I don't do much in the way of Traveller these days, but I think that the various parameters of ship design (e.g. with the Spaceships series) can lend themselves to similar analysis.
Though actually I think it's more social than technical. What pirates have historically always needed is somewhere to sell their loot. (I'm counting political acts, like the Sea Shepherd raids or the PLF attack on the Achille Lauro, as a different sort of animal.) The Traveller Imperium setting _may_ give that, depending on just how the Imperium works in any given instance of the universe. If you rob Imperial shipping in system A, then jump to system B to sell the loot, system B may not ask too many questions - particularly if the loot is stuff they wouldn't normally be able to afford. But the Imperial powers _will_ care, and depending on their reach into planetary government they may well be able to shut things down at this point. Ship costs usually scale with ship size. A pirate who could afford a big ship wouldn't be a pirate. So he's going to have a ship that's of the same sort of size as his targets, at most, and possibly smaller. It'll certainly have less cargo space, because it'll be packed with guns, boarding parties, whatever else the tech base allows. So he has to take the target ship, not just steal cargo. (Exception: if he knows in advance about a high-value, low-bulk cargo.) That suggests that he's going to be running with lots of spare bodies on board, for prize crews and combat losses. Passengers (and perhaps crews) can be ransomed; but how to transport them to somewhere that business can be done? Again, it depends on the politics - maybe there's a "safe haven" of some sort, maybe not. R _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
