuga Base, neighboring empires
concentrate on infiltration/espionage efforts to predict and
undermine pirate raids. Rationalisation often goes that one known
large hive of scum and villainy is actually preferable to a hundred
unknown medium sized ones hidden all over the map.
So there must be a technology which allows starship construction and
repair 'in the field'. Capturing educated technical workers may be a
raider tactic, but it has obvious risks -- can they trust their life
to an enslaved engineer? Mind control might be the answer, or all
those lovely coercive gadgets from the new UT. But proper vikings
build and maintain their own ships, which might well be one TL more
advanced than their victims' defenses.
With high enough TL, 3D Printers or MiniFacs allow construction of just
about anything given enough time, the right industrial blueprints
and raw materials.
Of course, pirates would not need to build much stuff from raw asteroid
or comet materials, they could operate hidden 'chopshops' where they
take apart stolen starships and put together new ones. Hidden serial
numbers and other security measures might mean that it would be
extremely difficult and time consuming to forge legitimate papers for
stolen ships or even parts of stolen ships, but pirates might not be
all that interested in legitimacy since they would be using the ships
for illegitimate commerce raiding anyhow.
* There must be lots of habitable worlds within flight range, both to
encourage dispersed 'victim' settlements and hidden 'pirate/raider'
settlements.
In my setting large frontier colonies are fairly rare, hundreds of
parsecs apart, but asteroid and comet habitats are very numerous
(usually spread all around the oort clouds of the main systems). Not all
habitats openly advertise their coordinates and instead prefer to
stay hidden, and some of them even harbor outlaws or trade with them.
Also, there is lots of room for outlaws to hide out there amongst the
stars - Only a small fraction of the frontier starsystems have been
explored in detail so far, and there are millions of them.
Habitats are fairly easy to set up, since digging into an asteroid is
very cheap and fast at TL10-11 and at the same time operating a small
scale mining/refining operation results in much more profits than
constructing a habitat costs.. After a belter/comet mining group has
exploited an asteroid/comet to a sufficient degree, they tend to
sell the whole complex of tunnels and chambers to some group of
colonists in need of cheap real estate before moving onto another
asteroid. Usually the location of the new habitat is kept confidential
(for security reasons mostly - a startup colony/habitat usually cannot
afford much in the way of defense forces.)
-Pauli
--
"Our ship is made out of darkness, she mocks the laws of nature.
With cables, ropes, tackle and sails, she moves on the waves
of the void. On her decks a red crew, dark as if painted with
blood. From among the hooded cloaks of crimson, eyes of
silver gleam darkly.. Oldest of all is Hiram of Malta, the Red
Commander. He knows the secrets of Schwarzchild Radii, of Neutron
Stars and Cepheids. His hidden paths we follow, like ghosts from
space we strike deep, only to disappear again soon, sometimes even
the fear itself is afraid of us.."
-CMX, Punainen Komentaja
(Translated from the Finnish song 'Red Commander' by CMX)
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