Space Pirates is a science fiction trope that just won't go away. The image of pirate freebooters on the high seas is just too romantic for words, science fiction writers can't resist. Alas, in a scientifically accurate world, they are more or less impossible, much like space fighters and for similar reasons. There ain't no stealth in space, so it is practically impossible for a fat space galleon to be surprised in mid trip by a sinister space corsair flying the Jolly Roger. Or a rude surprise for a space merchant ship whose trajectory passes too near the Somali Asteroids for that matter. It would be several orders of magnitude easier for the "piracy" to take the form of grand theft from the merchant's warehouses on the ground.
Synonyms for "pirate" include corsair, buccaneer, and freebooter.
Do keep in mind that back in the days of Blackbeard piracy was punishable by death. If nothing else many pirates were savage murderers. The skull-and-crossed-bones flag contained skulls and bones as a message to the hapless galleon. The message was to hand over your treasure with no resistance, or the pirates would kill you and take it anyway. These are not the jolly comedic figures many of us remember from childhood stories.
And this is not just historical pirates. In the present day pirates operating around places like Indonesia will often torture and kill those who they capture.
But over and above the homicide aspect, under Admiralty law pirates were considered Hostis humani generis (Latin for "enemy of mankind"). The high seas could be claimed by no nation, they were the common property of all. So piracy was seen as a crime committed against all nations. Therefore all nations were bound by admiralty law to capture, bring to trial, and (if found guilty) execute any pirates they encountered; regardless of whether the nation had been attacked by that particular pirate or not. The trial usually was in a court martial held land-side, but in extreme cases could be by drum-head court-martial on the high seas convened by the officers of the capturing ship. Convicted pirates were traditionally hanged, in space I suppose they'd be thrown out an airlock without a space suit ("death by spacing" or "airlocking"). This would be an example of returning the favor, since airlocking is the space pirate equivalent to forcing a victim to walk the plank.
The other class of seafaring criminal who were considered hostis humani generis were slavers.
Nowadays things are a bit different. Vessels on the high seas are under the protection of and in the jurisdiction of the vessel's flag state. Piracy is considered an offense of universal jurisdiction, so any state can board and seize a vessel engaged in piracy. And any state may try and impose penalties according to that state's laws.
Piracy does not work very well in a Rocketpunk solar-system based fictional universe. But if one is creating a fictional universe with faster-than-light starships, the author can tweak the properties of the FTL drive in order to allow piracy. As a matter of fact, many tweaks that will allow interstellar combat could also allow interstellar piracy.
Generally the pirates will have to perform naval boarding in order to loot the target merchant ship. In the Traveller RPG, boarding parties and the defenders use cutlasses since shooting bullet holes in a pressurized hull is considered to be a Bad Thing. But actually, all romanticism aside, it would take about an hour before the air leaking out a bullet hole depressurized the compartment to dangerous levels. So ditch the sword and take a submachine gun instead (long rifles are unwieldy in narrow spacecraft corridors).
As a side note, historically there was a bit of nuance used when employing Jolly Roger pirate flags.
A pirate ship would approach its merchant ship prey while displaying either no national flag ("no colors") or a false flag ("false colors") in the hope that the merchant captain was stupid enough to be fooled by this transparent ploy.
Once the pirate closed to firing range, it would fire a warning shot across the merchant's bow and hoist the black pirate flag. The message was "surrender without a fight, give us your cargo, and we'll let you live." Usually if the merchant fights but then surrenders, the pirates would tend to give them quarter if the black flag was flying.
If the pirate captain became angry (usually when the merchant refused to surrender), they'd hoist the bloody red flag. This means the merchant is in hot bubbling doo-doo up to their eyebrows. The red flag means the pirates are going to take the ship by force, and no quarter will be given. You had your chance Mr. Merchant, but you just had to go and cheese me off. Now we are going to capture your ship, kill you all, and take all your valuables. Enjoy your last few minutes of life.
If the merchant thinks the pirate is actually a privateer, the merchant might be inclined to resist. Privateers are forbidden to fight with no quarter, so the merchant knows they can surrender at any time during the battle. Of course the merchant is shafted if it turns out their assailant is a pirate after all. Or is a shady privateer captain who knows that Dead Men Tell No Tales, while making it clear this includes both the hapless merchant crew and any blabber-mouth members of his crew.
An implication of this is that the mere possession of a pirate flag is enough to convict one of the crime of piracy. Only a pirate would dare fly the Jolly Roger, as they was already under threat of execution
Types of Pirates
Some of these terms are universal, that is, they can easily be applied to your science fiction universe. Others are more specific to certain historical situations, but are still of interest to the science fiction author.
Pirates
Pirates are pirates. They are people who rob people at gunpoint (and other violent crimes) for private ends and without authorization from any country; as long as this takes place on the high seas.
They are generally after valuable cargo carried by helpless merchant vessels. However some are also interested in kidnapping anybody worth a ransom, seizing the merchant ship itself, capturing the people on the ship in order to sell them into slavery, recruiting new pirates from the passengers, and committing other unspeakable acts.
Mild pirates just considered piracy their occupation. They just wanted the cargo with as little fuss as possible, and generally would not harm the merchant crew if they refrained from causing any trouble.
Brutal pirates on the other hand were bloodthirsty killers, torturing and slaughtering the merchant crew because they got a kick out of it.
Another term for pirate is "freebooter." This comes from the Dutch word "vrijbuiter", which comes from the word "vrijbuit" (plunder), which comes from "vrij" (free) + "buit" (booty).
When among only other of their kind, pirates would call themselves "pirates." If they were among Naval officers, judges, magistrates, snitches, and others who would hang them for their crimes, pirates would call themselves "merchant crewmen" or something equally innocuous.
Privateers
Pretty much the only difference between a pirate and a privateer is a little scrap of paper called a Letter of Marque and Reprisal. This letter gave the privateers authorization from their home country to act in a piratey fashion on ships belonging to hostile countries, as spelled out in the letter of marque.
Some privateers would become pirates, attacking ship of countries not allowed by the letter of marque and hoping there were no witnesses. They would actually be pirates using the letter of marque to hide behind, pretending they were privateers.
When the war which prompted the letter of marque to be issued had ended, the letter was revoked. Some privateers would become pirates because they would ignore the revocation.
Privateers would call themselves “Gentleman of Fortune”, though that term was quickly stolen by full blown pirates.
Smugglers
Smugglers are just merchants who are trying to avoid legal restrictions on free trade. Local governments can be so unreasonable sometimes about which trade goods they deem to be illegal, subject to expensive import taxes, or only allowed to be carried by official government merchant ships in the official government monopoly. The same goes for hostile fleets laying siege to a planet, who take a dim view of blockade-runners supplying said planet with guns.
The smugglers are not blood-thirsty cut-throats stealing goods at gunpoint from captured merchant ships. Instead they are just peaceful merchants trying to quietly sneak past customs patrols and burdensome tariff regulations.
The government however view smuggling as piracy, that is, the smugglers are swiping money and goods out of what was intended to be a closed economic system. As far as the government is concerned, the end result is just as bad as if the smugglers were full-blown pirates.
Buccaneers
Spain more or less owned the entire Caribbean until the Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588. After that Spain started to lose her colonies. A thorn in Spain's side was the French colony of Haiti on the island of Hispaniola.
The French settlers saw the plentiful hordes of wild oxen and pigs roaming the island, and the hungry Spanish ships frequently passing by, and so saw a business opportunity. The settlers would hunt the animals, cook the meat and sell it to the Spanish ships. The meat was cooked on racks called "boucans" (French for "barbecue"), so the Spanish called the French settlers "boucaniers." This was the origin of the term Buccaneers.
The Spanish later did something truly idiotic. Spain wanted to desperately hang on to its dwindling supply of Spanish colonies, and decided that the French buccaneers represented a threat to the security of the Spanish colony of Santa Domingo on the same island. Spain therefore came to the conclusion to forgo the delicious boucan-roasted meat and do their best to wipe out the French colony of Haiti.
The buccaneers took exception to this, and the Spanish quickly discovered that they had kicked a hornet's nest.
The buccaneers had no ships, but that was easily remedied. These guys typically would hunt the wild boars of Haiti armed only with two long daggers, they were mean and tough. On little canoes in the dark of night the mean and tough buccaneers would stealthfully approach Spanish ships moored off the coast, quietly climb aboard, and silently cut the throat of the Spanish crew. Hey, look! A free ship!
Thus equipped with ships, the buccaneers became fierce pirates. With the major difference that the buccaneers would only attack Spanish ships. They had a grudge against Spain, so to speak.
The buccaneers called themselves "The Brethren of the Coast", and had a long run in the Caribbean. They later established the pirate haven of Tortuga.
So the Spanish not only failed to eradicate the French colony of Haiti, they created a monster devoted to preying exclusively on Spanish ships. And they forever lost access to scrumptious Haitian barbecue.
Marooner
Like most of the other major white-skinned seagoing European countries of the time, Spain committed the crime of enslaving brown-skinned people of African heritage. Some of the slaves would manage to escape and run away. The Spanish called such people "cimarron", which came from the Spanish word meaning "wild or untamed." They would create "cimarron settlements."
The moronic powers that be who ruled Spain has apparently learned nothing from the Buccaneer debacle. They had never heard the quote "insanity means doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
The Spanish tried to wipe out the cimarron settlements the same way they tried to eradicate the buccaneers. And they got the exact same results.
In retaliation the cimarron targeted Spanish towns, and shipping. They soon acquired their own set of captured Spanish ships, called themselves "Marooners" after the term "cimarron", and started to prey on Spanish shipping. The term "marooner" came to mean any pirate with brown skin, but the original meaning was cimarron pirates with a grudge against Spain.
Corsairs
These were Muslim pirates and privateers based on the coast of North Africa who raided Christian towns and shipping all across the Mediterranean Sea, taking tons of ill gotten gains and about one million Christians who were sold as slaves. The Corsairs saw this as a religious duty to fight the infidels, though there was the opportunity to make a little money on the side by hijacking treasure.
The most famous were the Barbary Corsairs from the Barbary Coast of North Africa. They actually had letters of marque so were actually privateers. The Barbary Corsairs intercepted ships traveling through the Strait of Gibraltar or coming from the trading ports of Alexandria and Venice.
Interstellar Piracy Essentials
The situation, driving forces, and ecology of seagoing piracy on the Spanish Main is very different from interstellar buccaneers raiding merchant starships. Things will have to be altered in order for deep space piracy to make sense.
But some things are eternal. Pirates benefit from paid pirate-informants who spy around the starport and ferret out which merchant ship has the most lucrative cargo and when it is departing. Pirates will also need a fence or three to launder their ill-gotten gains into neutral money. Regardless of whether the pirates are operating in the 1600s or the 2500s.
Pirates will make heavy use of naval boarding, it is a large enough topic it has an entire section.
SECTION 11: OPERATION SHORT OF WAR
Dealing with space piracy falls into the category of operations short of war, and thus deserves discussion. Classical piracy on the Caribbean model is another victim of the lack of stealth in space. After all, everyone can see you boarding the ship, and everyone can see you taking it somewhere to sell it. And they can probably see who you sold it to. After a few raids, some navy or coalition of navies shows up, blasts your ship apart, and destroys the base you were fencing your prizes at. For that matter, the orbit used to rendezvous with the target is likely to be non-standard, alerting the target before you even get there. This gives them time to prepare defenses, and any nearby government vessels a chance to deal with you early. All of this makes for a shortage of pirates.
There are, however, several ways that piracy in a broader sense could still happen, such as privateering and ransoming. Privateering is a lot like piracy, except that you’re selling the prizes to a government, and everyone knows it. The problem is that you will quickly be flagged as a warship, and then it becomes difficult to sneak up on your targets. For that matter, any vessel from a belligerent is unlikely to end up in a situation where it is close to an enemy vessel and legally able to capture it without the enemy knowing well in advance. It is illegal under international law to capture a vessel in the waters of a neutral power, and this is likely to apply in space. Any attempt by a vessel of the enemy, be it a regular naval unit or a privateer, to intercept a vessel in deep space will be detected well beforehand, leaving no advantage to the privateer. The enemy will either be able to intervene or not, and the type of raider makes no difference. The exception, of course, is if the competing powers are close together, such as a war between Europa and Ganymede. Even then, there is little of the traditional privateer, and it rapidly turns into commerce raiding by contractor, which might or might not be sufficiently like piracy to be referred to as such.
Another alternative is the method used by the Somali pirates. The objective, instead of capturing and selling the ship, is to hold it for ransom. This is far more practical, because there is not a fixed base where the ship is sold for the various governments involved to go after, and the small craft used to board can be hidden with relative ease, provided that there are no major warships nearby. In this case, the planet in question can provide useful cover, as can other small craft in orbit. The biggest problem in this case is likely to be boarding. While it is not conceptually difficult, boarding is likely to be problematic for an ill-equipped pirate. On the other hand, the pirates do not necessarily need to enter the hab of the target to accomplish their mission. They could hold them hostage quite effectively from outside the hull, and it is even possible that they could take control of the ship’s systems (drive in particular) externally.
Even if, for some reason, a ship in deep space was seized, there are still significant problems to overcome. Commercial ships are unlikely to carry more delta-V than is needed for their mission, plus a small safety margin. During a deep-space intercept, half of the delta-V will already have been burned, leaving the captors with very limited options as to where to go. Except in very rare circumstances, those options will take the ship close to the original destination, which might well dispatch forces to recapture the vessel. There are only two ways to deal with the mass ratio problem. First, throw away anything that you don’t want, such as cargo and possibly the old crew. The issue with this is that the amount that can be thrown away (assuming that you wish to keep the cargo) is fairly minimal. Second, bring along extra fuel and refuel the target after boarding. This means you need a bigger ship to start with, driving up the price to enter the business. Theoretically, the best time to seize a ship would be at departure, but that in turn means that it is close to its origin, and forces from there will be well-positioned to intervene.
Another piracy-like action is barratry. This is some form of misconduct by the crew that is not in the owner’s best interest, such as stealing the cargo. It also covers nautical (or hypothetically astral) insurance fraud. Both of these are quite feasible, though certain forms of barratry (diverting the ship to a fence) cannot be concealed as well in space as they can on Earth for reasons mentioned above.
Another interesting concept raised in the course of discussing piracy and boarding is that of chases. There are several potential classifications of chases. The most obvious is that in which the pursuer must simply catch the pursuee, who has no particular goal other than getting away. The victor in this chase is determined by available acceleration and delta-V, but it only gets interesting when one can be traded for the other. The pursuer might well pile on the acceleration, as they only have to catch up with the target once, while the target must stay ahead at all times. The real complication here, though, is that the pursuee is likely to be fleeing to somewhere, instead of just away. This means that at some point he has to turn around and slow down. The pursuer then has a free shot at him. This assumes, of course, that the pursuer must only get in range of the target to destroy it, instead of trying to rendezvous and board. That objective is significantly more difficult, as the pursuer must carefully time his burns to meet the target. Another potential complication is that the pursuer will most likely have to avoid wherever the pursuee is going, and must keep enough delta-V in reserve to do so after the pursuee is overtaken. Getting home again is also a potential problem, but it might be resolved by dispatching a tanker to meet the pursuer after it’s safe.
by Byron Coffey (2019)
AND A BOTTLE OF RUM
The Red Peri, legendary space pirate in her super-strong tetrahedral spacecraft.
Pirates in SPAAACE !!!
There is no escaping them, no matter how high your cruise acceleration or how much reserve delta v you have in the tanks. They lurk the literary spaceways, ready to pounce on the next gilded starliner or even the next wandering tramp freighter.
Are they possible? Or — a more relevant and demanding test — are they plausible?
First, let's assume a setting with no FTL or other out and out magitech, confined for practical purposes to the Solar System. Orbital mechanics makes the paths followed by commercial ships highly predictable, so that hijacking one would have much in common with train robbery, except with no doubt that the train will be on time. The problem is that the entire line is in plain view of the main depot — even from hundreds of millions of kilometers away — so no matter where you pull the job, the dispatchers can see it and notify Pinkerton's.
Along the spacelanes, at least in normal space (e.g., no FTL), every robbery is therefore a brazen robbery. Which leads to two further observations:
1. The above applies only to robbery, not to, say, embezzlement or fraud. These remain practical ways to transfer funds to your account, as it were, but this hardly fits our image of space piracy.
2. Sticking to stickups, since the act will be brazen anywhere there is no reason to travel off into deep space somewhere to commit it. You may as well strike right after the ship undocks from a space station, so long as you're outside the immediate reach of the authorities. (And if they're on the inside of the station airlock, they can't get at you till they order up a patrol craft.)
This has a couple of advantages. You don't need to set out in your pirate ship weeks or months in advance (which everyone in the Solar System would see you doing anyway). Your ship won't be needed till just before — or just after — the heist. Even then the ship doesn't need carronades on the quarterdeck, or the equivalent; its function is more analogous to a getaway car. If you shoot it out with the authorities you're going to lose — if you could shoot it out with them and win, why didn't you just seize the station itself outright?
Which leads to a further complication. For the sake of Romance we don't want just a single act of space piracy, however brazen — we want endemic piracy, Brethren of the Coast. The sort of heist I outlined above, however, is pretty much an inherent one-off. In fact, since it won't be hard to figure out who pulled it off (who made a sudden and unscheduled departure right after the crime?), your ID will be all over the police net, and you'll have a hard time fencing your haul, or even enjoying it in peace and quiet.
Assuming, however, that the local police all see eye to eye about the severity of the offense. Here politics raises its ugly head — not ugly at all, really, in this context. For where there are Brethren of the Coast, Lords of the Isles cannot be far behind, and when the pirate wears a badge, all those messy legal complications go conveniently away. They are replaced by diplomatic and sometimes military complications.
The dirty secret of piracy has always been that — like terrorism today — it is in the eye of the beholder, as Bess told Felipe. Endemic space piracy, of the sort we would like to write about, almost always has a strong whiff of guerilla war. Whether it pits the Nasty Empire against the Noble (if scruffy) Rebels, or the Good Shepherds against the Sea Wolves, is strictly up to the author's tastes.
James Cambias:
Piracy in space could work for the same reasons piracy on Earth works right now in places like Somalia and Malaysia. The pirates aren't quite enough of a problem to justify the cost (both $ and political) of putting them down. They operate out of areas with either complaisant or non-existent local law enforcement, so stopping the pirates would mean invading and "nation building" — which nobody likes.
Manned piracy in space would require some kind of space habitat which is either run by a powerful Earth state yet tolerates piracy (the "no peace beyond the Line" model), or a space habitat which is essentially owned by pirates and can defend itself (the "Libertaria" model).
Here's the real bottleneck: where do you get the pirates? On Earth there's never been a shortage of young men willing to steal stuff and kill people, but launching people into space costs an amazing amount of money, and keeping them alive up there costs even more. Launch space is limited, so anyone doing piracy is not doing something else — which means the profits of piracy have to support an entire space program.
Rick Robinson:
Carla — good question about what makes pirates and other thieves romantic. It's worth a blog post, but short form:
Historically most piracy has been plain thuggery, like sea piracy today. (Remember the cruise ship that repulsed an attack off Somalia?) Generally it has been both loathsome and petty — small boats attacking coastal freighters and the like.
A fair proportion, though, was peer competition between merchants — e.g.,Venetians v Genoese — and this becomes nearly indistinguishable from naval guerre de course (commerce raiding). This is both grander and more ambiguous.
There's also religious/ideological piracy, corsairing, what Drake was doing. This can also be grander and more ambiguous, to the extent you care (or can be persuaded in a story to care) about infidels, or papistry.
The piracy most associated with Romance — "Pirates of the Caribbean" — actually represents the declining phase of Protestant corsairing, more or less from Drake to Sir Henry Morgan to Blackbeard.
But surely the fascination with Robin Hood, or pirates, or the Mafia, also has to do with the general fantasy of living beyond the usual constraints. As such it also has a "rebel" undertone, since the usual constraints include, especially, the powers that be.
Cambias — yes; piracy or the like can function when the cost to the authorities of shutting it down is too high, and it doesn't touch their vital interests.
You just can't have colonies, or even robust space stations and bases, if every interplanetary mission costs several billion dollars/euros/whatever.
Doug:
If we allow for the possibility of stationary* bases that can act as useful defensive fortifications; than as a prelude to war than as an alternative to an all out offensive wars may begin with the use of pirates as auxiliary commerce raiders. Two factions in the deadlock stage before the outbreak of actual hostilities allow pirates to use their bases against each other. This allows for a shift in the economic and military balance between them, since piracy both constricts the enemies trade and also forces them to divert ship-construction to corvettes/frigates/whatever-their-patrol-craft-are-called instead of larger ship designed for the big battles.
If more than one faction undertakes this strategy it can set up an interesting dynamic between the auxiliary pirates, the spaceforce patrol craft crews, and the spaceforce line-ship crews. The Line ship crews are probably brown-nosing and button polishing while trying to ignore that while they get lots of simulator time they haven't actually seen combat yet.
I honestly don't know how difficult it would be to manage an intercept of a ship that happened to already be past the beginning of it's journey, but since it would be fairly obvious that a ship from an unfriendly base loitering near you would be a pirate we may be stuck with that.
However if a group were to try to attack a liner immediately after it left port they wouldn't need a ship of their own at all; just use the liner as the getaway vehicle. It even comes with it's own hostages! If you need a better mass ratio to reach you're preferred destination dump any cargo you don't want; and then set off for the nearest port unfriendly to the people you just stole from. This is probably where most pirates would get their start, hijacking a ship in their own home port and then try to modify it into a more effective and fearsome vessel. Stealing your first ship keeps your starting costs down.
When I said "they wouldn't need to use a ship of thier own" I was implying that they either had short range thruster power or had stowed away on board. Clearly you would need some mode of transport to board a ship as it was leaving a space station.
* By stationary I mean "Cannot drastically change their movement without outside help." Obviously anything orbiting the sun or a planet is moving, but the bases I'm thinking of can't change that movement very much without outside force.
Rick Robinson:
Orbital forts can be targeted by missiles at Stupendous Range — though whether the missile gets through defenses is another matter.
Commerce raiding has another effect — besides diverting funds from a battle force to patrol/escort craft, more fundamentally it diverts funds from the cargo ships. It raises their "protection rent." Note that in purely economic terms it makes no matter the rent goes to pay for escort ships or goes to the pirates themselves as protection money. Which leads to:
Hijacking does seem more practical than waylaying ships in deep space, especially since — let's face it — boarding a spaceship is just not a practical tactic. I can see storming the airlock of a ship docked up, or even boarding from a space taxi, but either way depending pretty much on catching the crew off guard.
But the other practical option is extortion, either tactically of individual ships, or strategically of shipping lines.
Winchell Chung:
In the story "Recoil" (collected in THE COMPLETE VENUS EQUILATERAL) by George O. Smith, the very first space pirate goes the extortionist route. In the novel, there really isn't any way to intercept and board a spacecraft.
So the pirate uses anti-ship weapons to destroy a couple of freighters in route. Then he announces that space shipping has become regrettably dangerous, but for the low-low fee of one dollar per ton of cargo (sent to an untraceable Swiss bank account), he will personally ensure that freighter spacecraft wouldn't accidentally be hit by missiles. A protection racket, in other words. Nice freighter you have there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it.
Doug:
The trouble with hijacking is that it's near impossible to repeat it. If you were on the crew or a passenger than your biometrics will undoubtedly be checked by port security, and if you're crew there may be police background checks as well. So you do your heist and then you find another way of operating or another line of work.
Boarding is extremely difficult with one ship, but not all that difficult with two or more. With one ship the problem is that while the pirate captain needs to keep the freighter and cargo relatively intact the freighter captain has no such restrictions. He can wait until the pirate is very close before either firing weapons or using his engines as a weapon or ramming.
The solution is to go in with two ships, with one ship matchiong velocities with the target far enough away that it can defend itself against a surpirse attack. The second closes and prepares to dock, and the ultimatum is sent. If the freighter tries to use force against the boarders it can be blasted out of the sky even if it suceeds.
Now there another factor that comes into play here: If a given ship and captain have a reputation for leaving no survivors even if their demands are met then there is little motivation to surrender. If on the other hand the freighter's crew can believe they will get better treatment through cooperation than there is a greater chance of surrender. Having a reputation for being true to your word is very useful for issuing ultimatums; particularly if the freighter captain can check his database on the captain and ship.
All this changes if the freighter is carrying it's cargo in detachable pods.
Rick Robinson:
Reliable identity checking spoils a lot of familiar plots!
For boarding, the "two ships" can simply be your ship, and a space taxi (or gig, or whatever you call a "ship's boat") that does the actual boarding. What you still don't get is classic boarding against resistance.
Reputation matters! In an environment where you can destroy a ship but not forcibly capture one, you depend on the victim's willingness to surrender. So you want a reputation for ruthlessness against those who don't surrender, but leniency toward those who do.
Somali pirates did not put to sea to further the cause of space opera, but space opera is an unintended beneficiary of their depradations, because we now have an excuse to reconsider a time honored trope: space piracy. Reread this recent post, and this older one. I have usually distinguished hard SF (and retro-hard rocketpunk) from space opera, but of course it is nearly all space opera at heart, no matter how well we tart it up with realistic details. And because we do want to tart it up, we can look to the waters off Somalia for lessons.
Apart from piracy as such, one of my commenters brought up another traditional form of malfeasance at sea, barratry, a name given to many crimes, the one of special SF interest being scuttling a ship to cover theft of its cargo. As I noted in the comments, this is an eminently practical space crime, indeed one that could already have been committed. If a commercial space launch blows up or sends its payload into the Indian Ocean, who knows if there was really a satellite aboard? (For that matter a launch sabotaged by commercial rivals surely also counts as barratry.)
One form of space piracy is a first cousin of barratry. If you can divert cargo spacecraft onto orbits to nowhere, under the right conditions you can divert one to Port Royal. Unlike barratry, there's no concealing this crime, no uncertainty whether a crime was committed, and you know the address of the receiver of stolen merchandise. How you serve a warrant is another matter, but like barratry this sort of piracy is a white collar crime and requires an insider.
What about 'real' piracy – forcible hijacking of spacecraft? The strategic lesson of Somalia piracy is a timeless one: It thrives along lawless coasts. And the first tactical lesson is that real pirates don't fly the Jolly Roger. The traditional image of space pirates striking out of the interplanetary vastness is unlikely, because a pirate ship on a nonstandard orbit is declaring itself to the entire solar system, putting potential victims on alert and giving any patrol force weeks to respond. Pirates will strike in crowded space, where their mother ships are indistinguishable from a host of civil craft.
Contrary to SF tradition, the asteroid belt makes a lousy pirate lair. It is vastly too big, a billion kilometers across, its shipping lanes likewise farflung. But since space piracy is brazen wherever you commit it, why not Earth orbital space? This will surely be the most crowded part of space for centuries to come, and the first to have a shadow side. Given hundreds of spacecraft, many in similar orbits, and a steady flow of inter-orbit shuttle craft moving among them, we have suitable physical conditions for brazen piracy. Distances in Earth orbital space are hundreds of times greater than in the waters off Somalia, and the Space Patrol can't be everywhere.
Boarding in space has its challenges. You can't board a spacecraft simply by bringing a small craft alongside and scrambling up a line – or can you? The defenders can easily jam the airlock, and cutting your way in is difficult, at minimum requiring costly specialized equipment. But pirates don't have to break into the pressure cabin to threaten passengers and crew, and effectively hold them hostage. Cut the power supply, disable the radiators – technically sophisticated pirates might even be able to hotwire the propulsion system and divert the ship without needing to directly overpower the crew.
Future versions of Captain Phillips will improvise 'nonlethal' means of defense. Evasive maneuver is a classic means of defense; attitude thrusters might also be used as fire hoses to keep boarders at bay. Putting defensive armament on civil spacecraft will be problematic for all the same reasons it is today.
The real challenge for our orbital pirates is not making captures, but where to take them. Pirates need a Port Royal, a place where the art of asking no questions trumps orbital mechanics. So why doesn't the Space Patrol simply blast it out of orbit? That is where politics come in. In rocketpunk days the default assumption was a Federation, a 'sole superpower' taken to the max. No room there for Port Royal, not in Earth orbit, not in the Kuiper Belt.
Remove the Federation and things aren't so easy. Take your pick of a Patrol paralyzed by dysfunctional legalism, or rival national patrols paralyzed by dysfunctional mutual antagonism – save, perhaps, a tacit mutual agreement that Port Royal is worth more as an intelligence-gathering asset than as blasted wreckage. Mix in whatever combination and stir to taste. The conditions needed for organized orbital piracy may be unlikely, but where commerce is rich but authority weak or uncertain, it could happen.
Lurking beyond piracy are questions about space warfare. I have been in the school of thought that sees space combat as dominated by the laws of physics and the vastness of space, where 'everyone sees everything,' and battles are fought by automated systems engaging each other at Stupendous Range. But what if real space conflicts end up happening in crowded space, where at Stupendous Range you can't easily distinguish hostile forces from civilian craft including friendly ones?
How things play out in those conditions could be very different – more complex, and because of the human element more interesting than robotic battles fought in the middle of nowhere.
Carla:
Close-quarters conflict, crowded conditions, difficulty telling friend from foe until it's too late, possibly a messy political situation and divided loyalties. Your scenario looks like a rich seam of plot and story :-)
Are your orbital pirates vulnerable on the way to space-Port Royal? If it's some distance from Earth orbit, would a ship being taken there be on a non-standard trajectory, and would that be obvious to the Space Patrol (or whatever)? If so, does it follow that your pirates have to have a way of making the hostages' lives dependent on the pirates' continuing survival? This is easy if the pirates and hostages are in the same craft; if Space Patrol destroy the craft they kill the hostages along with the pirates. But if the pirates don't actually board the cargo ship, just capture it by hot-wiring its propulsion system or whatever, does this mean that Space Patrol can devise a way of destroying the pirate ship while leaving the captive ship intact? A sort of small but highly accurate torpedo, perhaps — do those work in space, and what would the pirates do about them?
I was going to say that your orbital pirates would also have a problem in profitably disposing of their ill-gotten cargoes, since anyone could see and track a ship leaving Port Royal and arrest it whenever and wherever it tried to sell its stolen cargo. But this might not be an issue if the main profit is in hostage-taking and ransoms rather than the value of the stolen ship and cargo per se. In which case, the most profitable targets for space pirates (hijackers?) would logically be passenger rather than cargo craft, as this gives you more hostages to ransom.
Rick Robinson:
Things do get wonderfully messy when humans are involved.
And yes, vulnerability en route to Port Royal is a problem. The general solution, if you can't conveniently board the prize, is to keep in close formation with the capture.
Precision missiles/torpedoes are certainly possible, and lasers can potentially have ultra precise aim. But so long as only one patrol ship is in position to engage at a given moment, the pirate can position himself 'behind' the capture. The pirates might also attach a mine with a 'dead man' switch — blow up the pirate and the mine goes off.
The Somali pirates depend on ransoming crews and ships, but fencing off stolen merchandise might be possible. If the legal framework is weak enough, legitimate or semilegitimate cargo may also pass through Port Royal, and how do you prove that a given outbound cargo is previously stolen goods?
The underlying requirement is that the shipping industry regard piracy losses as cheaper than paying for enough hugely expensive Space Patrol ships to clean up the spaceways — and perhaps cheaper than opening their own books to prying official eyes.
Jim Baerg:
Rick: "The underlying requirement is that the shipping industry regard piracy losses as cheaper than paying for enough hugely expensive Space Patrol ships to clean up the spaceways - and perhaps cheaper than opening their own books to prying official eyes."
To answer the question — not necessarily. Unwillingness to pay for a patrol force might still be enough to make piracy viable.
In space conditions, a degree of transparency is nearly a given — there's no sneaking in and out of Port Royal by night or fog. But no surveillance technology will see what its operators choose not to notice. I could see 'transparency' leading to a wink & nod culture.
Ferrell:
As far as pirates getting the 'drop' on a passenger vessel in orbit; your generic Orbital Transfer Vehicle (OTV) (that looks like a thousand others) suddenly, or leasurely, scoots up to your trans-lunar transport and some guys in heavy-duty construction space suits squrt over to your ship and attach some commercial shaped-charges to various sections of your hull. They then tell you to let them on board; when you do, they take control and the OTV leaves, to go about its business. If the half dozen Space Patrol ships are busy shadowing each other (national politics) or inspecting the freighters from Mars (Customs and Drug Enforcement)or tracking some asteroid (Navigation Hazard Abatement), they then miss the whole thing. By the time someone notices that the transport is NOT headed for Lunar orbit, but is actually on its way to L-4 (Port Royal) it may be too late to stop and board it.
The American and Russian Space Patrols may be more professional and more agressive than say, the Non-Aligned States Space Patrol, but they can't be everywhere. As I've said before, you can tell a lot from a ship's drive flare and acceleration charateristics, but you can't determine the content or intentions of the crew from those facts. To further confuse things, sometimes ships change destinations due to reasons not apparent to the world at large.
If the government of L-4 Port Royal dosen't allow the 'taking' from certain nations or multinational companies, and even provide some 'kick-backs', then Port Royal may be untouchable (if things don't get too annoying to the rest of the various players in space commerice), at least from a political standpoint. As Rick said, things DO get messy when humans are involved. As far as the carefully orchastrated flow of interplanetary travel imagined during the 'golden age' of SciFi, I doubt that logical construction will be high on the list of criteria as space travel evolves and government entities strugle to keep up with the rapidly growing complexity of interplanetary travel and commerice.
Rick Robinson:
The one part of this scenario that might not work out well for the pirates is the pirate ship (OTV) 'going about its business.' Once the act of piracy is committed, the pirate ship has in effect hoisted the Jolly Roger by revealing its intent, and the only safe place for it is in close company with its prize. If it goes off on its own, Patrol ships finally have a clean shot for their fancy long range weaponry.
Once they get back to Port Royal, the pirate ship can be 'laundered' and return to service under a different registration. Again some wink & nod is required.
No doubt this whole situation is unstable; if piracy gets out of hand, there will finally be some sort of crackdown, such as putting Port Royal under quarantine, backed up by Patrol blockade.
As an alternative scenario, when things get out of hand Port Royal gets proactive and goes legit, perhaps establishing its own Patrol to clean out freelancers. Set a thief to capture a thief!
Ferrell:
I hadn't thought about the OTV 'going about its business' getting shot up and/or boarded after it delivered its 'cargo' of pirates, but you're probably right. Centuries ago, Jamaica was once a center of piracy and eventually did just as you suggest would happen to our future Port Royal; go legit or have its patrons withdraw their support and protection. Of course, if the OTV was just a 'robot-for-hire' type, then it may not really be worth shooting it up or even boarding it...the owners wouldn't know who was going to reprogram it after they rented it out for what they thought was legimate commerice..or, at least, they could claim they thought that.
Ian Moulding:
Or...
There is no Space Patrol. There is a single overarching Federation that controls space, be it the UN or whatever, but Earth is just as heavily balkanized as it is today. The space-controlling Federation acts as a proxy for the collective efforts of the nations that back it. This sort of situation depends on all the great powers of the era wanting to avoid an arms race in space while still having access to the resources of space.
The Federation's main job is to license large corporations to exploit space resources. It also runs a ships registry, provides technical licenses for ship crews, and other administrative tasks, but its main job is to collect fees and taxes from the corporations.
Some of these corporations are owned outright by national governments, others are nationally-owned through shell companies, and some are privately owned. There's a real mix of competing interests out there. All of these companies have private security, mainly to protect their assets from corporate espionage and disgruntled employees but also because there are a lot of expensive assets floating around with no central authority to guard them.
And in this setting it's also common for small highly maneuverable craft to approach larger craft. The corporations don't trust important data to broadcast media, and tightbeam communications can be intercepted by virtual-antennae nanoclouds without totally blocking the beam (Technobabble and handwavium in one sentence!). Pirate craft look just like couriers and packet ships, and if you bribe the right person at the security firm you can even get the proper approach codes.
Earth-Moon space and the busy Lagrange points are good places to approach a victim. Depending on how developed the setting is the Jupiter and Saturn systems might also have a piracy problem. There might also be enough traffic around Earth-Mars cyclers to support piracy.
A pirate base could be a station, cycler, or transfer vehicle owned by a supposedly legit company. Said company is actually backed by a national intelligence agency, coalition of companies, or other backer. Whatever the backer is, it can have a variety of motives — Disrupting a rival's activities, capturing a key piece of information or technology, or distracting attention from some other activity. And there can be multiple pirate havens, all backed by different players.
And no one nation on Earth can take any large-scale actions against piracy. There are too many interests at stake. It would take a majority of the great powers acting in (relative) cooperation to change the system without sparking a war. As long as piracy stays small, it will remain a valuable tool for the corporate and national players in space.
It's an unstable situation, but unstable situations make for fun story backdrops.
Ferrell:
And just to further confuse things, there will probably be pirates (criminals) and privateers (backed by Letters of Reprisal and Marquee); which is which are closely held secrets.
Ian Moulding:
Thinking about it, the term 'piracy' and romantic images of the age of sail are probably part of why 'hard' SF writers dismiss the idea of space piracy. The image invoked is one of a pirate ship approaching a victim on the high seas, far from help where no one can see what's happening... But in space everyone knows there's no such thing as stealth*.
Replace the term 'piracy' with 'hijacking'. Cargo vehicles are hijacked on a regular basis in the Western world, on brightly light streets and highways, with GPS broadcasting their positions.
* Part of the problem is that a lot of people confuse the ideas of strategic stealth (The inability to hide large-scale maneuvers) with tactical stealth (The ability to misdirect sensors or break target locks for a few seconds). And there's a lot you can do with strategic misdirection. Just look at the build-up to D-Day.
Rick Robinson:
Ian — I like that scenario. Easy to imagine an International Space Authority that doesn't really have much authority. In this situation the Patrol is likely to be mainly an emergency rescue organization, and even if their craft have some armament, how many ships do they have? Even Earth orbital space is a big place, let alone the rest of the Solar System.
Mars orbital space, Jupiter space, cyclers — anywhere with lots of traffic and no strong overarching authority. If authority is blurred enough you can also get the ambiguities Ferrell mentions. Whether a particular grab is piracy, privateering, or official arrest can depend on perspective!
Our familiar image of piracy definitely produces misleading preconceptions! Truth to be told, even most Golden Age piracy was by small craft operating near lawless coasts. Big quasi-warships like the Black Pearl were very much the exception. William Kidd's Adventure Galley was a similar ship. (The filmmakers perhaps had her in mind — I was impressed that they showed her using oars!) But Kidd was a highly ambiguous character, and Adventure Galley was actually an antipirate design.
In space, though, I suspect that even grand scale piracy — AKA irregular warfare — will happen in crowded space, not out in the middle of nowhere.
The comment about stealth is very well taken. Anyone remember Heinlein's Between Planets? The Venus rebels send troops aboard commandeered space liners to seize Circum-Terra space station. That is a perfectly viable operation, and can as easily be piratical as military — or have elements of both.
Ian Moulding:
1 — I think we just found the viable setting for human-piloted space fighters. As Carla said — Close quarters, crowded conditions, difficulty telling friend from foe, split-second life and death decisions, all in a boiling cauldron of politics and money. What sane government would leave those decisions up to an AI programmed by the lowest bidder? Small fighter craft piloted by officers trained to deal with hostage situations make sense.
2 — Pirate havens. Given the way legal authority is subdivided, leased out, and just plain sold in the sort of setting we're discussing, any station or orbital platform can be a pirate haven at least once. Station A impounds a craft from Station B for smuggling. Station B security intercepts a craft owned by the same company that owns Station A and demands the release of the craft impounded by Station A. But the cargo from that craft was actually owned by a government-backed corporation that owns Station C. Said government issues a letter of marque and reprisal allowing ships from Station C to intercept craft from Station A and sues Station B for losses. Meanwhile the mafia bribe a dock worker to let them into the impound area, and the cargo from that first impounded ship vanishes into the night.
The International Space Authority personnel give up and go get drunk.
3 — It can't be all crazy all the time, or no one would work there no matter how much it paid. But the major decisions are probably made in back on Earth, between the great powers that control space. For the most part living and working in space is pretty quiet, but when things go wrong there's a real sense of powerlessness. The space cops are almost entirely mall-cops or corporate security, with a few armed marshals guarding important craft. And nothing gets done without a conference call back to Earth.
4 — This is essentially a variant of the cyberpunk idea of corporate governance, and the idea of full-time criminals in this system amuses me. In this set-up everyone either works for one of the corporations, or for the International Space Authority, or is an observer from one of the Earth-based powers. A full-time criminal would be like a cubicle worker who spends 8 hours a day 5 days a week stealing office supplies, downloading corporate data onto portable media for sale on the black market, clogging the company intranet with spyware, letting people into the company vehicle pool, and dealing drugs in the staff lounge, and still aces all his performance reviews.
5 — You can still have space colonies in this setting. In this case a group of colonists would register as a corporation and lease a set of resources from the International Space Authority. As long as they pay their corporate taxes no one will care how they live their lives out on some backwater cluster of asteroids.
6 — The situation lasts until:
One great power becomes dominant on Earth, and can clear up the situation in space.
One coalition of space-based powers becomes strong enough to create an anti-pirate patrol and make the powers back home accept the patrol.
The people who live and work in space stop identifying with the green hills of Earth, start identifying with the habitats of Jupiter Trojan L4 (Or wherever), and become willing to shoot anyone who tries to argue the point.
All of the above.
Carla:
Ian's situation seems to me to be somewhat reminiscent of the Border reivers on the Anglo-Scottish border in the 16th century. That situation of blackmail, theft and violence carried on, with both governments and their officials either helpless or complicit, until 1603 when England and Scotland came under a unified crown for the first time (James I/VI). Whereupon James' government suddenly had an incentive to clear up the Border, and did so in a surprisingly short time.
Rick Robinson:
Ian — LOTS to chew on in that last reply! But on the first point, while this type of setting definitely puts humans at the front of the loop, I don't think it produces classical style 'space fighters.' The minimum crew for a boarding & inspection type mission would be (at a guess) three: a pair to board, watching each other's backs, and a third who stays aboard the patrol craft with a finger on the All Hell Breaks Loose button.
But this parallels your point about the familiar pirate image misleading us. The familiar image of space war is essentially (post-1588) sea battles on steroids. Real space conflict might be an entirely different beast, more like police work that occasionally explodes into urban warfare between rival cops.
I'm not even going to try to discuss the other points here in the comment thread, because it goes to the whole question of power politics in space. Which is, shall we say, a big question. :-)
Ian Moulding:
Carla: Yeah, there are a lot of similarities there. There are also similarities to policing in the 18th and 19th Century, particularly in New York City where police from rival boroughs used to fight in turf battles. Rival private firefighting groups also used to brawl over who had the right to put out housefires.
For that matter, think stagecoach robberies in the American West or highwaymen in England. When you really think about it, the peace and quiet of the 20th Century seems to be the anomaly here.
Rick: Who says the space fighter is firing missiles? Put the boarding crew (2 guys at a minimum, a squad of 4—6 may be more likely) into rocket-propelled space armour, give them harnesses with forced-entry gear, and fire 'em from an exterior missile rack. I wouldn't want to do that job — But I don't want to do a HALO jump either.
I've been driving myself nuts for months trying to set up a politically and economically viable setting for space piracy, and suddenly it all falls into place. I just ran a few basic spreadsheets and even a slow rate of space development produces a viable piracy threat by the mid-21st Century. The powersats produce 2% of Earth's power, the space population is 0.0001% of Earth's, and space mining provides maybe 5% of Earth's material needs. As long as no one hijacks one of the helium-3 tankers the great powers on Earth just don't care what happens. On the other hand, over 80% of the space population has spent the majority of their lives working, training, and living in space. They definitely care.
Space Piracy is a common science fiction trope. It has been continuously derided in Hard Science Fiction as silly and a holdover of the 'Space is an Ocean' analogy.
But is it really that unrealistic to have space pirates? Let's find out.
Pirates want to gain something from the attack worth their time and the risk they take. Unless the reward is cash, they need to convert their gains into money. They then want to spend and enjoy that money without having to be constantly on the run from police authorities.
One prominent modern example of how critical these rules are to piracy is the situation off the coast of Somalia between 1986 and 2013.
In 1986, a devastating civil war started following the brutal crackdown of an aging tyrant on his population. Government institutions ceased to function, rebel and gangs organized themselves into armed groups and the Somalian Navy disbanded.
Fishermen felt the toll of illegal dumping and pollution of their fishing waters and saw their livelihoods at risk of disappearing too.
Together, this situation allowed for numerous men equipped with AK-47s and RPGs to get a hand on fleets of small boats and fishing trawlers and have free reign of the seas... the very same seas that saw a constant, rich stream of ships laden with cargo containers entering or leaving the Indian Ocean through the Suez canal.
These men attacked those ships.
Now pirates, they had practically no opposition either at sea or on land. Shipping companies paid ransoms on their crews and whatever the tiny bounty their boats could carry back was traded with unscrupulous merchants. This money was then shared between the pirate crew, the pirates' patrons, bribes for officials, the cost of fuel and new boats, and with the fishermen and their families. Often the Somalian pirates were seen as benefactors of the fishing villages.
The pirates were earning millions, at little cost and with no real risk. Their rewards arrived directly in bank accounts or in cash from jewellery, mobile phones and other high-value items stolen while on-board the cargo containers: these are easily sold. Finally, there was no real police or government authority to enforce any sort of law on the pirates. All the requirements for piracy were met.
The pirates had grown to attack thousands of ships a year, and were demanding ransoms measured in the millions per ship. The world's navies were given permission to violate Somalia's waters as needed in the pursuit of pirates. US warships now patrolled the waters, along with contributions from more than twenty nations, including Japan and New Zealand. The cargo ships were equipped with water cannons, safe rooms and armed guards. Somalian anti-piracy initiatives raided pirate hideouts, confiscated weapons and created Maritime Police Forces.
US Navy destroyers looking for pirates
The risks increased considerably. Failed attacks now could lead to pirates being shot by US Marines or detained and trialled in foreign countries. These stories scared many and forced the rest to travel further and further in search of unprotected prey, so costs increased too. Shipping companies became less inclined to pay millions to recover their crews and instead called in the warships to handle the situation. Satellites trained on the region could follow even fleeing pirates, to be plucked out of the water by helicopter or to be intercepted upon their return to the shore.
Rates of Piracy
The end of an era
The requirements for piracy were no longer being met. And thus, there have been no successful attacks on cargo ships off the Horn of Africa since 2012.
Numerous examples throughout history can be analysed in light of these requirements to understand why piracy was prevalent or not. The most famous examples, such as the Pirates of the Caribbean, the Barbary Pirates and the Qing Pirates, were all the result of situations that met these requirements.
Pirates have attacked horse carriages, trucks, trains, ships and planes. Space is an entirely different environment and presents new challenges for meeting the requirements for piracy.
We will assume for now that we are considering piracy in our Solar System, where most solid bodies are inhabited by permanent populations of various sizes that trade significant volumes of goods across interplanetary distances.
Travel between the planets is cheap enough for bulk goods to be worthwhile (large quantities of raw material), yet the cost of propellant is not negligible and is an important variable in the profitability of shipping companies.
Due to the danger a accident a collision poses at interplanetary velocities, either to the spaceships or to space stations, either directly or through the debris created, omnipresent surveillance and tracking of all objects larger than a centimeter is the norm throughout the Solar System. The implication is that all spaceships are weapons of mass destruction while in operation and are treated as such.
We will consider how changing these assumptions will affect piracy in space, but for now we will work with a realistic, 'near-future' setting.
Finding a target
This is not a trivial task, and it is a crucial step to making piracy happen at all.
Pirates are parasites on any economy, and so prolific piracy requires a large host. The consequence is that for every pirate operation, there are hundreds, thousands or more, legitimate traders and businesses running transport ships between across the Solar System.
Due to the significant delay between a cargo being ordered and it reaching its destination, measured in weeks, months to years, it is only possible to make a profit upon arrival by correctly predicting the market conditions weeks, months to years ahead: the timing of these deliveries is crucial. This is exacerbated by the fact that the cheapest shipping involves infrequent deliveries of massive quantities of goods all at once, with a significant 'dumping' effect on the markets at the destination.
The dangers inherent in space travel require that every spaceship declare its flight plan and time of departure ahead of time. This prevents a nasty collision between spaceships that leads to a shower of debris hosing down densely-occupied orbits and littering busy trajectories between planets.
As merchants are unable to hide their timings, they will insist on privacy on the nature and quantity of good being shipped. A competitor with that sort of information would be able to short sell the markets, undercut prices or place well-timed buy orders that steal profits away from the shipping company.
A delivery of iron or platinum would look pretty identical from the transport ship's outside, and it becomes impossible to distinguish the goods being transported at long distances, through a telescope for example.
Pirates would need to glean this information from three sources: the transport authority's inspection reports, spying operations or from the internal communications between the shipping company's agents.
Piracy cannot happen in space without this sort of detailed information. It is too expensive in terms of time, effort, propellant and simple risk to intercept potential targets blindly.
Therefore, it is required to make piracy work that there is some possibility of hacking, bribery, infiltration and other information collection methods being both effective and undetectable.
Intercepting the target
The next challenge is to actually get to the target once it is in flight and outside of the safe haven of the port or space-station it departed from.
The major problem is the ubiquitous tracking of spaceships.
If every ship is under observation, any pirate attack will be witnessed by everyone. Any spaceship deviating from its planned trajectory would be flagged as a potential threat to everyone around them and to anything in their path. This is similar to how aircraft are tracked today when flying over North America or Western Europe.
If the pirates conduct an attack, they will be recorded in the act and watched intensely wherever they go. A military spaceship might be sent after them, or they will be greeted by the police once they dock at a space station or other port.
In space, every increase or decrease in velocity, or change in trajectory, requires propellant. Matching a trajectory with a target usually involves accelerating towards the target, and then slowing down until the relative velocity reaches zero. As a consequence, pirate spaceships must have a higher deltaV capacity than their target in the best of cases.
The target will notice a spaceship speeding towards it due to the previous fact, usually from millions of kilometers away. It will start to accelerate to try and
escape.
For every meter of second gained by the target, the pirates will need 1m/s to catch up and another 1m/s to slow down after the attack. The pirates will need more than twice the deltaV of any target they attempt to run down.
For example, if a target travelling at 20km/s has a 25km/s deltaV reserve to slow down at its destination and maneuver, and is equipped with a rocket engine that has an exhaust velocity of 30km/s (Isp 3058s), then its mass ratio started off at 4.48 and is now 2.3. For every kilogram of dry mass, the target spaceship is carrying 3.48 to 1.3kg of propellant.
Expendable propellant tanks helps achieve high mass ratios
A pirate spaceship attempting to catch this spaceship must first reach the 20km/s the target is travelling at, run down its 25km/s deltaV reserve, then slow down from 45km/s to stop. If it has similar engines as its target, it must start with a mass ratio of 20. For every kilogram of dry mass, it must bring along 19kg of propellant: it is over 95% just a stack of propellant tanks!
Due to how the Rocket Equation works, doubling the deltaV capacity of a spaceship requires that the mass ratio be SQUARED.
There might be a slight chance to stage an 'accidental intercept' and catch the target in without having to ride around on propellant balloons, but it will only work once, and for a very short period of time.
There is a solution to this critical problem with space piracy: Stealth.
If the watchful eyes of police and military sensors cannot detect the pirate ship, then it is free to do whatever it pleases. It can approach its targets unannounced, attack them in complete secrecy, and return to the base of operations without being tracked or followed.
Stealth in Space was covered in a four-part series earlier in the blog. The gist of it is that detection in space happens when a spaceship reflects sunlight, has a thermal signature or bounces radio waves off its hull. Sensors available even today can track even the smallest amount of reflected light, the lowest temperatures and the faintest radar returns over extreme distances. So, the avoid detection, a spaceship must be perfectly non-reflective, have an undetectable heat signature and have no radar return.
Each requirement is met in turn by a Vantablack non-reflective coating, a system of heat pumps and liquid hydrogen heat sinks that cool down the hull exterior to the cosmic background temperature, and an insulating sheath around any metallic component.
A pirate spaceship that incorporates these elements into its design can achieve 'hard' stealth: it would be physically impossible to detect unless it is on top of its targets.
Spaceship using mass driver for propulsion
Maneuvering while 'running cold' is accomplished through any sort of thruster that expels very low temperature exhaust. Cold gas thrusters are one example, mass drivers are another. Curved nozzles with extreme expansion ratios can be fitted to a conventional 'hot' thruster to expand the exhaust until it cools down into untraceable gases.Stealth has another benefit: if the target does not know that the pirates are coming, they will not know to run away until it is too late. It will not have the opportunity to expend all of its deltaV, and so the pirate ship's deltaV requirements fall to those of typical transport ships.This undetectable spaceship design, called the Hydrogen Steamer for its use of boiling liquid hydrogen, does have drawbacks. It requires very large amounts of liquid hydrogen, which is not very dense. This makes even the lowest endurance Hydrogen Steamers very massive. For example, handling 10kW of room-temperature waste heat requires that 2.3 grams per second of liquid hydrogen be boiled off. If the spaceship attempts to hide for six months, it will require a reserve of 36 tons, which has a volume of 517m^3. This is a cylinder 3m wide and 73m long!
Covering this large volume in carbon nanotubes might be a very expensive affair, depending on the level of manufacturing technology the pirates have access to. Cryogenic heat pumps that can operate at 20 Kelvin and lower might not be readily accessible at kilowatt power levels either. Preventing the hydrogen over long periods of time from escaping is no easy task either.
Furthermore, the low temperature exhaust requirement imposes a performance penalty on the spaceship's propulsion. Covertly matching the trajectory a target spaceship will require boiling away huge amounts of liquid hydrogen to cover the increased waste heat production from using propulsion systems.
The difficulty or ease with which stealth is achieved depends on what the pirates expect to get away with.
If the pirates are under a total surveillance and must evade the concerted efforts of every nation's military forces, they will need complete end-to-end stealth. A dedicated 'Hydrogen Steamer' design is required.
If the pirates operate out of locations with less stringent surveillance, sparse military forces and traffic control that doesn't ask questions about the pirate vessel's suspicious features, they can choose to use stealth only intermittently. Accelerating into a trajectory that takes them somewhere near their target can be done in plain sight, using normal propulsion. Liquid hydrogen is consumed only to hide the pirates as they fine-tune using 'cold' propulsion an intercept with their target to conduct the attack, after which they return to regular traffic as if nothing had happened.
Port Royal was a pirate haven
Depending on how long the pirates need to maintain stealth, the spaceship they need might only need to carry small amounts of liquid hydrogen - small enough that they look like regular propellant tanks. The pirate vessel can then pass off as a merchant ship or fast transport and transit high-surveillance zone without worry.
Making money - Types of attack
So the pirate ship catches its target. At the intercept, it may still be hundreds to thousands of kilometers distant from its target, and pirates' victims remain completely unaware of the situation.
From Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean
How does this intercept become a pirate attack? In fact, it heavily depends on how the pirates hope to make money.
The easiest way to make money is to ransom a crew.
The vast majority of private entities will feel obligated to pay for the safe return of their employees if they wish to maintain their reputation - those that don't will quickly see themselves out of business. Ransoming a crew in space doesn't require boarding parties: all is required is that the pirates have a means of putting the crew's life at risk. This can be as simply as threatening to punch a few holes in the hull, or shining a laser on the radiators. Pirates might sit a few hundred kilometers away from the target and demonstrate their ability to do damage. They then establish a communication channel with the shipping company and start negotiations.
A manned spaceship usually means that the goods being transported need human attention or supervision: high-value items, confidential data etc.
Spanish merchants returning from South America laden with gold were prime targets
Pirates might have knowledge of these and demand that they be handed over: in addition to a ransom, they commit theft (or take hostages).Theft in space is more complicated. The pirates must physically interact with their victims, and need the cooperation of the crew to some degree. Depending on how well the pirates threaten their victims, they can convince the crew that handing over the precious cargo is of less dire consequence than resisting the pirates.
Release a cargo container or we will shoot!
By Luke Berliner
If it is impossible to guarantee the crew's cooperation over the radio, then the pirates might escalate to dealing damage to their target, or even attempting a boarding action.
A distinction must be made between 'boarding' that forces a docking, but can be foiled indefinitely with a burst of the maneuvering thrusters, 'boarding' that destructively creates another point of entry into the target's hull, which puts the victims at considerable risk and might convince them to fight back, and non-penetrative 'boarding' that involves latching onto a spaceship's exterior and interacting with it from the outside. The latter method is the safest for both parties involved and of greatest interest if for example the victims' spaceship has a depressurized cargo bay that can be accessed and stolen from without touching the habitation sections.
Another valuable prize for the pirates is any passengers onboard the target spaceship.
Passengers can be taken hostage and ransomed back to their families or employers. These ransom negotiations can take place along different channels than those for between the spaceship crew and the shipping company. It is in the pirates' interest that they keep their hostages safe and unharmed — this maintains their value during negotiations.
However, pirates might decide to take their hostages onboard their own vessel so that they can escape under stealth before the authorities arrive without having to abandon their prize.
Pirates might try to make money off the target spaceship itself. It might be the only option if the pirates intercept an unmanned transport that does not carry any valuables or passengers. While it is unlikely that the spaceship can be carried away and sold whole (unless it is modular), there are valuable components and parts that can be sold on the black market: rocket engines, nuclear fuel or navigational computers, for example.
Finally, if pirates can intercept and even board a target, it might not be much more difficult to take control of the spaceship. This is hijacking.
Hijacking a spaceship allows pirates to make money even if their target was unmanned, carried no valuables or passengers and was made up of only parts with no re-sale value.
There are three things that pirates can do with a hijacked spaceship: re-route, disable or turn into a weapon.
Re-routing a spaceship ensures that it arrives at a different destination (such as a dock where corrupt porters will steal its cargo), or takes much longer to arrive at its intention. A delay in shipping can create market movements that financially savvy pirates can exploit: it can reduce a company's stock value, force the payment of non-delivery fines, increase the price of a good due to artificial scarcity or manipulate market options and bets to the pirates' benefit.
Disabling a spaceship forces the shipping company to spend money (and huge amounts of propellant) to retrieve it before it goes too far or even leaves the Solar System. This is interesting if the pirates are working in conjunction with a corrupt recovery business, or if it is part of a ploy to increase the value of a ransom.
As mentioned above, any spaceship travelling at interplanetary velocities is a weapon of mass destruction. A hijacked spaceship can be pointed at a space station or colony to cause a huge loss of life and materiel... or the pirates can be paid a huge amount of money proportionate to the 'savings' from having the spaceship returned to its original trajectory. Larger settlements are therefore likely to pay more. They are likely to have defenses to shoot down asteroids and rogue spaceships, but there is little they can do against an unmanned ship hauling thousands of tons of rocks or ices, especially if the pirates hide traces of the hijacking until the last possible moment.
It is where the pirates service their vessels, offload their bounties and stage their attacks. This implies that the base is able to provide propellant and fuels, replacement parts and repairs, fresh crew and information gathering services, secure storage, a method of moving stolen goods to black markets (or has its own marketplace), and most important of all, protection from the authorities. The protection for the pirates can be accomplished through stealth (the entire base is undetectable), weaponry (the base is not worth assaulting) or some sort of immunity (the base is located somewhere the authorities are unable to exercise their power).
Whether it takes the form of a pirate haven, a hidden space station or a reliance on their own infrastructure depends on the technological assumptions.
Barbary Station by R. E. Stearns
If the pirates cannot repair their own spaceship or obtain their own propellant, they will need a full-scale port that provides these services. If instead they can 3D-print most of the components they need and can scoop up propellant through In-Situ Resource Utilization, then they are much less beholden to any single location.
Base embedded in a comet
In practice, most pirates will need access to all three types of bases. Even the most self-sufficient pirates will need a way to sell stolen goods, and even the most dependant pirates can gather more propellant and parts, at the very least by stealing them off their victims' spaceships.
Alternative pirates
So far, we have assumed that the pirates must travel in a vessel of their own, physically approaching a target and conducting an attack that they must then escape from under stealth. This is only a slight modification to the traditional sci-fi trope of Space Pirates, themselves a version of the romantic notion of Pirates of the High Seas converted to take place in Space.
By that assumption, pirates are a group of space-going criminals skirting the law with specialized vessels.
In reality, there are a broader range of options that match the true definition of 'piracy', which is any robbery or violence that targets ships in transit.
Therefore, it is just as likely that we might have pirates that stay at home and try to remotely hack through the electronic defenses of their victims' spaceship. This sort of pirate is featured in Corsair by James L. Cambias. If they cannot get through these defenses, they can instead remotely control a drone ship to their target. This drone ship doesn't even have to be exciting: it can be a micro-satellite equipped with a radio, hooks and manipulators.
The drone can use its manipulators to access any exposed electronics, sensors or communications devices to bypass the electronic defenses and hijack the target. If even this is too difficult, the pirates can simply install a bomb on-board the drone and inform the crew that if they do not follow instructions, it will go off.
This micro-satellite is much easier to hide using stealth than any large manned ship. It can flit around docked spaceships and latch itself onto a target's hull before it has even launched. Intercepting a target in deep space is also easier, as a micro-satellite does not need a big engine or huge amounts of propellant.
Remotely or through these drone, the pirates can make money through most of the methods mentioned before with no risk to themselves. In fact, it is more realistic that 'pirates' are simply criminals that disperse dozens to hundreds of these miniature drones to multiply their chances of intercepting a rich target.
The other assumption, that the pirates are criminal groups, can be challenged as well.
The pirates might simply be contracted commerce raiders. This is a legitimate method of waging war, and pirates that fall under this definition have been known as privateers throughout history. Privateers act like pirates, but only against the enemies of the nation that is sponsoring them.
Privateering solves most of the complications that pirates in space have: they have a secure base of operations, they do not have to hide themselves in friendly territory and will not be hunted all the way base to their base of operations if caught. Captured spaceships can be diverted to the sponsor nation's ports to be sold whole or in pieces.
German WWII U-Boats conducted commerce raiding expeditions throughout the war
However, the number of potential targets is more limited than for true pirates Their sponsorship can be revoked if they do not follow the rules, or if the conflict ends. They will also be actively hunted as a military target and are unlikely to win fights against true warships.
There is also a type of pirate that is a criminal, but has nothing to fear from the authorities: the corporate raider.
The East India Company practically had its own military, and its rule was law
Corporation in space will compete at every level for control of the markets. This competition can spill over into illegal activities, such as attacking competitors' spaceships and raiding their commerce to ruin reputations or steal sensitive information. Between the enormity of space and the amount of money corporations have on hand to spend on bribes, a lot of these illegal activities can be hidden.
In short, these corporations can hire off-the-book crews to acts as pirates that attack only the spaceships of their competitors. They will be protected from the consequences if they follow these rules, but left to the authorities if they breach the terms of their contract.
A competitor might be frustrated by police and military inaction, and might decide to take matters in its own hands by hiring its own pirates and pirate-hunters. There is even less of a chance that military forces intervene in 'red on red' conflict, even if it escalates into corporate warfare.
The main difference between corporate warfare and true piracy is that the corporate pirates are unlikely to gain any money by ransoming their victims, as the corporations have nothing to lose from writing off their responsibilities, and are unlikely to target major settlements by using spaceships as WMDs, as this will draw in attention from the authorities that cannot be bribed away.
Up next
So far, we have looked at what is needed in a setting to allow piracy to take place and even prosper. Pirates in space can be glamorous raiders that slip in and out using undetectable spaceships cooled to cryogenic temperatures, or mundane criminals working from home using remote-controlled drones.
Next, we will discuss the countermeasures that will be developed to combat piracy, and what effects this will have in terms of worldbuilding.
The practice of piracy involves more than a crippling shot, a boarding party, and a swift escape into the blackness of space. Even pirates must obey certain laws: the laws of economics, ecology, and political reality. Piracy has flourished in particular places, and follows a progression from simple outlawry to organized business (sometimes to the formalized status of privateer). Mutineers, hijackers, and other "wildcatting" pirates appear dashing, but successful long-term piracy requires intelligent, planned adaptation to conditions, like any other enterprise. In the words of the overused phrase, "there are old pirates and bold pirates, but there are few old, bold pirates."
The major feature distinguishing the business of piracy from the merchant's trade is its systematic acceptance of illegal violence to enhance the normal effort to buy low and sell high. Under certain conditions, the pirate entrepreneur may slip freely back into the merchant role. Like the merchant, the pirate requires a ship, a crew, a source of goods, and a market in which to sell them. He faces the same risks of accident, malfunction, and remoteness from aid in a crisis. His routine varies only as dictated by his status as an outlaw.
Poverty, mutiny, other crimes, or temperament can force experienced spacers into piracy as a livelihood. The illegal acquisition of a starship will be a relatively easy task for experienced spacers (albeit rather dangerous). Obvious approaches include hijacking, mutiny, and "skipping;" (ed note: skipping is running away to escape the bank's mortgage on your starship) a successful pirate might someday boast the funds for an outright purchase! An exchange of ships may sometimes be useful, when the crew's current vessel is damaged, "hot," or inadequately equipped.
What sort of ship suits the pirate's needs? The requirements of illicit space travel come into play here. Streamlining is essential for frontier refueling without recourse to port authorities (ed note: in-situ resource utilization, skimming a gas giant's atmosphere to get free fuel). Nav-tapes must be available from a "generate" program in the ship's computer. The jump-drive should be sufficient for rapid travel, but not so large as to require excessive crew. Piracy itself dictates hardpoints and turrets, plus space for cargo and captives (perhaps in low berths) (ed note: suspended animation). Superior avionics will detect nearby ships and altered transponders(ed note: to broadcast a fake ship ID) will lull the suspicions of both victims and police. Forged papers are, of course, a necessity if the ship is to survive long in patrolled space.
Realistically, very few pirate vessels will have all (or even a majority) of these facets. Scout/Couriers and Far traders will be most common in the "trade," with their integral hardpoints, streamlining, and jump 2 capability. Without bank payments, the costs of operating a starship are low: fuel can be skimmed from gas giants or remote oceans, and even a minor success will generate the few tens of thousands of credits needed for the crew, life-support, and maintenance. Prizes can be stripped of costly equipment or sold intact to illegal buyers. Kidnapping for ransom, extortion, and the fencing of valuable cargo can offer other sources of cash. There are major problems, however. Access to facilities, not their expense, is the key to on-going piracy. Basic ships stores can be extorted from casual traffic, purchased under a "cover" identity, or delivered through a second ship (willingly or under duress). Annual maintenance and repairs of battle damage will require lengthy stops in a class A or B port. Battle damage can be difficult to explain to port authorities (bear in mind that not everyone can be bribed, and not all those who can will stay bought). Secure maintenance can be a difficult and expensive proposition, and such bases will delimit the natural "ranges" of successful pirates. Without secure bases of operation, pirates will lead a hand-to-mouth existence, extorting or conning their way through groundside repairs, always one jump ahead of the fleet, having to abandon vessels with great frequency or operating unreliable ships increasingly prone to dangerous malfunctions. Pirates with such handicaps will be no match for the local authorities, armed merchantmen, or jealous rivals.
Personnel must be taken into consideration as well. Few ship's crew will care to spend their entire lives onboard ship, slowly accumulating money. Ship's crew must be given rest and recreation in port at frequent intervals, or they will soon desert or mutiny. In addition, pirate crews are not renowned for their high moral fiber or their extreme loyalty. Many a second-in-command has "promoted" himself with murder. Many crewmembers will get revenge for a slight (real or imagined) by betraying their ship and turning state's evidence. A captain who took command by mutiny could very well have set the precedent for his own downfall.
Pirates must seek out class A or B star-ports beyond the borders of major states, and controlled by authorities too weak or too immoral to bar suspected criminals from their facilities.
Pirates must also remember the cardinal rule: don't get greedy. If you become enough of a threat to business, either the business will go away, or somebody (not necessarily the law) will remove you as a threat. No matter how big you are, there's always somebody bigger, and it's usually a good idea not to attract their attention. In seeking prey, cost efficiency directs pirate attention to ports of Class C or better, with their higher volume of traffic. Such ports provide immediate targets for piracy, but also present the danger of a rapid response of authorities. A laden merchant is most securely looted at a distance from its last known location: intimidated. hijacked or lasered into compliance, a ship can be boarded and reprogrammed for jump to a nearby empty system, with time in hyper-space for a leisurely inventory of the take. The main problem with piracy is that a given region can only support so many "predators." If trade is disrupted too much, merchants will avoid the area, and the pirates will "starve." The analogy to nature can be carried further: Shepherds expect a few losses from their flocks as part of the cost of doing business. If wolves begin killing too many sheep, however, the shepherds will find it worth their while to organize a large-scale hunt to wipe the wolves out or drive them away.
Referees should bear in mind that the populations and governments of these worlds will not openly condone piracy, and will help in its extermination if it begins to cut too much into the circulation of trade in the region. Remember, a small, discretely run operation will be the most successful in the long run.
Inspiration can be drawn from the way pirates in the "real world" operated. Research the Caribbean pirates and privateers of the late 1600's and early 17OO's AD. Note in particular the career of Henry Morgan, a pirate/privateer for the first part of his career, then a pirate-catcher for the British in his later life.
Sailors and pirates—“Arrr!”—are a natural pairing in many swashbuckling adventure stories. Traditional sea pirate stories were often inspired by the European merchant trade with the East and Spanish trade with the New World. During the 18th century, it took about six months for a merchant ship to travel from London to Calcutta via the Cape of Good Hope. Cargos therefore, had to be durable, portable, and valuable. Valuable cargos in heavily-laden, slow-moving cargo ships were a favorite prey of pirates and other brigands. Pirates and pirate stories made an easy transition to the emerging science fiction market, appearing in juvenile and adult science fiction stories. We saw pirates in the movies, on television, and in our SF literature. It did not matter if the protagonist was a pirate or fighting pirates, we always knew there would be a chase, a heroic struggle, and at the end, we would share the winner’s exultation. Author David Wesley Hill delivers space pirates—“Jasper takes what Jasper wants”—as well as a hard science take on physics of planetary travel among the rings of Saturn. --- Bascomb James
Serendipity was an old ship. For more than two centuries she had sailed the same slow course from the inner planets to the Jovian moons and out toward the Kuiper Belt, that clot of comets lying between Neptune and Pluto. There, after unloading cargo and picking up freight bound sunward, her crew would adjust Serendipity’s sail, align the spinning prismatic circle of Kapton19(tm) at an angle to the distant solar orb, and begin the decade-long spiral back toward the heart of the system. Serendipity had made eleven such round-trip voyages.
“Everything’s clean for fifteen hundred klicks,” she said.
“Leshawn?” (Captain) D’Angelo (Jones) asked.
His niece’s second husband was at the weapons console. “Fore and aft cannons loaded with buckshot, D’Angelo. Lasers ready.”
They were skimming seventeen hundred kilometers above the rings of Saturn, a vast uneasy ocean that stretched below them into infinity. Rivers of color, glinting silver and gold and crimson and umber, writhed into view and disappeared astern.
Saturn was off the starboard bow. Although it was still a hundred thousand kilometers distant, the immense brown and yellow hemisphere subtended a quarter of the sky.
Serendipity would approach Saturn within eighteen thousand klicks, entering a shallow orbit meant to fling her away into space like a stone from a slingshot. Only by leveraging such a gravitational assist from the gas giant could they hope to reach the Kuiper Belt. The efficiency of a solar sail was, unfortunately, directly proportional to its distance from the sun.
“Whole lot of debris ahead, D’Angelo.” Letty studied her console. “Pebbles. A dozen pieces a meter in diameter.”
“Range one thousand, two hundred eighty klicks,” Leshawn said. “Locked on and standing by.”
“Clear a path,” Jones ordered.
The rings of Saturn were composed of rock, dirt, and ice, trillions upon trillions of pieces varying in size from particles of smoke to floating mountains. Most fell toward the low end of this spectrum. The rings surrounded the planet in a belt almost three hundred thousand kilometers in diameter yet they had an average thickness of a single kilometer and sometimes their width could be measured in hundreds of meters. Occasionally, however, plumes of debris would be knocked out of the rings, either by collision with other particles or simply through some peculiarity of gravitational interaction. This created navigational hazards for ships approaching the planet.
Leshawn triggered his weapons. Beams of coherent light lanced out. The debris in their path exploded into mist.
“All clear,” he said.
“Beatrice?” Jones asked.
“Orbital insertion in four minutes, thirty seconds.”
“Steady as she goes.”
Jones gazed warily through the clear dome of the bridge out at the kilometers of sail, brilliant against the jet backdrop of space. Rock, dirt, and ice weren’t the only perils facing the old ship during its traverse of Saturn. The rings were inhabited by tribes of piratical aborigines, the descendents of castaways, outcasts, and criminals, who enjoyed nothing better than hijacking passing solar sails, robbing them of cargo, and enslaving the passengers and crew.
These vermin lived in caves that they hollowed out in larger pieces of ring material. They mined iron, copper, lead, and other metals from the infinite expanse of detritus and refined the ore by hand, casting it into the machinery necessary to survive in vacuum. They breathed oxygen extracted from water ice through electrolysis, which also provided hydrogen to fuel their rockets. Since the sun at this distance was too feeble to support plant growth, they polished acres of ice to reflective smoothness, aligned these mirrors in huge fields, and concentrated the sunlight to an intensity sufficient for hydroculture. Even so protein was scarce in the rings. That was another reason the scum took captives.
Unfortunately, despite their primitive level of technology, the aborigines were a real danger. Over the years Serendipity had been attacked seven times during her passages of Saturn.
“More debris to starboard,” Letty announced.
“Clear a path.”
“Two minutes, six seconds.”
“Hold her steady.”
Serendipity, like most solar sails, was a freighter. Her cargo consisted of bulk goods and durable commodities, items that weren’t sufficiently valuable to warrant the exorbitant cost of shipping aboard a fusion ship and whose worth wouldn’t decrease during the long years of transportation by sail. She was carrying whiskey in bond from the Tarsus distilleries on Io, mining and manufacturing equipment, silk and wool from the Imbrium farms on Luna, and five thousand indentured servants from the urban warrens of Valles Marineris. These were enduring the long haul to the Kuiper Belt in suspended animation, frozen to within degrees of absolute zero. They were strung out behind the ship in translucent capsules that were open to vacuum, insulating their cargo from temperature variation but not providing much else in the way of amenities or safety. On average 97 percent of such passengers survived the crossing alive and undamaged. One percent would die. Two percent would suffer freezer burn of varying severity.
“Twenty-two seconds to insertion. Twenty.”
“Captain—”
The use of his title alerted Jones. “What is it, Letty?”
“Seven degrees to port. Range nine hundred and forty klicks.”
“—Four seconds,” Beatrice was counting down. “Three seconds. Two… one. We have insertion.” His wife’s hands fell away from the helm. Serendipity had made orbit.
“Eight hundred and twenty klicks,” Letty continued. “Eight hundred and ten and closing.” His mother’s cousin shunted data from the optical scanners to the main display, giving them a view of a swarm of rock and ice fragments rising from the plane of the rings toward Serendipity. At this distance the instrumentation had a resolution of twenty meters. It was impossible to decide whether the scene was innocuous or whether it hid some greater danger. “Seven hundred and ninety and closing,” Letty called out. “Relative velocity at point one klick per.”
“Bring it up on infrared,” Jones instructed.
Letty stroked the console, switching the view from the visible spectrum. In this mode space was dark blue. The chunks of ice and rock, scant degrees from zero Kelvin, were only slightly paler. Jones studied the image intently. Nowhere did he see a trace of green or red, yellow or orange, which would indicate living warmth and the presence of enemies.
Still he remained uneasy.
“Bearing?” he asked.
“Should cross our bow by eighty-six klicks.”
“Too close,” Jones muttered. He stared at the screen and then said to Leshawn, “Take out everything larger than a meter.”
His niece’s second husband nodded. “Aye, aye, D’Angelo.”
Leshawn bowed over his board. Once more lasers lanced forth, the forward sections of the beams becoming perceptible each time they found a mark, momentarily delineated in the clouds of steam and dust generated by their impact with the swarm of debris hurtling from the rings. Again the lasers flicked out, creating a nimbus of subliming water and methane vapor mixed with chlorine and fluorine as well as with particles of carbon, iron, and nickel.
Velocity distorted the shape of the cloud into a comma kilometers long. Then this cloud itself detonated, shooting streamers of brilliant fire, bright candles of furious white light fleeing from the maelstrom, and Jones felt a sick twist of tension settle inside his chest, understanding exactly what he was looking at, knowing that it had all been a ruse and that they were under attack. The damned savages had hidden their filthy makeshift rockets in the ring material and the sons of bitches were coming full throttle straight toward his ship.
Evasive action was out of the question. Clutched by Saturn’s gravity, Serendipity would be unable to maneuver until she rounded the vast planet and was flung again toward deep space and the Kuiper Belt. The savages’ timing was perfect.
Jones refused to allow emotion to enter his voice. “Fire at will,” he said.
“Immediately, captain.”
Leshawn fired the guns, filling space ahead of Serendipity with a storm of pellets capable of penetrating the ice and metal out of which the primitives built their frail ships. Unfortunately, Jones knew, it wouldn’t be enough. It never was.
He keyed on the intercom. “Now hear this. Now hear this. All hands to stations. Serendipity is under attack. Prepare to repel boarders.”
Forty-six of the savages’ tiny ships had been concealed among the rock and ice, shielded from visual and infrared detection. Three were destroyed within seconds. Four veered off on tangents at the mercy of malfunctioning control systems. The remaining thirty-nine ships continued on course despite the barrage of buckshot Leshawn threw at them.
At a distance of sixty kilometers their jets fired, braking their velocity relative to Serendipity. Letty pasted a close-up on the main screen, allowing a view of the lead vessel. Its fuel tanks, exhaust chamber, and attitude jets were fashioned from hand-beaten metal. The navigational and electrical systems, however, which were too complex for the savages to manufacture themselves, had been stripped from vessels they had robbed. The rest of the thing was a chunk of ice that had been crudely chiseled into shape, hollowed out, and pressurized. The airlock was a pane of ice that had been frozen to the hull to create an atmosphere seal. It shattered suddenly into a thousand shards, which fled away into space. Distant figures emerged from the ship through the portal now revealed. They fired their thrusters and burned toward Serendipity. Fighting would soon be hand-to-hand.
Jones thumbed on the intercom. “Engagement in seventy-three seconds.”
Beatrice stood down from her console, went to the arms locker, and removed four épées—projectile weapons were, of course, useless at close quarters in microgravity since the recoil would send the shooter tumbling (questionable, but literately dramatic). She handed them out, keeping the last for herself, running the slim graphite blade through a lightning routine, the sword moving almost too quickly to see.
“Ten seconds to engagement,” Letty counted down. “Eight.”
Serendipity’s sail was a round sheet of shimmering Kapton19(tm) 24 kilometers in diameter with a two-kilometer circular hole cut out of its center. Through this projected the main body of the ship, a complicated spindle almost three kilometers long. Joined to each other by shrouds of cable, both sail and superstructure were spinning with a period of 72 seconds. This rotation allowed the sail to maintain its shape without the need for supporting spars or masts, and also generated an artificial gravity of .3G within the ship itself, sufficient to prevent muscular atrophy and skeletal distortion among the crew during their lifetimes lived in space. The bridge extended a hundred meters out from the deck on a spire that was in turn seated on gimbals, an arrangement that allowed it to remain stationary while the rest of the ship spun, providing Jones with a stable vantage point.
The crew—his family, each of them a relative by blood or by marriage—took up positions amidships, abaft of the sail and ten meters clear of the rotating complex of habitats and cargo containers, greenhouses, equipment sheds, hangars, and workshops that comprised the untidy bulk of Serendipity. Others took a stand at the bow, guarding the main portal into the vessel. In the distance, now subtending a third of the sky, Saturn cast a yellow pall over the ship and the tiny figures defending her. Seventeen hundred kilometers away spread the strange and dangerous ocean of the rings, an insane kaleidoscope of chaotic geometry.
Generic solar sail spacecraft. Artwork by Frank Tinsley. Note spining habitat in center of sail.
With appalling suddenness the savages burst through the sail.
Diminished by perspective, the holes they made coming through the Kapton19(tm) seemed no larger than pinpricks in comparison to the vast expanse of sail. But tension widened the punctures, splitting apart the edges in a visible process, the holes engorging into gashes hundreds of meters wide and hundreds of meters long. Only ripstops—seams of denser material overlaid on the Kapton19(tm) at regular intervals—prevented the sail from cleaving asunder.
Most of the invaders struck amidships directly at the crew. Many failed to bleed off their velocity, using themselves as human missiles, sometimes successfully, sometimes with suicidal results. Others hove to in a blinding flourish of personal rocketry to engage the defenders’ graphite épées with their own cruder weaponry: maces, morning stars, and pikes of beaten iron, sabers of ice, and clubs and daggers of rock. Soon bodies were floating limply or thrashing while their fluids evaporated in the vacuum, the integrity of their suits fatally breached. Vaporizing blood cast the desperate scene in an incongruous pink glow.
Smaller parties of savages struck at the bow. One group jetted for the bridge. Jones readied his sword. “Let’s have at the God damned murdering sons of bitches,” he snarled, enraged to blasphemy by what they were doing to his family and to his ship. Beatrice struck the emergency lever, which blew out the airlock, evacuating the bridge of atmosphere. She launched herself into space in a tumble that made her impossible to target as she flew at the savages, careering into them in a deadly flurry and then rebounding at an angle, the tip of her épée crimson.
Jones headed toward the foremost of the approaching party, a tall figure in a black suit emblazoned with stylized skulls of iridescent orange and purple. The savage was wielding a quarterstaff of blue ice with iron spikes embedded in either end. He struck out with the weapon but Jones deflected the blow with the pommel of his sword, slithered the épée around the staff, and ran it into his opponent’s throat, thinking that here was one God cursed barbarian who would see no profit from this day and from the attack on Serendipity. Without drawing breath, Jones leveraged the body to launch himself at another opponent. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Letty and Leshawn skirmishing with their own antagonists. For an instant he caught a glimpse of Beatrice, her pale features set in a feral grin, and then he was wrestling with another of the cannibals. The pirate slit a long gash in Jones’s thigh before the épée slid through the bastard’s heart. Jones slapped a patch over his wound, stanching the discharge of blood and air.
The flare of light from an igniting rocket overcame the softer glow of Saturn. While most of the savages had engaged Serendipity’s crew, others had been cutting cargo containers, hydroponics pods, and similar equipment free of the ship. They had bolted one-shot engines and primitive guidance systems to this booty and were now launching the stuff toward the rings, where others of their tribe were, no doubt, waiting to receive it. This, more than anything that had happened so far—this dismantling of his ship before his very eyes—infuriated Jones. Unable to find his voice, he gestured inarticulately for the others to follow his lead. Thumbing on his jets, he headed for the nearest group of pirates. The scum had detached a dozen suspended-animation capsules from their moorings and were about to consign them into the void. They weren’t after slaves, Jones knew, since the pirates lacked the technology to revive the frozen passengers. But it didn’t take much skill to slice a steak.
Jones didn’t bother to brake. He changed attitude until he was approaching feet-first and let momentum be his weapon. The jolt of collision slammed through him from his boots to his teeth. His target came apart. This effectively killed Jones’s velocity. He lanced out with his épée at another savage but his adversary parried Jones’s thrust with a meter-long cudgel. The riposte caught him just above the faceplate with sufficient force to send him tumbling head over heels into space.
Unconscious.
Three minutes went by before he came to. Choking. Coughing. Lungs on fire. His mask was full of blood from a gash on his brow, a flurry of red globules joining and breaking apart and rejoining in an intricate dance, obscuring his vision and choking him. There was too much fluid for his filtration system to handle. Jones knew he would drown in his own blood unless he took quick action. There was, unfortunately, only one thing he could do.
He had ten seconds in which to do it. That was how long a man could remain conscious in vacuum.
Jones retched out the liquid he had inspired and screwed his eyes shut to prevent ice crystals from forming on them. Exposure to vacuum chilled the body as moisture on the skin evaporated. He exhaled, emptying his lungs, and stretched his mouth wide open. This would prevent damage to his lungs when atmosphere rushed from them. Not allowing himself time to think, Jones opened his visor, evacuating it of air. Vacuum bit his cheeks like a thousand needles. His nostrils and throat stung as air hissed from them. The blood fouling his helmet dried into flakes as it was blown out into space. The blood on his forehead congealed and sealed the gash
.
Five seconds. Six.
Eight seconds passed before he got his helmet closed and flooded with atmosphere and he was able to breathe freely again.
When he looked around, Jones learned he was midway between the ship and the sail, heading toward the vast sheet at a velocity of five meters per second in a crazy somersault. Careful bursts of his attitude jets steadied the spin and killed his forward motion. Three additional discharges sent Jones heading back toward Serendipity. All communication channels were jammed with the mad static of conflict. It was impossible to tell what was going on and how the battle was progressing. Jones keyed on a priority override, which patched him through to Letty.
“D’Angelo, thank God you’re alive.”
“What’s the situation, cousin?”
“We have them contained at the stern.”
“I’ll be there.”
Jones oriented himself and triggered a long burn. Serendipity grew before him. Another burn sent him skimming sternward. A third bled his velocity and brought him to a stop relative to the ship. Not far away two groups were standing off from one another. Fifteen savages were left of the party that had boarded Serendipity. The remaining primitives were gathered in a defensive three-dimensional knot, arm-to-arm and arm-to-leg and head-to-toe, weapons outward, all except for three of their number, who floated forward of the main body. Each held a leash connected to a handcuffed crew member. The leashes attached to the tubing linking the prisoners’ oxygen tanks to their helmets. A good tug would rip loose the hoses and kill the hostages.
“What are their demands?” Jones asked Letty. She indicated a figure so lanky that it hardly seemed human, wearing a suit ornamented with swastikas and broken crosses done in blood-red. “That’s their hetman. Jasper the Something. A charming conversationalist. He wants passage for himself and his men. All the bodies of their dead. The bodies of our dead, too. He didn’t explain himself but it’s not difficult to guess why. Oh, and Jasper expects a ransom. In bullion, if you please.”
“Does he?” The anger building in Jones was so profound that it required all the control he had developed during his years of command to reply to Letty in an even tone. “Who are the hostages?”
“Kevin Milestone, third engineer. Jasmine Whitlock, first cook, you know her, she makes those wonderful greens. And—oh, D’Angelo, I’m sorry—they have Beatrice, too.”
He heard the news as if from far away, as if it didn’t matter. It didn’t, not really, that’s what he told himself, because he was Serendipity’s captain. All his crew were important to him, no single one any more valuable than any other. At least that was how it was supposed to be, and that was how it was, by God, even though the scum had his wife leashed by the throat.
Jones burned to within ten meters of the hetman, close enough to see the brilliant blue of Beatrice’s eyes and the furious expression in them. He prayed she wouldn’t do anything stupid but feared her courage would overcome her common sense. Martians were like that. “I’m D’Angelo Jones, captain of Serendipity,” Jones said. “Release your prisoners and you may live. I give you my word.”
“You give Jasper nothing, sailor man,” the hetman replied with a sneer. “Jasper takes what Jasper wants. Jasper takes your ship. Jasper takes your women. Jasper takes your dead to feed Jasper’s children. Jasper is hetman. Jasper takes.”
“You take nothing, hetman. Your people are fled. You’re outnumbered. Give me one reason I should hold back from killing you.”
“Jasper gives you three,” the savage replied and tugged at the leash he held. Beatrice clutched at the hose with her bound hands, taking the strain, but even so the jerk loosened the tube from its coupling and a thin stream of air began jetting from the joint. Jasper laughed. “Maybe Jasper only gives you two reasons.”
“What do you want?”
“That’s better, sailor man. You listen to Jasper. You do as Jasper says. Maybe Jasper lets your people live.”
Before the hetman could continue, however, Beatrice shrugged, blew Jones a kiss, and realized his worst fear. With a jerk of her shoulders, she intentionally ripped the hosing free from her own helmet. Then, disregarding the flooding forth of her life’s air, she drew a knife from an ankle sheath, whipped the blade up, and plunged it into her captor.
Jasper died.
As he did, however, his mace caught Beatrice square in the face. Her mask shattered. Atmosphere rushed from her helmet into space. Hoping that she’d had the presence of mind not to hold her breath, which would have ruptured her lungs beyond repair, Jones thought, Ninety seconds. That was how long Beatrice would survive before vacuum killed her. She would be unconscious in ten.
Jones took out the nearest pirates with two quick thrusts. The rest of his crew burned past and fell on the remaining savages but Jones didn’t spare them a glance. He had to reach Beatrice. She was being carried off into space in a mad spiral by the atmosphere jetting from her tanks.
Eighty seconds. Somehow he managed to maintain the countdown in his mind while concentrating on catching her. Seventy-five.
He burned full throttle but couldn’t get near. The squirming tubing on her back altered her bearing by the second and it was as if she were purposely evading him. Not until her tanks exhausted themselves was Jones finally able to reach his wife. Sixty seconds. Beatrice was unconscious. Her complexion, even in the dim yellow wash of light afforded by Saturn, was becoming flushed a brilliant red as the capillaries beneath her skin ruptured in the vacuum.
(ed note: The space viking (aka "pirate") ship Enterprise was constructed with the purpose of establishing a raiding base on the planet Tanith, for Duke Angus of Gram. The villain Andray Dunnan stole the ship and murdered the protagonist's wife who had only been wed for half an hour. The protagonist Lucas Trask gives up his ancestral lands in exchange for a new ship, the Nemesis. He and his crew of space vikings (including first officer Harkaman) travel to Tanith hoping to find and kill Dunnan. Instead they find two broken-down tramp space viking ships, the Space Scourge and the Lamia. The captains of these ships are horrified to discover that the protagonist has no intention of establishing a base on Tanith, and their cunning plan has failed.)
As soon as he (captain of the Space Scourge) had blanked out, Harkaman threw back his head and guffawed as though he had just heard the funniest and bawdiest joke in the galaxy. Trask, himself, didn't feel like laughing. "The humor escapes me," he admitted. "We came here on a fools' errand." "I'm sorry, Lucas." Harkaman was still shaking with mirth. "I know it's a letdown, but that pair of chiseling chicken thieves! I could almost pity them, if it weren't so funny." He laughed again. "You know what their idea was?" Trask shook his head. "Who are they?" "What I called them, a couple of chicken thieves. They raid planets like Set and Hertha and Melkarth, where the locals haven't anything to fight with—or anything worth fighting for. I didn't know they'd teamed up, but that figures. Nobody else would team up with either of them. What must have happened, this story of Duke Angus' Tanith adventure must have filtered out to them, and they thought that if they got here first, I'd think it was cheaper to take them in than run them out. I probably would have, too. They do have ships, of a sort, and they do raid, after a fashion. But now, there isn't going to be any Tanith base, and they have a no-good planet and they're stuck with it." "Can't they make anything out of it themselves?" "Like what?" Harkaman hooted. "They have no equipment, and they have no men. Not for a job like that. The only thing they can do is space out and forget it." "We could sell them equipment." "We could if they had anything to use for money. They haven't." The three ships were slowly converging toward a point fifteen thousand miles off-planet and over the sunset line. The Space Scourge bore the device of a mailed fist clutching a comet by the head; it looked more like a whisk broom than a scourge. The Lamia bore a coiled snake with the head, arms and bust of a woman. Valkanhayn and Spasso were taking their time about screening back, and he began to wonder if they weren't maneuvering the Nemesis into a cross-fire position. He mentioned this to Harkaman and Alvyn Karffard; they both laughed. "Just holding ship's meetings," Karffard said. "They'll be yakking back and forth for a couple of hours, yet." "Yes; Valkanhayn and Spasso don't own their ships," Harkaman explained. "They've gone in debt to their crews for supplies and maintenance till everybody owns everything in common. The ships look like it, too. They don't even command, really; they just preside over elected command-councils." Work on the Lamia started the next day, and considerable friction-heat was generated between her officers and the engineers sent over from the Nemesis. Baron Rathmore went aboard, and came back laughing. "You know how that ship's run?" he asked. "There's a sort of soviet of officers; chief engineer, exec, guns-and-missiles, astrogator and so on. (chicken thief captain) Spasso's just an animated ventriloquist's dummy. I talked to all of them. None of them can pin me down to anything, but they think we're going to heave Spasso out of command and appoint one of them, and each one thinks he'll be it. I don't know how long that'll last, it's a string-and-tape job like the one we're having to do on the ship. It'll hold till we get something better."
Any merchant trader will tell you pirates are lazy @#$%! The exact translation of @#$% will vary by world but you get the idea.
The media presentations of pirates as charging in with lasers blasting are ... exaggerations to say the least. Lasers don't blast any more than a searchlight in vacuum for one thing. For another most merchants will stop resisting after a few well placed and low power shots tag them, or a missile or two is launched. A professional pirate simply demonstrates the means and will to end you and then the ball is in your court.
The problem all pirates must face is ... economics!
A pirate ship is a warship, whether converted or out of the dock. Warships have a number of features merchant ships do not, large magazines, oversized thrusters, barracks for troops, a large reserve of propellant and fuel... Merchants don't have these things because they eat up room that goes for cargo. Cargo, speculation and freighting is the merchant's life blood.
The merchants have an important edge on the pirates: fuel (or propellant if your setting uses rockets). Ships guzzle the shizzle. Your fat merchant could use up a lot of this running away and then hopefully top their tanks at the nearest port. A pirate finds a rather warm reception if he tries that. Now there are installations that will refuel and service pirate vessels. Usually they are not frequented by merchants so you need fuel and time to reach them. If a merchant gets in a lucky shot with a laser and the pirate ship loses fuel they may be stuck pending a quick patch job and some tense negotiations.
Other pirates also laugh at you a great deal upon hearing this.
So pirates like merchants try desperately to maximize their profits and minimize their risks. Yes there are head cases, terrorists and sociopaths out to maim, murder, and loot. They don't last long. In fact many are exterminated by pirates who realize the nutcase are going to bring the Navy down on their necks.
So smart pirates try to hit ships with known and valuable cargos. Insured or freighted cargos are preferred because no one is going to push their luck defending another person's booty or booty they get compensated for.
They also run the extortion game. A lot. That cuts down on risks but nothing helps the dependency on liquid hydrogen.
Borsten's Leap was situated in a less developed area between two civilized pockets. Trade began between the pockets and a guy named Borsten decided to set up a colony and a starport in position to cut a few weeks off travel times and refuel merchants. The star system had gas giants but they were very far out past a couple of asteroid belts. Borsten's High Port grew wealthy on ships passing through and began gouging on fuel prices and various services knowing the merchants wanted to move on to trade elsewhere and wouldn't schlep out to the gas giants to refuel. They did want all manner of legal and illegal services the Borstenites provided. Borsten's economy grew around a system of services provided and the local currency was backed by coupons for back massages and the like, not gold or other precious metals. It worked.
A sizable community of belters had spread in the belts. Borsten's Landing welcomed them, and gouged them as well. In particular the Borstenites established a search and rescue (SAR) operation and demanded the belters pay their share. The Belters insisted they did not need such a service as they looked after their own or let them be examples of Darwinian evolution. But the Borstenites followed up with a huge SAR tax for many services and goods.
Never piss off a Belter.
Belters are licensed to use nukes. They use these nukes to dig out fabulous riches. They have no problems with dumping these riches on your planet to derail your economy. Whatever you base your exchange rate on, they'll find it and drop it on you, possibly for free. Of course this did them little good with the Borstenites. They could drop a gold asteroid (gently, they weren't monsters) on them but it would do little harm to their economy and there was no way for them to drop a bunch of masseuses or concierges or factors or call girls on the Landing.
The nukes remained and the belters could use them on the pirates. Thus pirates did not bother belters by and large.
After the belters had enough of the ground pounders double charging them they used a couple of nukes on a few of the dirty snowball asteroids and nudged them into more sunward orbits. Dirty snowballs contain water which can be processed into liquid hydrogen and a merchant ship could usually make a run to an asteroid in 12 hours or less. They could get refined fuel there from a belter running a small station. They could get it under cost.
The Borstenites were somewhat put out by this to say the least.
The economic status quo was in danger!
But piracy saved the day. As I said pirates hate having to actually work for their booty. Running over to a small station on an advertised asteroid was pretty easy. Shooting at tanker shuttles and grabbing their cash, then stealing their fuel and leaving was pretty low risk. The shuttles had to have a regular schedule to be available for the merchants after all. The belters did nuke a pirate ship or two but it cost them a kamikaze shuttle and a fuel depot. Those were uneconomical losses.
The belters were stuck. The local government couldn't be blamed for the pirate attacks and didn't have the resources to create an in system patrol. The belters could have to help pay to form such a patrol, guard their own stations or get out of the fuel depot business. The belters decided they'd had their fun and pulled out of the operation. They sold the sites.
To pirates.
The pirates had their fuel. They mostly left the traders in this system alone and hit them in the surrounding systems earlier or later on their route. The belters had made a profit from their fuel stations, could use them themselves, and even rent shuttles to them or sell excess fuel. The traders had reasonable losses to the pirates who were very careful not to harm crew or ships given their cooperation they also wanted the merchants to buy their fuel.
Like I said there were always places a pirate could get fuel and repairs. There will always be pirates.
(ed note: This is about piracy in a medieval world such as obtains in a role playing game like Dungeons and Dragons. But it has some general principle that still apply in Rocketpunk. In such a game, a player group that rights wrongs and fights evil are called "heroes". A player group that just goes around killing people and monsters in order to steal their gold are called "murder hobos".)
Basic Pirate Market Speculation
Piracy is simply another form of market speculation, albeit an extremely violent one. When making the choice to raid a ship, or even become pirates at all, the would-be pirates make a conscious risk-reward calculation. The first tier of decision-making works something like this:
Never stealing a ship and declaring oneself a pirate is a valid and rational choice if the reward for high-seas thievery is very low. If nothing shipping is worth stealing or the risks involved are so high the reward is not worth that risk, the seas stay free of pirates.
But, if the rewards outweigh the risks, pirates! Pirate Captains make cold calculations before risking their precious resources of ship, weapons, magic, and men against the possible rewards of a good payout. Is the cargos worth it? Will naval forces catch the pirates mid-pirating? Is the ship they are eyeing armed? All valid questions which temper risks versus rewards before heaving ho.
In fact, if the rewards for piracy are enormous and the risk non-existent, governments get in on the piracy party — especially if high seas raiding gives heartburn to rival governments. Cash-strapped governments on constant war-footing, seeing a good investment opportunity, speculate with their tax base on state-sponsored sea-based theft. They authorize local mercenaries in their names and papers to commit high-seas piracy on their rivals and return a percentage cut of cargo sold back to the Crown. These profits (a higher % return than inflation) return back to the treasury to pay for more land-based wars.
Since Medieval societies must make constant food-vs-safety choices to allocate their few resources efficiently, the risk of sudden market failure (ie, a heavily armed and angry military ship capturing and killing pirates) is low, our economist warlock says. The kingdom lacks the coordinated naval resources to stop piracy whole-scale with brutal violence. But, are the rewards worth it? Economics is the study of scarcity in markets and when a good is scarce, the price rises accordingly. Something is scarce and therefore worth the risk. Pirates will not raid the high seas if they know merchants filled their holds of ships with packing peanuts.
Pirates weigh these possible factors before going about their pirating:
Is the spotted ship worth taking over? A small skiff is unlikely to hold anything of interest. The enormous 100 gun military vessel is tasty but heavily armed. The sailing merchantman is the sweet spot — not too armed, but with enough payout to cover any losses, carry reasonable cargo, and make a profit.
Will the pirates get caught mid-pirating or post-pirating by armed law enforcement? If so, that could go bad.
Is the possible, unseen cargo in the merchantman worth possible traps, death, mayhem, and law enforcement?
And, is there a buyer for that unseen mystery cargo?
The fourth question is the important question to ask. Every single take-over of a cargo-bearing ship is an extra market risk — the risks of law enforcement, of the ship carrying Murder Hobos (lots of armed fighters), of bad cargo. It’s like opening a present. It might be something good. It might be something bad. For all the pirates know, that merchantman is carrying either gold or Gnomes (combative monsters with no gold). Without careful application of magic — and here is where wizards ought to get involved, the economist warlock says — pirates take an investment gamble of time and resources on every attack.
The pirates are weighing probabilities, the economist warlock says. Knowing organized land-based buyers exist — ie, smugglers, black markets and customers — pirates are safely assuming something worthwhile floats in the holds of those round-bottom ships. Something people will pay for.
Clearly, between scarcity, low Naval policing presence, and eager buyers, the King has a piracy problem along his shore. He is offering successful Murder Hobos Letters of Marque to take the fight to the seas.
The question is: Why?
Creating a Market
During times of war and famine, local, noble-blooded landowners raise the price of wheat. It’s scarce, price finds a way, and the price rises with demand. The local landowners also force the their 0-level NPC bonded peasants, who grow the wheat, to sell a maximal amount of their wheat to the market for the maximum market profit. Scarcity is an awful time for the local people but a bonanza profit fountain for those at the top. Terrible thing about the peasants having to eat their shoe leather, the Earls and Dukes say at their huge banquets. We hope the famine breaks soon and we win the war.
While Medieval societies are closed and self-sufficient, as populations grow, societies bump into one another. One society might have starving peasants yet diamond mines for resurrection while the other has a bumper crop and a burgeoning magic item industry. So, they trade with each other. You give me food and I’ll give you diamonds. But trade also re-allocates resources in an economy and removes scarcity from core production products like cloth or food. These traded products become cheap commodities.
Governments pass laws to protect what little supplies they have to feed their peasants when supplies are low. After all, if the peasants all die, high profits or not, the rich won’t have anything to eat. They keep peasants around to make the food. But, then when the crisis passes, those laws hang around. High tariffs and protectionism lingers. Laws keep prices high. Those in charge won’t lower their tariff walls and allow foreign food to flow in and put downward pressure on their markets. They like money.
High tariffs and protectionism walls create opportunities for those who take the risks to reap the rewards. In this case, the Kingdom’s Earls and Dukes pressured the King to keep high tariff walls around the import of foreign wheat after the last spat of “unpleasantness” ended. The Kingdom experienced a wheat shortage due to bad harvest during the last round of wars with their neighbor. During the altercation, the nobles reaped fat profits off the backs of the peasant and merchant population. While the harvests are now healthy, wheat’s price is still high.
Now, pirates, seeing a lucrative speculative opening in wheat futures, are jumping foreign ships, stealing cargo, and dumping cheap foreign wheat on the docks into the hands of smugglers. The smugglers sell the wheat at high but still lower-than-controlled government market prices in black markets to the local populations. The local populations gets to eat. Money flows into the hands of pirates instead of nobles. The nobles become super irate.
And the Kingdom says:
First off, we need to get rid of these freebooters because they’re cutting into our bottom line;
Second, perhaps the Kingdom can take a cut of selling this extra foreign wheat by exploiting its own tariff and protectionism laws;
Third, we get to hassle our enemy, the foreign government.
Fourth, not a 0-level NPC peasant wins!
Thus and therefore, Murder Hobos now have in their hands a license to take a ship, go raid the high seas and rid the oceans of pirates in the name of the Kingdom. And high profits.
Pirates Have No Allegiance to Anyone
The Murder Hobos learn, while they’re off privateering, that each pirate ship is its own self-contained company in a highly competitive free and laissez-faire market. Pirates are individual, freelancing contractors who stand up their corporate concerns in this open, free market of speculation and food futures. Even those pirates with Letters of Marque in their pockets and tacit permission from their governments to create mayhem have no true allegiance to anyone except themselves. The market ensures everyone is an untrustworthy scoundrel.
The market offers both enormous rewards in treasure and XP and death. Perfect for the Murder Hobo on the go.
The warlock economist points out:
These pirates are competing over the same fixed pool of rewards. Pirate ship concerns (ie, actual physical pirates) will multiply and fill the ocean while risk remains low and reward remains high providing ample opportunities to level up. However, as pirates continue to enter the market, pirate ship numbers will reach an equilibrium when the risk to reward balance becomes near even and profit dries up. Killing pirates keeps this point further in the future but the allure will continue to draw perfectly good naval crews into lives of piracy.
At the equilibrium point, it becomes to everyone’s benefit — the pirates, the Murder Hobos, the governments wanting a cut – to push over the balance so the risk and reward moves from the fat, tasty merchantmen to the pirates themselves with their loads of fat cargo and pirate treasure. Then, pirate war breaks out. Strong pirate companies will eliminate weaker pirate private contractors. Pirates continue murdering other pirates until the market clears of competition and profit margins again rise. Rinse, repeat.
We can use pirates to kill pirates, the warlock economist says, by making more pirates. Pirates will prey on each other and kill off the weak to up their own rewards. This leaves only the richest behind for Murder Hobo consumption.
We need to create more pirates.
The warlock economist looks at the King’s Letters of Marque. She points out to the rest of her Murder Hobo crew another way to optimize their mission: corporate mergers. Take over ships and, instead of murdering the crew and taking their stuff as is the Murder Hobo way, force them to join a flag. Scale their corporate investment out horizontally. One ship can capture a certain amount of wheat and/or other pirates. Ten ships can capture ten ships worth of cargo back to haul to shore for profit. Scaling out lowers their pirate market risk while keeping their profits high. Losing one ship to an unfortunate merchantman trap is no longer a company-ending event. This builds an allure for more to go into piracy (thus making more pirates) and lowers our risk.
The Murder Hobos will be corporate officers and cut their own personal exposure to speculative market risk while their pirates take the brunt of their charge by, well, pirating. And what pirates wouldn’t want to join up? After all, the Murder Hobos are famous heroes with magic spells and weapons. They pose a clear market advantage over normal, scruffy Pirate Captains.
That way, the warlock economist says, other strong pirate ships will force weaker pirates to join their flag to compete in this new market. The pirates will go corporate to maximize the pirate effort. And next thing we know, we will have not only enormous profits but exciting and climatic multi-ship mega-battles on the high seas. Thus eliminating the pirate threat.
The Murder Hobos will simply corner the piracy market.
The Paladin, of course, objects to abusing their King’s Letters of Marque like this. That’s why the rest of the party leaves him on an island.
A year later, the Murder Hobos retire from their life of state-sponsored high seas terrorism rich as Lords. They leave behind their legends as Pirate Kings built on a loose yet massive amalgamated confederation of pirates and wheat. They built their Pirate Isle to store their reaped gold and magic. Perhaps the mission wasn’t carried out to spec but the Murder Hobos had lots of high seas fun.
The pirates aren’t destroyed. This scheme just makes more pirates. No amount of military force will kill speculators in an open market when speculation is possible. Speculation, like life, finds a way. The pirates prey on merchantmen and, then, when there are too many pirates, each other. The cycle continues with or without Murder Hobos.
The pirates finally disperse when the King lowers his wheat tariffs, signs a treaty with his rival foreign government, and wheat prices drop dramatically. Without the easy, fast, low risk, high reward profits of wheat, pirates don’t exist. Profit and danger-seekers go elsewhere — like turn ex-pirates into more Murder Hobos waiting in taverns for Questgivers to send them off to destroy smugglers on the docks. Something new is coming into town on the black market…
Interstellar travel isn’t completely analogous to 16th century sea travel. For one, delicious air bathed ships even during the most dangerous voyages. The crew wasn’t at risk for explosive decompression from a bad bit of engineering or a poorly soldiered joint. But in many ways, one informs the other. Voyages faced imperious captains, perilous voyages, uncaring financial backers, and death if anything happened. The endless sea is a desert, as is the vacuum of space. No one survives a trip outside the small life-giving ship into the endless nothing.
Following 16th century age of sail, the first ships after the initial intrepid explorers into the great darkness are merchant ships – the miners, colonizers, point to point trade between the outworld colonies and the home base. Trade is the engine of exploration. It is the creator of fortunes. It is the economic pump that generates capital to build more merchant ships. There are things out there that are worth more back here. Humans do anything to get those goods between two points even if it means flinging humans in a metal tube into the darkness of space. Especially if it’s dangerous and somewhat lunatic.
If one group of humans drag precious cargo from point A to point B, another group will want it. They want to steal it, to sell it, keep it, to roll around in it while yelling obscenities. And another group of humans will protect it with guns and swords.
Disclaimer: Relativity is a thing that exists. There’s a fascinating economic problem about relativity, space travel, and crew member payment. How does one pay the crew on a regular schedule when the relativistic local time for the ship does not match the relativistic local time for the bank back home? Does one calculate maximum possible crew pay over the ship and load the ship’s local bank with cash? How does one transmit cash at relativistic speeds? What happens if the communication is lossy? Or the bank goes out of business? Or the corporation goes out of business? For simplicity, much like the 16th century, the corporation pays merchant sailors before the voyage and on return home. The rest of it is details.
The TB Corporation
Neither the sailors, nor the captain, nor his officers own the ship. TB Corporation owns the ship and everything on it.
Standard employees from the TB Corporation don’t venture into space. They stay at home. They dwell in their enormous glass-paned high rise calculating shipping routes, mining trips, and round trips for the highest possible profit margin. They’re a publicly traded company. Their first obligation is to the shareholders. Not to the officers and crew of the many ships they fling out into space.
The corporation supplies the capital for building the ship, providing upgrades, continuing maintenance, provisions, advances on crew pay, negotiations for terms of delivery and freight, and, importantly, finding customers on both ends of the voyage. They deal with advertising, goods delivery, and fulfillment.
The voyages return with ores, minerals, and rare alien artifacts. Those have Earth-based buyers. The corporation sells the goods at sufficient profit to cover the cost of voyages – plus some.
TB Corp officers have no desire to ever board one of their merchant ships. They know the rate of success versus the rate of death. They stay on Earth where it’s warm and comfortable, and where they have large plush carpeted offices in that glass-paned high rise. They outsource all the risk to their captains. Why die for profits when someone else is willing to do so in their employ?
When the ships, officers and crews are in dock – on Earth, at a colony, or a refueling station between – the TB Corp sees, evaluates, and judges crewmembers on performance. But when the ship is in flight, the TB Corp loses all control. Yes, the captain radios back (at the oh so slow speed of light) various cheerful status updates. The ship itself chirps automated updates back home, too. But, the captain and his or her crew are alone in the darkness of space. And savvy Captains can hack computer systems.
The Captain can radio back anything he or she wants. Meanwhile, has she eaten the crew as a delicacy? Sure. Fed the crew to aliens? Why not. Turned to piracy? Maybe. Who knows? All TB Corp knows is everything is well.
Status is the Captain’s and crew’s hands.
This is the principal-agent problem. A self-interested agent works on behalf of a principal, and the agent has more information than the principal does. The agent has the leverage. The principal has to decide to take the risk on the agent to see the job through despite the lack of information.
Once the ship leaves dock, TB Corp is in the dark. The voyage is in the hands of the Captain and her crew.
Imperious Captains and Efficient Autocracy
Starships maintain a strict hierarchy of leadership from the crew to the officers to the Captain. Captain and officers are employees. Crewmembers are not.
Most crewmembers are contractors. They join on one end of the voyage, traverse a leg, and hope to find work on the other side, either at one of the many spacedocks or at a growing space colony. They roll off in dock. They’re paid 1/3rd of their wages on joining and the 2/3rds on delivery. They sign a contract, undergo whatever horrors TC Corporation contractually demands, board, and leave. They’re the kind who look for a few months or years of hardship for a better life in an off-world colony than what they found on Earth. And, the contractual pay is decent.
Meanwhile, in flight, the principal-agent problem invites all kinds of crewmember opportunism. During the voyage, the absolute masters of the ship are far away, out of sight, and depending on technological solutions to mitigate the risk (on-board cameras, radio’d updates, tracking systems) our of mind. Crewmembers can take advantage of the situation. To extort more money or power, they can stop maintaining the ship. They can damage cargo to impact voyage profitability by jettisoning it out the airlock. They can rig the computer systems to vend endless ice cream, depleting fixed ship supplies of dairy and sugar. They can steal the ship and keep the cargo profits for themselves.
To prevent this, the TB Corp centralizes all on-board power in the Captain’s hands. The Captain directs crewmember tasks, distributes on-board supplies, and controls discipline and punishment. If the ship is highly automated, the crew is quite small. The Captain monitors the crew through cameras and electronics implanted in crewmember’s brain. If the ship is older, larger, or requires constant maintenance, the crew expands. The Captain must delegate to trusted officers control over discipline, work rotation, and punishment.
And punishment in space is not nothing. It runs the gamut from a reduction in allowable rations on board for a fixed duration all the way to throwing a crewmember out an airlock. Outside Earth’s atmosphere, in the darkness of space, international law cannot dictate how a Captain treats crewmembers. An imperious Captain may resort to corporal and psychological punishments to keep the crew in line on a long voyage between Earth and a colony. The TB Corporation cares about delivery. It replaces crewmembers on either side of the voyage.
That said, if the Captain injures or murders all his or her crewmembers on a voyage, no one will survive to complete it. The Captain must ensure he or she has a healthy enough crew to make it to one docking station to another while maintaining strict discipline.
TB Corporation must also worry about aligning Captain-Corporation interests. What goes for the crew also goes for her Captain. The Captain is also subject to the principal-agent problem.
The TB Corporation has a few levers to pull to maintain control over her ship’s Captains:
TB Corp offers profit sharing and incentives on successful deliveries. A successful voyage pays out in a sizable bonus for her Captain and smaller bonuses for the officers;
TB Corp also pays the Captain and the officers salary on top of the shares;
With some older ships, TB Corp offers successful Captains partial ownership of the ship. The Captain is not only an employee but an owner on the voyage;
TB Corp offers the Captain’s family special incentive back home. The Captain feels indebted to the Corporation and it’s magnificence.
Too Much Autocracy
The TB Corporation infuses the Captain with absolute autocratic control over the ship’s crew to prevent the principal-agent problem. Unlimited power in a vacuum can turn into unlimited evil. Captains are economically incentivized to ensure that the voyage completes, crew alive or dead. As rational economic actors, they may prey on their own crew to get what they want to ensure success.
And Captain predation takes several forms:
The Captain cuts down on crewmember rations to goose the profitability of the trip;
The Captain cuts down on crewmember rations so the Captain and her Officers have more to eat at the tail end of the voyage while crewmembers starve;
The Captain takes on unauthorized contraband at a refilling dock and beats any crewmembers who try to report it to TB Corp;
The Captain uses his or her absolute control over crewmember discipline and punishment to “settle scores” with crewmembers.
TB Corporation laces the ship with automated systems to report the status on fuel, rations, and pay during the voyage . Automated regulation systems help cut down Captain predation. But the Captain has the override codes. He or she can press crewmembers to hack the system and change the logs. Sneaky hackers can fool well-understood electronic systems. And some actions happen in flight the TB Corp cannot see. In space, no one can hear a crewmember scream.
And who can tell what happened in the flight? Unless a system recorded an interaction, it’s a game of he-said, she-said. And the Captain, a paid TB Corp Employee, always wins.
Mutiny?
If the relationship between Captain and crew deteriorates, the crew will try mutiny.
Mutiny is a tricky thing. The crew is on a ship full of monitoring electronics. TB Corp wired crewmember brains into the ship’s monitoring and regulations systems. The Captain has a million screens and readouts.
It is possible. Only a small number of ships ever experience a successful mutiny. If even one crewmember wavers on committing mutiny, the mutiny fails. It’s everyone together or it’s a failed coup.
Mutiny faces a standard collective action problem. If everyone agrees they must remove the Captain for the good of the ship, mutiny often succeeds. The plan is complex, but the plan works. One Captain against an entire ship of angry crewmembers cannot stand. But it means getting everyone on board with violent action, including the ship’s Officers. If the Officers waver, the mutiny fails. If one Officer knows the plan and decides against mutiny at the last moment, he or she will inform the Captain. The Captain, in his or her autocratic right, uses the ship against the mutineers, and later spaces the mutiny’s leaders.
If the mutineers are successful, and they override TB Corp’s control systems before it decides to abort the voyage and drain all the air from the life support systems, the mutineers will find themselves the proud owners of a space ship. Where they go from there is up to them.
They can….
… finish the voyage and try to get full profits from TB Corp who will likely have them killed;
… turn and go to some other space colony and sell their cargo underground;
… join a space colony and abandon the ship;
… or attempt to join the growing community of space pirates who prey along the known Earth to colony routes.
If the mutiny works, Space Adventurers have a ship. And now, with all this background, the game play begins.
On Interstellar Merchant Shipping, PCs and Game World Design
Why don’t PCs pool their resources together, buy a ship, and start flying from the outset? Why must TB Corporation (or a myriad of other corporations) own the star ships and play gate keeper?
Merchant shipping is not as simple as moving goods from point A to point B.
First, point B must exist, and point B is expensive to establish. If TB Corporation pays billions to build an off-world colony, they’re not going to let anyone show up and transact at their port. That’s TB Corp registered ships only.
And, the TB Corporation establishes relationships with merchants on both sides of point A and point B. These, too, are expensive, requires a reputation to get the best deals, and must contend with TB Corp’s monopoly and local laws.
As voyages are expensive and risky, the TB Corporation floats the costs of the star voyages on enormous lines of credit. This is out of reach for regular PCs except for those who are “Lords of Capitalism”.
Building and buying a ship is, itself, a pretty expensive proposition. Doable but…
Getting the personal reputation to sell goods at a profit is pretty expensive, too.
In a world with economically reinforcing game design, it’s difficult for the PCs to simply “own a ship” without their own cash, reputation, or their own corporation.
But all is not lost. PCs can pool resources to buy a small ship and sell goods at shadow economy docks where people will buy anything for anyone. They’ll need to somehow come by the coordinates and contacts in the underground community. And, they’ll need to compete with the big boys who will do everything they can to squeeze the little guys out of the system. It’s a difficult road to walk.
This sets up tension and conflict, and conflict is interesting.
PCs can get into the game in these ways:
PCs as Captain and Officers in the employ of the Corporation. Easiest way to start with a ship is to start with a ship. The crewmembers are mere red shirts. The PCs initally run their ship for their corporation. Perhaps later, not so much. The corporation sends the PCs to interesting destinations. Gets them into fights with pirates. Gets them in contact with the shadow economy. Deals with morally dubious corporations, their sensing electronics, their laws, and their policies.
PCs as crewmembers in the employ of the Corporation. The Captain and Officers are amoral agents of a faceless corporation. The PCs move from voyage to voyage as Adventurer Contractors. They go to interesting space ports or fly to interesting colonies. Maybe the PCs go to colony to colony to explore/adventure and then hitch a ride on the next corporate ship to the next destination.
PCs as Space Marines in the employ of the Corporation. The Captain and Officers are still amoral agents of a faceless corporations. The corporation takes the PCs from colony to colony and parachutes them into trouble spots to kill aliens while the ship completes its merchant mission. They’re more than crewmembers and less than officers – they’re the military contingent glued to a civilian merchant mission. And, the PCs kill every hostile alien in the merchant’s way.
PCs have a ship from a successful mutiny. The PCs have a ship. They’ve dismantled all the corporation’s monitoring protocols. They’re in the darkness of space. They have dwindling supplies. Now they’re Captain, Officers and crew of their own vessel. How do they join the pirate economy? Is there one? How do they get there? What next?
Also, the world design requires a few working corporations! Here, the TB Corporation is:
Wealthy enough to build ships and establish off-world colonies;
Also wealthy enough to maintain those ships and hire crews to run them;
And wealthy enough to dictate trade laws on both the home world and the colony;
Monopolistic in bent;
Technologically advanced to casually implant tracking devices in contractor brains;
Amoral and access to unlimited banking;
Home-world bound as its headquarters.
Nothing was said about what the miners mine in the off-world colonies or what TB Corporation ships between colonies and the home world. Tweak that knob; they might ship interstellar cheese or they might ship interstellar narcotics. They might ship narcotics inside the cheese. Maybe it ships human replicants for offworld colonies addicted to offworld interstellar cheese which acts as a replicant narcotic.
Setting the knob is important. It dictates the amorality of the corporation itself. The corp is already amoral and profit seeking. But, the corporation is willing to look the other way at Captain predation on the crew if the cargo is truly morally reprehensible.
The adventurers stole a ship! The adventurers mutinied, snuck on board and hacked it out from under watchful AIs, or swindled a ship in a card game. They got their hands on a ship and got away with it. Congratulations! Sure, space faring merchant companies, interstellar authorities, and other swindlers are after them. But, now, floating around in the inky blackness of space, they’re free.
And it feels great. Freedom!
Yet, if the adventurers are to survive, they’re going to need money, places to dock, and a plug-in to the black market. Provisioning ships is expensive. While starship holds are massive, ships require power to survive over the days and years. The crew of the ship must feed the ship’s hungry maw for power and supplies.
Out there, somewhere, in space, are ships carrying huge, juicy loads of rich “stuff.” And someone where, unsavory folks on the hard edges of space faring society are willing to buy booty from claims from pirate ships. And those big, fat, heavily loaded Merchant Ships also carry cash.
The Prizes
Pirate ships that only capture small prizes aren’t economically efficient. The effort in stealing a ship, crewing it, maintaining it, and alluding the law costs more than a small ship. Considering the overhead of offloading prizes on a black market, a diet in small ships cannot feed the open hungry maw of running a ship. Pirates who only take out the small guys aren’t going to last long.
A higher appetite for risk – and large prizes – makes pirates economically viable. Pirates search out Merchant ships hauling unique substances, valuable AI, and research that goes for a mint on a black market. There’s always a buyer somewhere off in the shadows.
A successful pirate ship preys on the biggest and fattest Merchant Men in space. Yet, the bread and butter of successful pirates are the medium-sized ships. Those medium-sized ships haul enough to make piracy worthwhile. They keep the pirate ship viable through selling illegally gained cargos on the black markets. They pay enough to fuel the ship and pay the crew.
Successful pirates with big appetites for risk dream the dream. The big score. That one huge hit. The big hustle. The win. That giant payout which ensures they can retire to some opulent outward colony. They won’t have to keep a rickety stolen ship afloat while angry corporations pursue them across time and space. They’ll be space kings.
Yes, those big scores are exceedingly rare. And, they’re well defended by heavily armed space marines. And the pirates might all die trying to take it. But what if they take big one?
What if?
While dreaming of the big prize, pirates stick with their ship. They make more money in piracy than in merchant shipping. The payouts are better. They’re living a more expensive lifestyle. And if they happen to hit that one big score… right around the corner… the next ship is the one…
The Captain and the Quartermaster
Piracy is all about capturing those prizes.
Pirate ships are free of the principal-agent problem. Pirates stole their ship! The captain is not beholden to some distant corporation or entity. The economic incentives of the crew align with the health and well-being of themselves. They have no distant owners who watch their every move.
But anarchy does not serve pirate ships well. An anarchic pirate ship is a dead pirate ship. Someone must run the show. Someone has to decide:
Where to go;
Which ships to engage;
How to engage the ships;
How to elude authorities;
How to react to being attacked;
And how to offload the booty once taken.
That someone is the autocratic captain. He or she makes snap decisions in the heat of battle. Conflicting voices while authorities are opening fire or boarding make it impossible to fight back.
That someone maintains ship discipline, decides how the crew gets paid, and throws unruly crewmembers out the airlock. Just like a Merchant ship, an unruly crewmember who won’t complete their assignments imposes risk on the mission, the crew, and the entire ship. Pirates don’t bow to any kind of interstellar law when dealing with discipline issues. They’re likely to simply kill the offender. And pirates are replaceable. Since pirates pay better than merchant expeditions, someone in dock is always willing to join up for the next pirating flight.
The need for a captain poses a dilemma for pirates (and adventurers). On one hand, pirates have a clear need for a strong authority figure to maintain control when the guns fire and the space marines burn holes in the ship’s hull with lasers. On the other hand, the point of pirating is freedom is escape from the heavy-handed autocratic dystopian universe of the corporate-owned Merchant ship.
A solution presents itself. Instead of suffering under an imposed captain, pirates democratically elect one from their ranks. As pirates are both the principals and the agents – they work for themselves and their own profits — a democratically elected captain ensures the pirates get exactly the captain they desire. Should the captain go berserk and murder the crew, the crew can space the captain and elect a new one from their ranks.
The crew decides how much power a captain has. And, they can take it away.
But, there’s another problem. If a captain has autocratic power, even elected autocratic power, they can wield autocratic power in peacetime. Autocratic power in the heat of battle helps pirate success. But, once the battle ends, the pirates face a giant pile of booty and boredom. Who decides how to split the take? Who decides how to allocate provisions? The captain? Won’t he or she take it all for themselves?
Pirates impose another check on the captain: the quartermaster.
The pirates elect the quartermaster from their ranks. Imbuing the quartermaster with equal power as the captain, pirates split power on two axis:
The captain has autocratic power over combat and crew discipline;
The quartermaster has autocratic power over apportioning onboard goods, balances the books, and adjudicates conflicts between the crew and the captain.
Pirates elect the nastiest, skeeziest, evilest son of a bitch in space as their pirate captain. But, the pirates also elect the most level-headed and educated for their quartermaster. The system of checks and balances ensures the pirate ship runs smoothly both in battle and during the long, boring stretches in space.
In peace time, the quartermaster checks the pirate captain’s rampant larceny. Yes, the quartermaster agrees, the captain should shove this crewmember out the airlock. The quartermaster also acts as a judiciary. And, the quartermaster ensures equal apportionment of the prize among the crew.
In times of battle, the captain has all the power.
The crews prize blood lust in captains and sanity in quartermasters. The crew can depose and maroon a pirate captain for a lack of sufficient battle-induced insanity. After all, the crew signed on with the ship hoping for a big score. If the captain cannot provide even the medium scores that keep the ship running, the crew will replace him with someone who will get the job done. But, if the captain oversteps his or her authority, or is too insane, the crew will shove the captain out the airlock and elect a new one.
Checks and balances.
And sometimes, the crew promotes their quartermaster to captain should the quartermaster show sanity and insanity in equal portions. Then they elect a new quartermaster.
Pirate Constitutions
While the quartermaster keeps the captain in check and vice versa, what keeps the quartermaster and captain from colluding and preying on the crew together? Where does one job end and the other begin? What jobs are crew-only and officer-only? What are the various crimes and punishments? Isn’t this a democratically-controlled ship?
Technically, pirate ships are outside of all law. They’re outside of any interstellar law, or colonial law, or homeworld law. Pirates stole their ship. They’re now nationless – and lawless. Nothing from home applies. If a captain and quartermaster collude, the crew loses.
The crew has an easy fix. They make some new laws.
Ships forge their own constitutions. When one has no nation, one makes their ship their nation. And a nation needs laws. Laws find their foundations in their founding constitutional documents.
Each pirate ship has a constitution with a different set of laws. Generally, a pirate ship constitution covers:
What the captain can and cannot do on the vessel;
Apportioning profits from taking a prize;
The payment for injuries sustained in battle (if survived);
The laws for crime, discipline and punishment;
The strict roles and responsibilities for the quartermaster;
The strict roles and responsibilities for the captain.
These constitutions require unanimous agreement before adoption. Even a single voice forces the crew to rewrite the document and try again.
The constitutions often have clauses dealing with indivisible booty with no clear buyer. In these cases – often the ships taken as prize themselves, but also rogue research, cutting edge AIs, single-use bioweapons, kidnap victims from ships, and other high price single items – the constitutions state the large prizes must go to auction at a black market dock. The quartermaster divides the sale price of the ship at auction among the crew and dictated in the ship’s constitution. What happens to these items once they find their way into the black market is not their business.
This ensures the crew doesn’t fight over payment. Of course, equal apportionment encourages crew free riding. Crew members can perform minimal work but get maximal payout as guaranteed in the ship’s constitution. To mitigate, the constitutions often add in systems for bonuses. While a free riding crew member will get paid from a prize, a crew member who performed valiantly in battle or in another service receives a bonus.
When multiple ships join together in a pirate flotilla, the captains and quartermasters agree on articles of confederation among the ship crews. They’ll forge a larger document. They will balance the needs between ship captains, ships, and prizes gained across the fleet. If enough ships join under a flotilla flag, they’ll write an overarching document covering all their ships.
They will form a pirate nation. A democratic Pirate Nation with an Elected King. As single ships, they are prey for corporations and interstellar authorities. As a group, they’re unstoppable.
Laws have their way…
Space Pirates in a Game
Pirates are blood thirsty murderers who murder innocent crews and destroy property. Pirates are space highway bandits. They’re also adventurers. Adventures who get into all kinds of trouble, get into exciting fights with authorities, and make vast sums of cash on one interesting take.
Pirates are also gameable. A few variations on the straight up pirate theme, interstellar or not:
PCs are pirates. They have a ship. They stole it in their backstory somehow. Perhaps they deposed the previous pirate captain. Either way, one is now captain. The others are officers with one as a quartermaster. A bunch of red shirt mooks work as the crew. PCs attack merchant shipping for the money and the XP. And maybe they’ll kidnap a mysterious corporate figure or find a bizarre alien map and head off toward the big score…
PCs are privateers. They work like pirates, except in the name of their nation or their corporation. They’re quasi-legal. They need to balance out the needs of absentee owners with a crew of bloodthirsty pirates. But they also attack ships flying different flags. And they capture a ship and learn about a rival corporation’s ugly plans which involves aliens, war, and death across the quadrant…
PCs are smugglers at a black market space port, which they use as their home base. They’re not pirates and their not corporate or interstellar cops. But they trade in the underbelly of goods and services both need. They go on dangerous missions to get what people want, and they’re the buyers at pirate auctions laying their hands on rare and interesting plans…
PCs are the law. Pirates are nasty and brutish thugs. They prey on innocent shipping and attack colonies. Stopped and destroy them!
PCs are pure adventurers. They join one crew, go on an adventure, get off at a space port, and then join another crew and go on another adventure. They hop from one port to another in search of riches, adventure, and aliens.
Interstellar space with, presumably, some kind of Star Wars or Star Trek like warp to allow space pirates to zoom around and attack shipping, adds a few extra spins on the idea:
Space is full of derelict space stations and pirate off-world colonies for pirates to hide and set up shop. These are weird corner places full of scum and villainy;
With all the money taken from big prizes, pirates off-world colonies are surprisingly opulent;
With enough ships in a flotilla in space, pirates set up their own space nations with their own constitutions and laws. These laws extend to pirate space stations, pirate colonies, and pirate black markets. These might even morph into real nations in space with their space hubs at their center.
PCs forge their own constitutions for their own extra-legal ships. And they compete with other NPC pirates for crew and supplies. Maybe those NPC pirates want to join their flag, and adopt their constitutions…
That said, adventurers who go the PC or smuggler routes must learn about where the pirate derelict space stations lie. No one is advertising these publicly. They have to get to port. They have to milk contacts. They have to refuel. They have to think scrappy.
Once adventurers work out their home port and their provisions, they have to figure out the right routes with the right prey. They need contacts to sell their ill-gotten goods. Then, once they get bigger, they must get accepted into pirate nations. Otherwise those aggressive rival pirate captains will squish them flat. And maybe, they have to take over the pirate nations and become pirate kings.
And space is big. Really big.
The first adventure, once the PCs have a ship, is:
(ed note: In Cities in Flight, their gravity control technology grows more efficient as the mass of the ship increases. So most of the ships are actual cities, chopped off at bedrock, and flying from star to star. They are sort of the migrant laborer's of the galaxy, with the Earth cops considering the Okie cities to be little better than tramps. The cities are powered by uranium and plutonium. In the story, Mayor Amalfi of New York is flying his Okie citie across The Rift, a wide area with no stars except for one wild star. The crossing is going to take about a hundred years.)
"Nothing on that side. Lots of nothing."
Amalfi moved the switch again.
On the screen, apparently almost within hallooing distance, a city was burning.
It was all over in a few minutes. The city bucked and toppled in a maelstrom of lightning. Feeble flickers of resistance spat around its edges—and then it no longer had any edges. Sections of it broke off and melted like wraiths. From its ardent center, a few hopeless life craft shot out into the gap; whatever was causing the destruction let them go. No conceivable life ship could live long enough to get out of the Rift.
Dee cried out. Amalfi cut in the audio circuit, filling the control room with a howl of static. Far behind the wild blasts of sound, a tiny voice was shouting desperately, "Rebroadcast if anyone hears us. Repeat: We have the fuelless drive. We're destroying our model and evacuating our passenger. Pick him up if you can. We're being blown up by a bindlestiff. Rebroadcast if—"
Then there was nothing left but the skeleton of the city, glowing whitely, evaporating in the blackness. The pale, innocent light of the guide beam for a Bethé blaster played over it, but it was still impossible to see who was wielding the weapon. The Dinwiddie circuits in the proxies were compensating for the glare, so that nothing was coming through to the screen that did not shine with its own light.
The terrible fire died slowly, and the stars brightened. As the last spark flared and went out, a shadow loomed against the distant star-wall. Hazleton drew his breath in sharply.
"Another city! So some outfits really do go bindlestiff! And we thought we were the first ones out here!"
"Mark," Dee said in a small voice. "Mark, what is a bindlestiff?"
"A tramp," Hazleton said, his eyes still on the screen. "The kind of outfit that gives all Okies a bad name. Most Okies are true hobos, Dee; they work for their living wherever they can find work. The bindlestiff lives by robbery—and murder."
His voice was bitter. Amalfi himself felt a little sick. That one city should destroy another was bad enough; but it was even more of a wrench to realize that the whole scene was virtually ancient history. Ultrawave transmission was somewhat faster than light, but only by about 25 per cent; unlike the Dirac transmitter, the ultraphone was by no means an instantaneous communicator. The dark city had destroyed its counterpart years ago, and must now be beyond pursuit. It was even beyond identification, for no orders could be sent now to the lead proxy which would result in any action until still more years had passed.
"Some outfits go bindlestiff, all right," he said. "And I think the number must have been increasing lately. Why that should be, I don't know, but evidently it's happening. We've been losing a lot of legitimate, honest cities lately—getting no answer to Dirac casts, missing them at rendezvous, and so on. Maybe now we know why."
"I've noticed," Hazleton said. "But I don't see how there could be enough piracy to account for all the losses. For all we know, the Vegan orbital fort may be out here, picking off anybody who's venturesome enough to leave the usual commerce lanes."
"I didn't know the Vegans flew cities," Dee said.
"They don't," Amalfi said abstractedly. He considered describing the legendary fort, then rejected the idea. "But they dominated the galaxy once, before Earth took to space flight. At their peak they owned more planets than Earth does right now, but they were knocked out a hell of a long time ago. . . . I'm still worried about that bindlestiff, Mark. You'd think that some heavy thinker on Earth would have figured out a way to make Diracs compact enough to be mounted in a proxy. They haven't got anything better to do back there."
Hazleton had no difficulty in penetrating to the real core of Amalfi's grumbling. He said, "Maybe we can still smoke 'em out, boss."
"Not a chance. We can't afford a side jaunt."
"Well, I'll send out a general warning on the Dirac," Hazleton said. "It's barely possible that the cops will be able to invest this part of the Rift before the 'stiff gets out of it."
"That'll trap us neatly, won't it? Besides, that bindlestiff isn't going to leave the Rift, at least not until it's picked up those life craft."
"Eh? How do you know?"
"Did you hear what the SOS said about a fuelless drive?"
"Sure," Hazleton said uneasily, "but the man who knows how to build it must be dead by now, even if he escaped when his city was blasted."
"We can't be sure of that—and that's the one thing that the 'stiff has to make sure of. If the 'stiffs get ahold of that drive, there'll be all hell to pay. After that, 'stiffs won't be a rarity any more. If there isn't widespread piracy in the galaxy now, there will be—if we let the 'stiffs get that no-fuel drive."
"Why?" Dee said.
"I wish you knew more history, Dee. I don't suppose there were ever any pirates on Utopia, but Earth once had plenty of them. They eventually died out, thousands of years ago, when sailing ships were replaced by fueled ships. The fueled ships were faster than sailing vessels—but they couldn't themselves become pirates because they had to touch civilized ports regularly to coal up. They could always get food off some uninhabited island, but for coal they had to visit a real port. The Okie cities are in the same position now; they're fueled ships. But if that bindlestiff can actually get its hands on a no-fuel drive—so he can sail space without having to touch civilized planets for power metals—well, we just can't allow it to happen, that's all. We've got to get that drive away from them."
Hazleton stood up, kneading his hands nervously. "That's perfectly true—and that's why the 'stiff will knock itself out to recapture those lifeships. You're right, Amalfi. Well, there's only one place in the Rift where a lifeship could go, and that's to the wild star. So the 'stiff is probably there, too, by now—or on the way there." He looked thoughtfully at the screen, once more glittering only with anonymous stars. "That changes things. Shall I send out the Dirac warning, or not?"
From EARTHMAN, COME HOME by James Blish (1955), book 3 of the Cities in Flight series
SPACE SKIMMER: FUEL-LESS SHIP = PIRACY
(ed note: In Space Skimmer, there used to a galactic empire. It collapsed about five hundred years ago for unclear reasons. Shortly before the collapse, a new type of starship had been invented, the Space Skimmers. Unlike conventional starships, these ships were constructed out of force fields instead of metal. They were self-repairing, and could gather the energy they needed for fuel by making a close pass by a sun.)
“Why is it that the Empire is still active in this area?” asked Ike. “Everywhere else we’ve been, the Empire is only a memory.”
“Part of it is geography,” Edelith answered. “Here, we’re nearer to the core of the galaxy. The stars are closer to each other; an interstellar flight between two neighbors is not as big a jump as it would be farther out.
“When the Empire collapsed, it only meant the collapse of long-distance communications; local trade still continued. For us, local trade covers an area which includes forty-three inhabited planets.” She shifted her position on the chaise, straightened slightly. “The average journey between stars is only a few days — in your skimmer, only a few hours — but out in the spiral arms, a journey could be days or months, even for you.”
Mass asked, “You haven’t tried at all to reestablish contact with any of the other Empire Stations?”
She shook her head. “The numbers aren’t right.”
“Eh?”
“The human race is spread too thin throughout the galaxy. It’s spread too thin even among our own planets; we have too few governments with the necessary populations or wealth.”
Ike put in: “There is an important social equation involved here. Individually, no planet has the wealth to mount the effort of rebuilding the Empire; it takes the collective wealth of many planets — but in order to achieve that kind of cooperation, you need the kind of communications that only an already established Empire can provide.
“A planet has to have a population of at least one billion people, with a gross product per person of at least ten thousand credits per year in order to be able to afford the technology capable of building and maintaining a profitable starship; an empire requires at least twenty such populations in order to maintain communications between a community of one hundred stellar systems.”
“And even then, they’re spreading themselves pretty thin,” remarked Edelith. “But trade and communications are an aid to growth; eventually their investment should pay for itself.”
Ike added, “The equation is determined by the length of time it takes to travel from one star to another. Before the synthesis of the skimmer, the critical factor was one light-year every three days.”
“The skimmers must have upset that equation drastically,” Edelith mused. “Economic values on too many planets were determined by false scarcity of certain trade items. With the sudden explosion of information and commerce that the skimmers represented, there must have been economic and political chaos. We’ll never know how much chaos, though; the Empire’s communications collapsed before the skimmers’ effects were fully felt.”
Mass didn’t pay any attention to that There was something else on his mind. “Wait a minute,” he said. “There are lots of planets with large populations and within range of each other — wouldn’t they be able to pool their resources?”
Edelith considered it. “It sounds good, Mass, but it doesn’t work that way. A culture has to reach a threshold level of production; after that, it requires only the willingness to accomplish the deed. Below that threshold level, there’s no way to ‘pool resources.’ Above it, there’s no need.
“There’re probably many areas in the galaxy where neighboring star systems have maintained communications — like the area around Liadne; but the Empire at its height comprised more than 11,000 planets. Most of them were thinly populated — oh, most people lived fairly well; according to the history texts, there were a great deal of resources available for just a very few people — but the equation requires a certain amount of manpower as well as a speci6c level of production. Too many of the Empire planets fell below those levels.”
“Then the Empire doesn’t exist any more, any-where...?”
“Probably not,” said Edelith. “We are living in what historians of the future will probably call ‘The Galactic Dark Ages’.”
“Dark Ages?” asked Tapper. “Doesn’t that mean a time of no knowledge?”
“It means an interruption in the gathering of knowledge, or a loss of knowledge from the general usage of a culture. In our case, the knowledge isn’t lost — it’s just spread out. It only remains to be gathered up again. This skimmer —” She gestured about her, “— is the perfect vehicle for such a task.”
"Excuse me,” said Ike. “It was the skimmers that were responsible for the collapse of the Empire in the first place.”
“Huh?” That was Mass.
Edelith echoed his bewilderment, “Why do you say that?”
“Because it appears to be true. I have been considering your statement, Edelith. You said that economic values on too many planets were determined by the false scarcity of certain trade items. I assumed you meant the scarcity which is derived from inefficient transport systems, in this case, the pre-skimmer lightships. As you postulated, the efficiency of the skimmer would destroy those values and create economic chaos — with political upheavals following as well However, I do not think you realize the scope of those political upheavals because you fail to realize the power of the skimmers.”
Both Mass and Edelith were staring, “Go on,” Edelith whispered.
“The pre-skimmer lightships,” said Ike, “were in-efficient in a way much more important to the stability of the Empire than the one-light-year-every-three-days limitation: they had to have a home base. They were tied down to a high-level technology because only a high-level technology could refuel and maintain a lightship.
"A lightship is an ecological dead-end,” explained the construct. “It has to be supported, it cannot support itself. The energy-refining equipment to manufacture its power cells could cover several hundred square miles. No ship could comprise that much technology within its hull,” said Ike, “—until the skimmers. The skimmers are self-supporting.”
“My God, yes —” Edelith’s face was pale. Mass blinked in astonishment.
"You should have realized it, Mass; this craft not only has almost unlimited speed — it has unlimited range as well. We can travel anywhere because we can refuel with anything. Think of the effect that knowledge must have had on a Captain four hundred years ago. Suddenly he no longer had to be responsible to his home planet — not economically, not politically. He was a free agent, master of his own ship, captain of his own destiny; he was as independent as a man could be. Once he was in space with his skimmer, there was no way that anyone could catch or control him.”
Edelith sank onto a chaise, her mouth agape. She managed to gasp, “but the skimmers weren’t the cause of the collapse, they couldn’t have been —”
“They were the catalyst,” said Ike. “The potential must have already been there.”
Edelith forced herself to ass. “Yes, of course. The potential for collapse is inherent in any entropy-reversing system. Its strength is measured by how well the system can cope with or adapt to new circumstances — yes, of course, Ike —” She looked up, her eyes were bright with realization, “— the impact of the skimmers was too much for the Empire; they happened too fast. They overloaded the culture’s ability to adjust —”
“And the result was an explosion of irresponsibility,” said Ike. "First, the economic chaos, then the political upheavals; then, anally, men must have seized the skimmers for their own ends, either to flee or to control. The skimmers represent ultimate power. I suppose that men must have killed for them, become dictators or tyrants. A man with a skimmer has absolute control, yet he cannot be caught or killed.”
Edelith shook her head, “No, Ike — not dictators. Gods. Men would have used the power of the skimmers to set themselves up as gods.”
From SPACE SKIMMER by David Gerrold (1972)
FUSTEST WITH THE MOSTEST: NO STEALTH IN SPACE
James Cambias:
In the perfect-information environment of space, pirates can still operate — they just have to be clever. Base themselves in "choke points" with suitably chaotic politics, so they can intercept merchants when they've finished their burn and can't evade.
Example: for a forthcoming story (The Barbary Shore by James L. Cambias) about pirates intercepting Lunar helium payloads, I put the raiders at L-1, near where the payloads launched from the Moon begin the fall down to Earth. The payloads are moving very slowly there, so a quick burn from L-1 can intercept them. Until they start their intercept burn, the pirates are peaceful "Lunar Resource Satellites" duly registered and legal.
Doug:
In a non-FTL system any attempt to draw close enough to a ship to board is going to be clearly visible to anyone looking the right way at the right time. Even barring a distress call that could be heard by anyone in the system and lead them to point their telescopes in the right direction sooner or later someone is going to spot the pirate ship while it is pirating. Once that occurs the ship can be tracked, and at some point the pirates are going to need a port or a base. Under these circumstances any port that gives aid to a ship that has been identified as a pirate will be getting a visit from a taskforce some time soon; since as I recall that would be an act of war. Chances are the regions harbouring pirates would not be up to a full-scale war against the regions they are robbing, since presumnably the robbed has more resources than the robber.
And that would be the problem Cambias. Without any uncertainty about where the perpetrators of the crime had gone it would be quite simple to take measures to stop them. Without a horizon or islands around to use to keep out of sight any act of piracy would be in full view of the solar system.
This also applies to Rebel groups, the only real places to hide are inside of habitats, otherwise tracking down a rebel base is just too easy. If there is a rebellion it will be less space battles and more sabotage and knifings. Of course you have internal sensors to worry about, but those are much easier to smash than telescopes on the far side of the system.
James Cambias:
I covered that in my story. The pirates are perfectly legal right up to the moment they start pirating. Then their flag government is shocked, shocked to discover these seemingly honest entrepreneurs were actually pirates. Some hapless political dissident gets arrested for the crime, and things continue. The story, of course, is about the inevitable response.
BOOKS I WILL NOT WRITE #4: SPACE PIRATES OF KPMG: PIN-STRIPE PIRACY
Starships are expensive, intricate pieces of machinery. They are difficult to build and maintain, and have to be continuously in motion, transporting cargo and passengers, in order to cover their running costs.
There are space pirates. They, too, have to pay huge amounts of money to keep their starships running, and they can't afford to be stupid about it.
The space pirates' business model is this: they identify a likely target merchant ship, match courses with it, and board.
They do not, however, rape, pillage, and murder the passengers and crew. That would leave them having to transport a lot of bulk merchandise and find somewhere to fence it, taking an inevitable hit in the commodity's resale value. It would also set everyone's hand against them. Not good for life expectancy ...
Instead, they audit the cargo. Then they search out for any secret items the ship is transporting, stuff that is of high value but not publicly announced. Many times they don't find any. But sometimes they stumble across a passenger liner with a safe full of quantum computing chips, or a bulk liquid carrier with much less freight volume in its cargo holds than expected and something extremely massive tucked away — a lump of stabilized neutronium, for example.
They do not steal the secret cargo. Instead, they notify their accomplices by means of their private causal channel to buy commodity options based on their insider knowledge of the secret cargo's impending arrival. Then they give the hijacked ship an armed escort (under communications silence) all the way to its destination, to ensure it arrives on time.
Thus: your typical space pirate in the Eschaton universe metaphorically wears a grey pin-striped suit, swarms aboard a merchant vessel with a spreadsheet between his clenched teeth, and has retirement plans involving a senior partnership in a firm of accountants. (Captain Jack Sparrow he ain't.)
Such pirates are tolerated by the majority of sane merchant captains (although they drive commodity traders up the wall) because space is big, space is dark, and space contains a small but worrying number of idiot barbarians who will, if they see a foreign merchant vessel, board it with rape, pillage and murder in mind. Idiot barbarians are bad for commerce. Professional space pirates strongly disapprove of this and will take drastic preventative measures when they run into them.
Now, fast-forward a decade after the events of "Singularity Sky". The New Republic of that book is, clearly, in dire straits. In fact, it's disintegrating under the stress of its own cultural singularity (inflicted by first contact with the Festival). The economy is in tatters; navy crews are not being paid. Is it any wonder if the crews of the surviving vessels of the New Republican Navy mutiny and light out for parts unknown, there to try and make their fortune flying the Jolly Roger (despite not knowing a put option from a hole in a bowling green)?
The pin-striped space pirates aren't going to approve ...
And the problem with pirates is that they aren't a problem... as people imagine it to happen.
For one thing, as the book states, Space is big, really big. It's so big it's next to impossible for a pirate ship to sneak up on a cargoship, and not because "There Ain't No Stealth In Space" it's because "Space Is Fraking Huge!" The travel times are so long, it's highly improbable that the pirate ship is in the right place.
Here's an example: We're in the Sol system, and Earth and Mars are in opposition, so the T2 cargo ship, Bountiful Booty (with V-Shift 2), is making the trip to Mars full of cargo from Earth. It will take 2.5 days to get there.
At the same time, the Space Pirate Base on the asteroid Pallas, is also at opposition and at perihelion, 2.132 AU. They see the Bountiful Booty leave Earth for Mars. They hop into their T2 pirate ship, the Lusty Lady, (also with V-Shift 2) and overburn to intercept the cargoship.
See the problem there? They can't catch them in space, even if they tried.
If the pirates don't turnaround and decel, they will intercept the cargo ship in deep space. But, alas, they are going in the wrong direction! Combat would be a quick jousting match, leaving one or both ships terminally disabled from the encounter. And even if it didn't, the pirate ship would have to turn around and catch up. They will have to travel the same distance again before they can head back. By that time, their radiators are glowing cherry red, and they are low on fuel.
"So John, are you saying that space pirates are impossible?" you may ask.
My answer is "No." They can still operate, but not in deep space. The problems of hiding your base of operations (impossible) and traveling fast enough to intercept the target (highly improbable and dangerous), means that pirates will not be hiding out in the asteroid belt, but on the planet itself.
In real life, most pirates sailed in sloops, fast and maneuverable, and mainly used their reputation to terrorize cargo vessels and only deal with the really valuable cargo.
So the pirates aren't piloting big space ships, they are flying interface craft, aerospace fighters and cargo shuttles, and after threatening to destroy the cargoship, the shuttles dock and load the valuable stuff, and they all drop back down into the planet's atmosphere and then hide amongst the ground clutter.
The pirates will have a ship in orbit during Opposition around Mars to keep an eye out for traffic from Earth. When they see the Bountiful Booty fire up it's drives and climb up Sol's gravity well for Mars, they will alert the pirate base on Mars and by the time the BB shows up, the corsairs are in orbit waiting for her.
Of course the Martian constabulary will have their patrol vessels in orbit, watching out for the corsairs, but it's not as easy to spot something in orbit, since it's out of sight half the time. And it still takes time to change orbital levels and intercept a ship.
Utopia Großband #178
Artwork by Rudolf Sieber-Lonati
The Fifth Force in the Universe
Quick answer: it's violence.
In writing about crime in space I've come to the conclusion it probably is not going to be what we expect. Space pirates are not going to hunt down their prey, plan an ambush from behind a small moon. I never understood how they got to see the target but the target didn't get to see them. Line-Of-Sight (LOS) should work both ways if playing Squad Leader taught us anything!
So while my previous post explained that limited space piracy was possible with hard science rockets (and enough work and sneaking) going after a ship is just plain stupid if you have any better targets and there are plenty following stable predictable orbits and with no ability to maneuver!
So what if they see you coming a month or more away? You look like anyone else coming in to stop for water and stores. You're always stopping for water; the stuff has a million uses. You get there and swarm the place. Even better wait for other ships to be docked and you might grab one of those too! I mean look, they're just sitting there docked!
There are still things a savvy station owner can do to minimize the risk of pirate attacks. If your establishment is under spin to create gravity you're probably trying hard to keep one section counter rotating so it's a stationary docking port for ships. Stop doing that. Have a station hub, a reinforced module with a bunch of different docking ports for ships can be a defensive feature. If the new customers have a suspicious number of parrots, eyepatches and rolled 'R's open an empty docking port to vacuum. Repeat as necessary.
If you're going to hit a station the loot might be immense. You will want to make sure it's immense. Because you're going to want to lay low and pay people to ignore you for a long time after this. Spies or inside men will pay for themselves many times over. Not only do they provide tips, a bit if sabotage works wonders to reduce resolve.
Also note a smart pirate will plan to attack a station and stay the hell away from underground bases in asteroids or moons. Those places have entrances at the end of tunnels and usually lots and lots of explosive charges. Blowing a habitat in a station could be suicide. Blowing a tunnel and collapsing it (optionally full of invaders) is something most miners won't think twice about.
Mines are usually dealing in raw materials though certainly some refining takes place to avoid wasting propellant carting slag around. You might not be interested in 200 tons of semi-pure iron. Much better to hit a station where it is already in the form of useful manufactured goods.
Space pirates. You know you love 'em. Those likable scoundrels with hearts of gold. Okay before I induce mass vomiting let's get to the real question: where do pirates get their ships?
D'uh. They steal them. Well yes. That's one way. But there's a bunch of them. Believe it or not pirates can pay for their ships too. In fact that may be the preferred way since you usually attack ships not equipped to pt up a fight. You are picking weakly defended choice targets to maximize your plunder vs. repair bills, right?
Needless to say when I say pay it is with someone else's money. Maybe yours.
The first and easiest way to grab a ship is to default on your bank loan. After all if you're going to be a pirate (or smuggler) you're going to have to get used to breaking the law. This is a sort of get your feet wet move. The drawbacks are that banks do not often give loans for warships meaning you have a small freighter or scout which is not going to inspire fear in your victims (despite all those boss .gifs you intend to transmit to them). Also when a ship goes missing the first thing banks think is 'deadbeat' and they quickly go through all legal (and some illegal) channels to get the ship back.
Make your disappearance look good. Crash a lifepod somewhere with a low passenger aboard who didn't make it. Send a distress call and fake a boarding action or just throw some wreckage out near the jump limit.
The second method is hijacking. This could get you a fighting ship. The problem is that fighting ships do not usually carry passengers. That means getting hired, securing working passage or being a stowaway. All of this requires skullduggery, acting and possibly honest work. It also requires either an outside ship ready with a prize crew or more than one hijacker to fly most ships into the sunset. Extra hijackers compounds the difficulty of remaining undetected. An outside ship runs the risk of being discovered and shot up in a boarding action if things go wrong.
I wrote enough on boarding actions. Basically any pirate attacking a ship to seize it better have a bunch of trump cards in a stacked deck or he won't be repeating it too many times.
Mutinies are a special case. This would be a prime way to seize control of a mercenary cruiser or other warship. Some the crew or troops take over, marooning or killing the rest. The benefit is you start out with a warship and with less damage than you'd inflict disabling it then boarding. You also start with a crew of fighters. More importantly mercs sometimes rake in the big bucks meaning the ship is paid for or taken as a prize. That means the bank will not be looking for you and on the Frontier that's almost everyone you need concern yourself with. Just watch out for any friends of the former owners with ships of their own.
Very rarely a pirate may find a derelict ship. This may seem like a bonanza. Till you start wondering what happened to the crew and what is wrong with the ship. You may find that a perfectly functioning ship with a missing crew is not a good thing at all (especially if I'm running the game.)
But then there is the ancient practice of barratry. Barratry refers to a ship captain defrauding ship owners or causing them damages. Some captains will sell a ship to interested buyers. What the hell, it isn't his ship and he could net several million, enough to retire on some pleasant backwater. The pirates get a ship without having to get shot at and the few million paid out is better spent on a bribe than medical equipment and damage repairs.
The final way to get a ship is to build it which can be either the simplest or the most complicated. A privateer is a mercenary given a license to plunder the ships of a hostile power. In this case the pirate/privateer attacking you may have started life legally in your enemy's shipyards.
Pirates do operate some secret shipyards in deserted systems. After all pirates need their yearly maintenance. Some prize ships may be upgunned or older ships modified. Showing up at a commercial shipyard just won't do. A pirate who manages to convert his stronghold into a shipyard is likely set for life. He can charge his peers exorbitant rates and retire from risky boarding actions. these pirate bases are quite rare and when the Navy or Scouts bust one up they crow about it for months (or even longer if it wasn't abandoned).
The other sort of shipyards work for their bloodthirsty clients in plain sight. A ship will come in with registration numbers and transponders faked for servicing or fueling. Only the most corrupt governments will knowingly service pirates in exchange for shares of loot. Only the most totalitarian regimes will have hopes of keeping this secret for long. Ever wonder why the local jerk-tator always seems to have spies following your crew around? Maybe they aren't just his spies. Maybe the friendly captain having his ship overhauled in the pit next to yours is not to be trusted. Maybe some people should wonder what their tax dollars are spent on?
On a final note, don't worry about those Bank/Pirate conspiracies where the bank hires pirates to capture ships close to paying off their mortgages, by them back for a fraction of their value and then mortgage them again. Pirates are not in collusion with banks.
So ye want te be a pirate chieftain do ye? Well getting a ship be easy. Beg, borrow or steal one. Getting the crew be the hard part!
Know what? I'm tired of talking that way.
Yes, the ship usually comes with a crew but after the usual methods of acquisition that may not be the case. A crew might mutiny and then some refuse to to sail under the Black Flag. Add to this that some crew may pirate only briefly and then retire or be retired and you realize there is a bit of a turnover rate. How then do you recruit more pirates?
This problem is compounded by the fact that pirates need some very skilled personnel to repair and modify ships and their transponders. The Navy can just hang some posters up and man a kiosk at the port with some eye candy and attract gullible young people. Try that with piracy and see what far you get. (Spoiler: you get twenty years hard time to life.) But don't worry! If the Scouts can attract recruits anyone can!
In several posts I mention piracy starts at starports. There any savvy group of Brethren have a number of snitches and agents identifying a juicy cargo to plunder. It beats rolling stuff up on an encounter chart. But it starts well before that. Piracy arises from a number of economic issues and local politics.
Take the Brethren (nickname given by the Navy brass). The Brethren were originally a a group of crime families who prospered and expanded to several worlds and stations. They began a number of illegal mining, drug refining and slave camps. They soon found that they had to guard these operations as well as have method of punishing those managers who were derelict in their duties or worse — skimming. They quietly put the word out through smuggling ring contacts and got a number of pirate captains quite willing to follow orders for a fat and regular paycheck. With their expansion secured the Brethren realized their space forces could easily generate more income and were mostly sitting around idle!
The Brethren embarked on a highly organized system of insurance fraud. Precious cargo would be bought, insured, and loaded on ships. In the process the cargo would be switched for worthless junk and sold groundside before anyone knew it was stolen. The ship carrying the false cargo would then be attacked, boarded and looted with the pirate crew instructed to do no real damage to the merchant already part of the Brethren. The Navy would chase the pirates in many cases and a well timed wave of smugglers would descend onto the Brethren's planet.
In some clusters the brethren began trading on their reputation. Representatives would approach shipping companies and introduce them to a very reasonable (compared to the alternative) rate system to assure no pirates would bother their ships. The same representatives called on a number of smuggling rings as well. Needless to say the smugglers were another source of recruits. Some merchants quit their companies to pirate as well. If they were going to endure violence and corruption the pirates had better armed ships and more leverage.
Some of the starport informants were quite skilled indeed working in traffic control, and maintenance and would make prime crew. Leverage to recruit them varied. Does that traffic controller have a gambling problem? Does the married engineer like the ladies a little too much. Any and every vice was monetized to get some hold over them. Loans and bribes to help out recruits were also used. These loans will be expensive. Just how expensive no one knows because no one ever finished paying them back. Maybe a promising recruit lacked the connections to make it into one academy or another. The Brethren obliged.
All these informants, expediters and corrupt officials had two things in common: a set of skills and a finite career groundside. They could either keep pointing out targets until they are caught or retire after they made enough to suit retire.
Except the Brethren might not want them to retire.
Now apart from their strong work ethic the Brethren usually did all right by its informants. When one got fingered they made a concerted effort to get the person offworld and onto a ship where they could be of further use. Letting them get arrested is just opening a whole other can of worms. It also made new snitches harder to recruit. So your traffic controller ended up manning a scanner on a corsair. Your engineer was set to up gun that merchant you brought in. That's how they got highly skilled labor.
Whole crews were harder. Sometimes a merchant skipped on payments and went rogue, peddling smoke stick cartons without the duty stamp and declaring himself a pirate. They usually lasted till they met a real pirate who made the crew an offer. Being outlaws already many accepted.
Privateers were another source of crews (GASP!). Once they started attacking enemy merchants some had trouble reading the print on their letters of marque and started grabbing any ship. Others wound up buying a ship for what amounted to a short war and horribly, peace! Left with no way to make payments and a warship what do you think they did?
Some crew came from prize ships. After working long hours, enduring passengers, local laws and a stratified promotion system many merchants chose a life of piracy instead of ending up a retired wage slave with a gold watch. The same held true to a lesser extent for Navy and Scouts. Some people would rather take a chance at riches if they're going to be putting their lives on the line anyway.
Moral of the story: pirates don't exist in a vacuum.
Another problem to be addressed if you want piracy to be viable is infrastructure.
Captain Jack Sparrow's ship needed no fuel, only the winds. The crew can repair much of the ship all by themselves, if they can find an island that has trees. And there is no shortage of places that will accept gold coins and jewels with no questions asked.
Now a pirate starship might be able to squeak by if they can use water or hydrogen for fuel, but it will be a real problem if their ships require antimatter or highly refined plutonium. Repairing ones ship is job for a shipyard, not a random asteroid with the crew frantically looking for nuggets of titanium. And fencing high tech computer chips will be a challenge. What pirates need is a Pirate Haven.
The two models of pirate havens are Tortuga and Port Royal. Tortuga was a place made by pirates and run by pirates for the benefit of pirates. Port Royal was a place that officially was against pirates. But unofficially they would purchase pirated goods, repair pirate ships, and show pirate crews a good time. In order to maintain the illusion of their anti-pirate stance the officials of Port Royal would strain themselves looking the other way, and never ever asking any embarrassing questions.
James Cambias said that manned piracy in space would require some kind of space habitat which is either run by a powerful Earth state yet tolerates piracy (the "no peace beyond the Line" model), or a space habitat which is essentially owned by pirates and can defend itself (the "Libertaria" model).
Pirate havens may also have their very own argot, Thieves' Cant or secret language. Newcomers who cannot speak it or otherwise pass the Shibboleth will be exposed as posers at best and undercover cops at worst. Both will probably be executed by walking the plank right out the airlock.
WIKIPEDIA: PIRATE HAVEN
Pirate havens are ports or harbors that are a safe place for pirates to repair their vessels, resupply, recruit, spend their plunder, avoid capture, and/or lie in wait for merchant ships to pass by. The areas have governments that are unable or unwilling to enforce maritime laws. This creates favorable conditions for pirates and piracy.
These havens were often near maritime shipping lanes. Although some havens were merely hidden coves, some were established by governments who employed privateers to disrupt the overseas trade of rival nations.
Access to facilities, not their expense, is the key to on-going piracy. Basic ships stores can be extorted from casual traffic, purchased under a "cover" identity, or delivered through a second ship (willingly or under duress). Annual maintenance and repairs of battle damage will require lengthy stops in a class A or B port. Battle damage can be difficult to explain to port authorities (bear in mind that not everyone can be bribed, and not all those who can will stay bought). Secure maintenance can be a difficult and expensive proposition, and such bases will delimit the natural "ranges" of successful pirates. Without secure bases of operation, pirates will lead a hand-to-mouth existence, extorting or conning their way through groundside repairs, always one jump ahead of the fleet, having to abandon vessels with great frequency or operating unreliable ships increasingly prone to dangerous malfunctions. Pirates with such handicaps will be no match for the local authorities, armed merchantmen, or jealous rivals.
Personnel must be taken into consideration as well. Few ship's crew will care to spend their entire lives onboard ship, slowly accumulating money. Ship's crew must be given rest and recreation in port at frequent intervals, or they will soon desert or mutiny. In addition, pirate crews are not renowned for their high moral fiber or their extreme loyalty. Many a second-in-command has "promoted" himself with murder. Many crewmembers will get revenge for a slight (real or imagined) by betraying their ship and turning state's evidence. A captain who took command by mutiny could very well have set the precedent for his own downfall.
Pirates must seek out class A or B star-ports beyond the borders of major states, and controlled by authorities too weak or too immoral to bar suspected criminals from their facilities.
"And we've already been dumping a lot of luxury items through Wyvern. I don't see any reason we can't fence the rest of our loot there—they certainly won't object."
He shrugged, and heads nodded here and there. Most Rogue Worlds were fairly respectable (by their own lights, at least), but Wyvern's government was owned outright by the descendants of the captain-owners of one of the last piratical fleets of the League Wars to go "legitimate." It bought or sold anything, no questions asked, and was equally indiscriminate in the deals it brokered. Many of its fellow Rogue Worlds might deplore its existence, yet Wyvern was too useful an interface (and too well armed) tor most of them to do anything more strenuous. Which, since the Empire had both the power and the inclination to smack the hands of those who irritated it, gave Wyvern's robber-baron aristocracy a vested interest in anything that might disrupt the nascent Franconian Sector's stability.
From PATH OF THE FURY by David Weber (1992)
THE WITCHES OF KARRES: SUPPLYING PIRATE INFRASTRUCTURE
"One thing, here's Uldune!" Her fingertip traced over the star map between them, stopped. "Be just about a week away, on half-power."
The captain gave her a surprised look. Uldune was one of the worlds around here which were featured in Nikkeldepain's history books; and it was not featured at all favorably. Under the leadership of its Daal, Sedmon the Grim, and various successors of the same name, it had been the headquarters of a ferocious pirate confederacy which had trampled over half the Empire on a number of occasions, and raided far and wide beyond it. And that particular section of history, as he recalled it, wasn't very far in the past.
"What's good about being that close to Uldune?" he inquired. "From what I've heard of them, that's as bloodthirsty a bunch of cutthroats as ever infested space!" "Guess they were pretty bad," Goth acknowledged. "But that's a time back. They're sort of reformed now." "Sort of reformed?" She shrugged. "Well, they're still a bunch of crooks, Captain. But we can do business with them." "Business!"
She'd never been on Uldune but it was a frequent stopover point for Karres people. Uldune's reform, initiated by its previous Daal, Sedmon the Fifth, and continued under his successor, had been a matter of simple expediency—the Empire's expanding space power was making wholesale piracy too unprofitable and risky a form of enterprise. Sedmon the Sixth was an able politician who maintained mutually satisfactory relations with the Empire and other space neighbors, while deriving much of his revenue by catering to the requirements of people who operated outside the laws of any government. Uldune today was banker, fence, haven, trading center, outfitter, supplier, broker, and middleman to all comers who could afford its services. It never asked embarrassing questions. Outright pirates—successful ones, at any rate—were still perfectly welcome. So was anybody who merely wanted to transact some form of business unhampered by standard legal technicalities.
"I'm beginning to get it!" the captain acknowledged. "But what makes you think we won't get robbed blind there?" "They're not crooks that way—at least not often. The Daal goes for the skinning alive thing," Goth explained. "You get robbed, you squawk. Then somebody gets skinned. It's pretty safe!" It did sound like the Daal had hit on a dependable method to give his planet a reputation for solid integrity in business deals. "So we sell the cargo there," the captain mused. "They take their cut—probably a big one—" "Uh-huh. Runs around forty per." "Of the assessed value?" "Uh-huh." "Steep! But if they've got to see the stuff gets smuggled to buyers in the Empire or somewhere else, they're taking the risks. And, allowing for what the new drive engines will cost us, we'll be on Uldune then with what should still be a very good chunk of money. . . . Hmm!"
While still half a day away from the one-time pirate planet, the Venture's communicators signaled a pick-up. They switched on the instruments and found themselves listening to a general broadcast from Uldune, addressed to all ships entering this area of space.
If they were headed for Uldune on business, they were invited to shift to a frequency which would put them in contact with a landing station off-planet. Uldune was anxious to see to it that their visit was made as pleasant and profitable as possible and would facilitate matters to that end in every way. Detailed information would be made available by direct-beam contact from the landing station.
It was the most cordial reception ever extended to the captain on a planetary approach. They switched in the station, were welcomed warmly to Uldune. Business arrangements then began immediately. Before another hour was up Uldune knew in general what they wanted and what they had to offer, had provided a list of qualified shipbuilders, scheduled immediate appointments with identity specialists (who can supply you with a fake identity), official assessors who would place a minimum value on their cargo, and a representative of the Daal's Bank, who would assist them in deciding what other steps to take to achieve their goals to best effect on Uldune.
Helpful as the pirate planet was to its clients, it was also clear that it took no unnecessary chances with them. Visitors arriving with their own spacecraft had the choice of leaving them berthed at the landing stations and using a shuttle to have themselves and their goods transported down to a spaceport, or of allowing foolproof seals to be attached to offensive armament for the duration of the ship's stay on Uldune. A brief, but presumably quite effective, contamination check of the interior of the ship and of its cargo was also carried out at the landing station. Otherwise, aside from an evident but no-comment interest aroused by the nova guns in the armament specialists engaged in securing them, the Daal's officials at the station displayed a careful lack of curiosity about the Venture, her crew, her cargo, and her origin. An escort boat presently guided them down to a spaceport and their interview at the adjoining Office of Identities.
Yes, I'm aware that Captain Harlock is not precisely a space pirate.
jollyreaper:
There's no reason that this can't be worked into the plot. Our own human nations are not immortal. Our corporations can be consumed or die of incompetence. Just because Rome was not eternal did not mean it could not exist for the span it did. The vast majority of seeds do not become trees but that does not mean a forest cannot be.
Any properly vast station would have hundreds of sectors with redundant life support and power generation systems. If we imagine the station as an island in space, consider Hispaniola. On one side we have a functioning states, the Dominican Republic. On the other side we have Haiti, a dysfunctional mess. Same island, same resources, different results.
I could imagine a very interesting setting on a vast station that is suffering from the collapse of unified control. Some sectors are properly maintained and society is functioning as it should. Other sectors are in poor maintenance. Some of the common areas are completely out of maintenance, possibly open to hard vacuum. Perhaps the functioning side lacks the resources to fix the broken areas, maybe lack the manpower.
You have a story of resource depletion and civil war on Easter Island. A relatively advanced primitive society tore itself apart, likely over religion and politics. Imagine if you had a dozen islands within sight of each other, some of them maintaining social order while others descend into cannibalism and anarchy.
So as far as your Mos Eisley station example, a small one would be operated by one pirate king, the same way pirate settlements in the Carribean were founded by notable individuals. His house, his rules. Visitors pay rent. He provides the power, air, and food. For larger pirate settlements, each faction would maintain their own area. You wouldn't see chaotic evil pirates running these places, they'd be pragmatic amoral. These would be the guys you could trust in the sense that you know they are rational and have reputations to maintain in the community. You might get knifed in the back if no one is to be the wiser but they're not going to cheat you openly in a way that would harm their reputations. Get known as a cheat and no other pirate will risk doing business, savvy?
The rationale for a pirate haven like this is fairly obvious. Pirates can't get their ships worked on in legitimate yards. They need a place to handle repairs too big for the hands onboard. They need a place for R&R, can't exactly stretch your legs in places where the cops are. Ships can refit and recrew here. And there's also the need to fence stolen goods. Here pirate cargo gets traded to "honest" merchantmen and can get back on the open market.
Now any number of things can happen to jeopardize the viability of such a pirate haven and that's where the stories get interesting.
(ed note: Waystar is the legendary pirate haven. Zilwrich is a Zacathan alien, noted archaeologists and historians. They have a life span of about a thousand years. The "Guild" is the Thieves Guild)
"You are right that it was a raid for the treasures we found within a tomb. It is a very rich find and a remainder of a civilization not heretofore charted. So it is worth far more than just the value of the pieces—it is worth knowledge!" And he provided that last word with such emphasis as I might accord a flawless gem. "They will sell the treasure to those collectors who value things enough to hide them for just their own delight. And the knowledge will be lost!"
"You know where they take it?" Eet asked.
"To Waystar. So it would seem that that is not a legend after all.
"They blasted into hyper. We cannot track them." Ryzk shook his head. "And the site of Waystar is the best-guarded secret in the galaxy."
But I held a session in which we pooled what we knew of Waystar. Since most was only legend and space tales, it would be of little value, a statement I made gloomily.
But Zilwrich differed. "We Zacathans are sifters of legends, and we have discovered many times that there are rich kernels of truth hidden at their cores. The tale of Waystar has existed for generations of your time, Murdoc Jern, and for two generations of ours—"
"That—that means it antedates our coming into space!" Ryzk interrupted. "But—"
"Why not?" asked the Zacathan. "There have always been those outside the law. Do you think your species alone invented raiding, crime, piracy? Do not congratulate or shame yourselves that this is so. Star empires in plenty have risen and fallen and always they had those who set their own wills and desires, lusts and envies, against the common good. It is perfectly possible that Waystar has long been a hide-out for such, and was rediscovered by some of your kind fleeing the law, who thereafter put it to the same use. Do you know those co-ordinates?" he asked Ryzk.
The pilot shook his head. "They are off any trade lane. In a 'dead' sector."
"And what better place—in a sector where only dead worlds spin about burned-out suns? A place which is avoided, since there is no life to attract it, no trade, no worlds on which living things can move without cumbersome protection which makes life a burden."
"One of those worlds could be Waystar?" I hazarded.
"No. The legend is too plain. Waystar is space-borne. Perhaps it was even once a space station, set up eons ago when the dead worlds lived and bore men who reached for the stars. If so, it has been in existence longer than our records, for those worlds have always been dead to us."
He had given us a conception of time so vast we could not measure it. Ryzk frowned.
"No station could go on functioning, even on atomics—"
"Do not be too sure even of that," Zilwrich told him. "Some of the Forerunners had machines beyond our comprehension. You have certainly heard of the Caverns of Arzor and of that Sargasso planet of Limbo where a device intended for war and left running continued to pull ships to crash on its surface for thousands of years. It is not beyond all reckoning that a space station devised by such aliens would continue to function. But also it could have been converted, by desperate men. And those criminals would thus have a possession of great value, if they could continue to hold it—something worth selling—"
"Safety!" I cut in. Though Waystar was not entirely Guild, yet surely the Guild had some ties there.
"Just so," agreed Eet. "Safety. And if they believe they have utter safety there we may be sure of two things. One, that they do have some defenses which would hold perhaps even against Fleet action, for they cannot think that the situation of their hole would never be discovered. Second, that having been so long in the state of safety, they might relax strict vigilance."
However, on the visa-screen what we picked up now was not the ship, but what lay ahead. For additional safety Eet had snapped on the distort beam and through that we could see just a little of the amazing port we neared.
Whatever formed its original core—an asteroid, a moon, an ancient space station—could not be distinguished now. What remained was a mass of ships, derelicts declared so by their broken sides, their general decrepit appearances. They were massed, jammed tightly together into an irregular ovoid except in one place directly before us, where there was a dark gap, into which the ship controlling our path was now headed.
"Looted ships—" I hazarded, ready to believe now in every wild story of Waystar. Pirates had dragged in victim ships to help form their hiding place—though why any such labor was necessary I could not guess.
The band of murdered ships ended suddenly in a clear space, a space which held other ships—three I could see. One was the cargo ship which had brought us in, another was one of those needle-nosed, deadly raiders I had seen used by the Guild, and the third was plainly a yacht. They were in orbit around what was the core of this whole amazing world in space. And it was a station, oval in shape like the protecting mass of wreckage, with landing stages at either end. Its covering was opaque, but with a crystalline look to the outer surface, which was pitted and pocked and had obviously been mended time and time again with substances that did not match the original material.
From UNCHARTED STARS by Andre Norton (1969)
THE ISLAND WORLDS
artwork by Alan Gutierrez
(ed note: Thor needs to escape Earth to go to the asteroid belt. He has faked his death and is seeking passage with a smuggler named Mr. Shaw)
Thor nodded off, but was jerked awake abruptly when
the buggy halted at a nondescript outcropping of rock.
“Get out and give me a hand,” Mike said. Puzzled,
Thor dismounted as Mike crossed to the rock and pried
a section away. It swung open on hidden hinges
and inside Thor saw a clutter of gear, most of which he
could not identify. In one corner was a rack of laser
rifles and handguns. All such weapons were highly illegal for civilians to possess. Thor helped Mike stow the
camouflage net, then they unbolted the track-hider gadget from the back of the buggy. Apparently, this was a
clandestine warehouse for smugglers to store the equipment they could not afford to be caught with. As they
drove away Thor noticed that the area they had entered
was heavily-trafficked, with crisscrossing tire tracks everywhere he looked. That seemed odd. He had assumed that they were headed for some clandestine
smugglers port. This looked like the area near Armstrong(public lunar base).
They passed through a gap in a low ridge and then
were looking out onto a broad plain flooring an ancient
crater. One high wall of cliffs on the edge of the crater
was studded with lights. “That’s Armstrong!” Thor said.
“Of course it’s Armstrong, you dummy,” Mike said
disgustedly. “You want to get off Luna, don’t you? Well
you need a spaceport for that.” He drove the buggy
onto a crushed-gravel road slanting down the low crater
wall. “Amateurs,” Mike groused. “I hate dealing with
amateurs!” Thor decided to keep his mouth shut from
then on. As they crossed the crater floor, a spidery
landing craft descended to the floor on a plume of
white-hot gas. It settled onto a pad and was lowered
beneath the lunar surface.
Instead of heading for the airlocks of the main facility, to which Thor had always returned from his outings, Mike steered for a long row of utility locks near
the landing pads. This area was a warren of old warehousing caves, tunnels, abandoned military facilities and
other derelict structures. Even the short history of lunar settlement had been sufficient to produce this tangle of semi-abandoned facilities, and Thor suspected
that some of the confusion was deliberate. He had
studied several maps of this region, and all of them
were mutually contradictory.
They passed through an airlock hatch with a number
code painted on its face, over several earlier generations of numbers. The machinery was antiquated but
well-maintained. Good machinery would last nearly forever on Luna, free from the corrosive effects of an
atmosphere and its attendant moisture and microorganisms. Mike left the buggy in the lock and Thor
unshipped his kit bag as the inner hatch cycled open.
He followed Mike into a long, featureless corridor carved
roughly out of the lunar rock and both men pulled off
their helmets. Mike was the scar-faced redhead who
had sat at the table near Thor and Shaw in the Earthlight room.
They passed into a room where silent men were
working busily, packing things into crates and bundles.
Thor and Mike climbed out of their suits and Mike
called one of the men aside. “Get all the ID numbers
off this suit,” he held up the suit Thor had been wearing, “and sell it over in Armstrong or someplace.” He
flashed Thor a very brief, gap-toothed grin. “Moonsuit
won’t do you no good where we’re going. You’ll need a
rockjumper suit out there.”
They passed through a maze of tunnels and rooms.
Mike seemed to navigate by cryptic marks painted on
the walls in a multitude of colors. Then they were in
Warehouse 17. Thor knew that this was a private facility rented by one of the outerworld transportation concerns. “Put your bag there,” Mike said, pointing to a
wheeled cart stacked with personal kit bags. Thor tossed
his on the top of the heap and followed Mike into a
small room opening off the main warehouse area. To his
surprise, it was a small bar. The tables were thinly
occupied by spacers and dock workers, and a few people were playing electronic games at the bar, with the
loser paying for the drinks. Mike strode to the rear of
the room.
“Here he is, Boss,” Mike said.
Martin Shaw looked up from the table where he sat
with the other man Thor had seen in the Earthlight
Boom, the dark one with the stubble of hair and beard.
“Have a seat, Taggart,” he invited. Thor and Mike both
sat.
“You disappoint me, Mr. Shaw,” Thor said.
“How so?”
“Well, first the Earthlight Room, now this. " He waved
at the busy warehouse facility beyond the barroom door.
“It’s all kind of mundane. The holos back home all have
people like you operating out of freewheeling buccaneer ports and clandestine landing sites, not using legitimate facilities.”
Shaw showed the very faintest of smiles. “What do
they know of people like me? Besides, hidden ports
may sound romantic, but the idea is impracticable.
There are damn near a century’s worth of spy satellites
orbiting around this rock. A kid couldn’t launch a toy
rocket out away from the settlements without something picking it up. No, smugglers have always known
that even better than clandestine ports are ports with a
large volume of legitimate traffic, so large that official
inspection is perfunctory at best. And best of all is
official cooperation.”
“People are packing up here to leave,” Thor said. “Is
that why the short notice I got?” A little, wheeled robot
waiter came by the table and Thor punched an order.
The drink was duly delivered up from the robot’s innards, in an inelegant but unbreakable plastic tube.
“You keep your eyes open,” Shaw admitted. “Yes,
I’m closing down lunar operations. It’s been good here,
but the new laws are cracking down hard. Mike will
stay back to close down our facilities and sell off everything we’re not taking with us. I’ve decided to clear out
now, before they shut off all our exits. Some of my
competitors are staying around. People are getting desperate to get out and are paying high prices. That’s
acting greedy and they’re going to regret it. They'll be
caught when the net goes out.” Shaw seemed to be
much more relaxed than the last time Thor had seen
him, almost friendly. Perhaps the decision to pack up
and go had relieved him of a lot of tension.
“So you think the isolationists and Earth Firsters are
going to win?” Thor asked.
“They’ve won,” Shaw said. “They won years ago, but
most people are just waking up to it. I saw it coming
long before I left Earth. The signs were all there.”
The ship had several “holds,” actually just enormous,
detachable cylinders adapted to carry cargo or passengers. Some of these were sealed and Shaw was reluctant to reveal what was in them. For an unabashed
smuggler, that suggested to Thor that some things were
unacceptable, even in the freewheeling society of the
space settlers. Drive, holds and control were all in
separate modules, connected by struts and passage tunnels. It was a common system for ships never intended
to make planetfall, allowing great flexibility of size and
function. “Also,” Shaw told Thor with a sharklike grin,
“it makes it very difficult to keep up with how many
and what type of ships are out here. If the authorities
were looking for Spartacus, I'd break her up and rearrange her modules with other ships. You can have as
many ships as you have command and drive modules.”
“It must be a nightmare for customs authorities,”
Thor observed.
“We do our humble best. Hijacked ships are never
found again because they’re broken up and utilized or
sold off as modules. You’ll have to go to a ship sale
some time. There’s no pirate hangout like in the holos.
Word just gets passed that there’s going to be ship
hardware for sale and everybody just sort of congregates at a certain set of coordinates that all the bartenders seem to know about. I've seen whole government
military vessels broken up and sold, weaponry and all.”
“Military!” Thor said, aghast. “I thought that was
supposed to be impossible. Are there hijackers powerful enough to attack a Space Service ship?”
“Who attacks?” Shaw said. “Usually, it’s just a matter
of paying someone to look the other way. The degree of
corruption in the higher echelons of the military is
immense and has increased tremendously in the last
fifteen years. It was historically inevitable. I’ll let you
read my monograph on the subject. There are other
ways that service vessels make it onto the black market.
Sometimes, a whole crew will decide to take early
retirement from the service and bring their ship along
with them.”
“I think that society out there will be quite different
from what I anticipated,” Thor mused.
“I can guarantee it,” Shaw said.
From THE ISLAND WORLDS by Erick Kotani and John Maddox Roberts (1987)
Privateers
What is a Pirate's favorite letter? No, it isn't Arrrr, it isn't even the C. It is a Letter of Marque and Reprisal.
A pirate is not a pirate when they are actually a Privateer. What's the difference? Not much, just the aforementioned Letter of Marque and Reprisal. If a government is at war, and it doesn't want to spend a lot on warships and/or naval officers (or it wants plausible deniability), privateers are the solution.
But the line between pirate and privateer is quite vague. The term "corsair" can mean either pirate or privateer.
Here's the deal. The privateer is a civilian warship, owned by citizens of the government. The owner receives a Letter of Marque from the government. The letter authorizes the privateer to attack vessels belonging to the "enemy" (as defined in the letter) in the name of the government. Other than what is stated in the letter, the privateer does not take any orders from naval command. Naturally a privateer is in big trouble if they attack a ship that does NOT belong to the enemy (as specified in the letter).
As the privateer captures or sinks enemy vessels, they get prize money. The privateer submits claims for bounty to the Prize Court to get paid. Generally they submit their claim by putting a prize crew in charge of the captured ship at the site of the battle and having it set sail to the port city containing the prize court. The prize money comes from the sale of the captured ship and its cargo (with the government having the option to purchase the captured ship at cost).
The prize crews usually are unhappy, since once they are off the privateer they do not receive any prize money from future captures. Only the crew on board the privateer during a battle get prize money from that particular battle. So the longer a crew person stays on the privateer, the more prize money they get.
The privateer is initially funded by private investors, who get a portion of the prize money earned as their dividends. The privateer's officers and crew get the rest of the prize money. The government does not have to pay any money (prize money comes from sale of captured ship), yet gets the benefit of pressuring enemy convoy fleets and warships. It is a pretty good deal all around, as long as the privateer can regularly capture enemy vessels.
Of course the privateer is stuck with the bill for repairing any damage their ship sufferers during battle. And they run the risk of being captured or killed if the enemy ship turns out to be more than they can handle. The enemy fleet does not like privateers very much.
If the privateer commits certain offences, the navy can revoke the letter of marque as punishment. If the privateers mistakenly capture a ship of the wrong nationality, the prize court can order the captured ship returned the owners, and will not pay any prize money. In addition, the privateers will be liable to the owners for damages. If the privateers are smart, they will post a performance bond before hand, as insurance to pay for damages to owners. Legally privateers are not pirates, they are legally warships. Which means pirate law does not apply, but the laws of naval warfare do.
SPACE SKIMMER: LETTERS OF MARQUE
The Empire had always been unwieldy and unmanageable. By the year 970 H.C. it was not so much an empire as a loosely organized confederation. Lip service was paid to the idea of a unified central government for all the races of man, but the Empire was only as strong as its local representative.
Where that representative was only one agent with an Oracle machine and a twice-yearly visit from a trading ship, the Empire was a distant myth. Where that representative was an Imperial Fleet, the Empire was law. And there were all the possible variations in between. Some were just, some weren't.
The Empire passed no laws; they could not guarantee uniform enforcement. Instead, they wrote suggested codes of moral behavior for use by representatives of the Imperial Council. Agents of the Empire were free to apply them — or not apply them — as they saw fit. Or, at least to the degree that they could enforce them.
The Empire maintained few fleets of its own — and these stayed close to home. Instead letters of marque were issued.
Member planets and systems often had their own armadas to police their own territories. Often, those territories consisted of as much volume as those armadas could effectively patrol. Armed with letters of marque, these fleets were automatically acting in the name of the Empire. As agents of such, their duties were what ever their admirals wanted them to be. In return, the badge of the Empire made them — and their control — legal.
The local governments controlled the fleets, and in so doing, they wielded the real power. Some were just; some weren't. The Empire didn't care — as long as they paid their taxes. Most of them did.
In return, they received the benefits of Empire.
In addition to the implied legality of their regimes, they were automatically privy to the vast scientific and cultural library represented by the sum total of humanity. The Empire continually collected and distributed. It functioned as a gigantic clearing house of knowledge, literature, art and music. Member planets disseminated their contributions freely through the system — part of the price they paid for being able to tap the system in return. The exchange was always a bargain: the knowledge of one planet traded for the knowledge of a thousand.
One way to control an empire is to control the pulsing of its lifeblood — its interstellar commerce, the huge ships that swim between the stars.
Indeed, it was the only way to control the recalcitrant government of a far distant planet — threaten to cut it off from its interstellar brothers, especially those beyond its immediate reach. Expel it from the Empire altogether —
— at which point it becomes fair prey to any armada bearing the Empire insignia. After all, wasn't it a matter of restoring order? And weren't the armadas legal representatives of the Empire itself?
An Empire ship would never attack another Empire ship or planet; that would be a violation of the sacred trust of the Empire. But an attack on an independent ship or government — well, that was something else altogether.
The Empire insignia was a license — but only to be used against those who did not bear it. Neat. Effective.
The Empire held that one trump card, and it was enough. It was the card of mutually recognized legality, an insignia recognized by all mankind and one that indicated its bearer subscribed to a known code of behavior. It was a safe-conduct pass through troubled spaces and a basis upon which any two humans could meet for trade, or news, or simply for the exchange of pleasures. It was the card of the open market — and few would endanger their right to participate in that market by defying the Empire. They feared their neighbors too much.
From SPACE SKIMMER by David Gerrold (1972)
THE STAR FOX: LETTERS OF MARQUE
(ed note: in the novel the Alerion aliens have captured a human colony world of New Europe in the Phoenix. For political reasons having to do with appeasement, the nations of Terra are loath to do anything about it. Gunnar Heim, a private citizen, finds a loop-hole in the archaic concept of privateers.)
Heim looked at the bent head, and the rage in him seemed about to tear him apart. "I'd like to go out myself!" he shouted.
"This would be piracy," Coquelin sighed.
"No ... wait, wait, wait." The thought flamed into being. Heim sprang to his feet. "Privateers. Once upon a time there were privately owned warships."
"Eh, you have read a little history, I see." Some life came back to Coquelin. He sat straighter and watched the huge, restless figure with eyes again alert. "But I have read more. Privateering was outlawed in the nineteenth century. Even countries not signatory to that pact observed the prohibition, until it came to be regarded as a part of international law. Admitted, the Federal Constitution does not mention so archaic a matter. Still"—
"Exactly!" Heim roared; or was it the demon that had come to birth in his skull?
"No, no, flout the law and the Peace Control forces arrive. I am too old and tired, me, to stand trial before the World Court. To say nothing of the practical difficulties. France cannot declare war by herself. France cannot produce nuclear weapons." Coquelin uttered a small sad chuckle. "I am a lawyer by past profession. It there were a, you say loophole?—I could perhaps squirm through. But here—"
Word by word, Heim said: "I can get hold of the weapons."
Coquelin leaped in his seat. "Qu'est-ce que vous dites?"
"Off Earth. I know a place. Don't you see—Alerion has to put space defenses in orbit around New Europe, or she can't hold it against any determined attack." Heim was leaning on the desk now, nose to nose with the other, talking like a machine gun. "New Europe has only a limited industry. So the Aleriona will have to bring most of the stuff from home. A long supply line. One commerce raider—what'd that do to their bargaining position? What'd it do for our own poor buffaloed people? One ship!"
"But I have told you—"
"You told me it—was physically and legally impossible. I can prove the physical possibility. And you said you were a lawyer."
Coquelin rose too, went to the window, and stared long out across the Seine. Heim's pace quivered the floor. His brain whirled with plans, data, angers, hopes; he had not been so seized by a power since he bestrode his bridge at Alpha Eridani.
And then Coquelin turned about. His whisper filled the silence: "Peut-etre—" and he went to the desk and began punching keys on an infotrieve.
"What are you after?" Heim demanded.
"Details of the time before quite every country had joined the Federation. The Moslem League did not recognize that it had any right as a whole to deal with them. So during the troubles, the Authority was charged with protecting Federation interests in Africa." Coquelin gave himself entirely to his work. Once, though, he met Heim's eyes. His own danced in his head. "Mille remercîments, man frère," he said. "It may be for no more than this night, but you have given me back my youth."
"Here's the situation. One commerce raider in the Phoenix can make trouble out of all proportion to its capabilities. Besides disrupting schedules and plans, it ties up any number of warships, which either have to go hunt for it or else run convoy. As a result, the Aleriona force confronting ours in the Marches will be reduced below parity. So if then Earth gets tough, both in space and at the negotiations table—we shouldn't have to get very tough, you see, nothing so drastic that the peacemongers can scream too . loud—one big naval push, while that raider is out there gobbling Aleriona ships—We can make them disgorge New Europe. Also give us some concessions for a change."
"It may be. It may be." Vadasz remained sober. "But how can you get a fighting craft?"
"Buy one and refit it. As for weapons, I'm going to dispatch a couple of trusty men soon, in a company speedster, to Staurn—you know the place?"
"I know of it. Ah-ha!" Vadasz snapped his fingers. His eyes began to glitter.
"Yep. That's where our ship will finish refitting. Then off for the Auroran System."
"But ... will you not make yourself a pirate in the view of the law?"
"That's something which Coquelin is still working on. He says he thinks there may be a way to make everything legal and, at the same time, ram a spike right up the exhaust of Twyman and his giveaway gang. But it's a complicated problem. If the ship does have to fly the Jolly Roger, then Coquelin feels reasonably sure France has the right to try the crew, convict them, and pardon them. Of course, the boys might then have to stay in French territory, or leave Earth altogether for a colony—but they'll be millionaires, and New Europe would certainly give them a glorious reception."
"Mr. President, honorable delegates—" The translation could only suggest how the voice shifted, became the dry detached recital of an attorney making a technical point. "The Federation was founded and still exists to end the tragic anarchy that prevailed among nations before, to bring them under a law that serves the good of all. Now law cannot endure without equal justice. The popularity of an argument must be irrelevant. Only the lawful cause may be admitted. In the name of France, I therefore advance the following points."
"1. The Constitution forbids each member nation to keep armed forces above the police level or to violate the territorial integrity of any other member nation in any way. To enforce this, the Peace Control Authority is vested with the sole military power. It may and must take such measures as are necessary to stop aggressive acts, including conspiracy to commit such acts. The individuals responsible must be arrested and brought to trial before the World Court."
"2. The naval branch of the Authority has been used beyond the Solar System, albeit only in relatively minor actions to suppress insurrection and riot or to protect the lives and property of humans on distant planets. By authorizing such action, and by negotiating agreements with various aliens, the Federation has de facto and de jure assumed the posture with respect to non-human societies that was traditional between governments on Earth prior to the Constitution. Hence Earth as a whole is a sovereign state with the lawful prerogative of self-defense."
"3. By attacking New Europe and subsequently occupying it, Alerion has committed an act of territorial aggression.
"4. If Alerion is not regarded as a sovereign state, negotiation of this dispute is legally impossible, and the Authority is required to take military measures against what can only be considered banditry."
A roar went through the hall. Fazil banged his desk. Coquelin waited, sardonicism playing over his mouth. When order had been restored, the spokesman of France said:
"Evidently this assembly does consider Alerion to be sovereign like Earth. So, to proceed—
"5. If Alerion is indeed a legitimate state, then by the preamble to the Constitution it belongs to the family of nations. Therefore it must be regarded as either (a) obliged to refrain from territorial aggression on pain of military sanctions, or (b) not so obliged, since it is not a member of the Federation.
"6. In case (a), Alerion is automatically subject to military sanctions by the Peace Control Authority. But in case (b), the Authority is also required, by the Constitution and by past precedent, to safeguard the interests of individual humans and of member states of the Federation. Note well, the Authority has that obligation. Not this honorable assembly, not the World Court, but the Peace Control Authority, whose action must under the circumstances be of a military nature.
"7. Accordingly, in either case an automatic state of war now exists between Alerion and the World Federation."
Chaos broke loose.
Somehow quiet was enforced. Coquelin waited until the silence had become deathly. He raised another typewritten sheet and resumed in the same parched tone:
"8. In the event of territorial aggression, member states of the Federation are required to give every appropriate assistance to the Peace Control Authority, in the name of the Federation."
"9. In the judgment of France, this imposes an inescapable duty to provide armed assistance to the colonists of New Europe. However, a member of the Federation is prohibited the manufacture or possession of nuclear weapons."
"10. There is no prohibition on individuals obtaining such weapons outside the Solar System for themselves, provided that they do not bring them back to the Solar System."
"11. Nor is there any prohibition on the unilateral authorization by a member state of the Federation of a private military expedition which so outfits itself. We grant that privateers were formerly required to be citizens of the country whose flag they flew, and that this might conflict with the national disarmament law. We grant also that eventually the issuance of letters of marque and reprisal was banned, by the Declaration of Paris in 1856. But while such treaties remain binding on their signatories, including France, they are not binding on the Federation as a whole, which is not a signatory and indeed has members such as the United States of America which never were signatories. And we have seen that the Federation is a sovereign state, possessing all rights and responsibilities not explicitly waived.
"12. Therefore the Federation has the unrestricted right to issue letters of marque and reprisal.
"13. Therefore, and in view of paragraphs 7, 8, and 9, France has the right and the duty to issue letters of marque and reprisal in the name of the Federation.
"France has done so."
"And she might take the chance rather than surrender. I'd hate to spoil our record. Four months of commerce raiding, eighteen Aleriona ships captured, and we haven't had to kill anybody yet."
"Not just that we wont have to blot out lives," Heim exulted. "But the money. All that lovely, lovely prize money."
And a prize crew to take her back to Earth, the business part of him recalled. We're damn near down to a skeleton complement. A few more captures and we'll have to call a halt.
Fiercely: So we don't sell the last one, but send word by. it. Whoever wants to sign on again can meet us at Staurn, where we'll be refilling our magazines. With the kind of bank account I must have now, I can refit for a dozen more cruises. We won't stop till we're blown out of space—or the Federation gets off its duff and makes some honest war.
He gave himself entirely to the work of preparation. When battle stations were piped, a cheer shivered the length of the ship. Those were good boys, he thought with renewed warmth. They'd drawn reluctant lots to choose who must bring the seized Aleriona vessels home, and even so fights had broken out over the privilege of daily risking death in the Auroran System. Of course, the ones who stayed got a proportionately larger share of booty. But they had signed on his privateer for much more than that.
(ed note: This is about piracy in a medieval world such as obtains in a role playing game like Dungeons and Dragons. But it has some general principle that still apply in Rocketpunk. In such a game, a player group that rights wrongs and fights evil are called "heroes". A player group that just goes around killing people and monsters in order to steal their gold are called "murder hobos".)
The merchants were in charge.
“In charge,” was literal. The merchants controlled their little country. They had royalty of a sort. They were quite proud of their royalty. They enjoyed showing them off at every special occasion. Their so-called King even had a vote on the country’s controlling board. But the cold reality was this: the merchants were in charge.
The merchants took over the place and changed all the silverware. They made changes to the country’s priorities. Before, when Kings ruled the people, the King’s priorities shaped the laws. And the King’s priorities mostly revolved around the King. The King’s other priorities were the treasury, the church (who supported the King), all the cool things the King got to do that no one else got to do, and a side of conquest.
The merchant priorities were profit-motivated. Out went the church. Out went the old, outmoded legal system tilted to benefit royalty and noble friends. In came the profit motivation, the stock exchanges, the commodity markets, and the Transmuter Bankers. Once the merchants unleashed their infant capitalism, the money – and abuses that followed – came with it. And that was pretty awesome, because it made a ton of people, including Murder Hobos, rich.
The merchants established enormous companies that rolled up to corporations. They built huge fleets of ships. They sent their Murder Hobos far and wide to strange foreign countries. Murder Hobos established footholds, rolled the locals, and brought back enormous riches.
Flags on masts fluttered in the thousands at enormous wharves. Ships waited to sail to unknown lands and take their stuff. And the merchants were pretty proud of what they built. It looked great in oil paintings hanging in richly-appointed parlors.
They forgot about the Kings because they had so much money.
The Kings did not forget about them.
Outsourcing a War
Kings have three core motivations:
Conquest.
Their treasury.
Ensuring their son is the next King.
When King sit on their thrones, gaze out their windows, and contemplate little countries run by heathen merchants with no proper respect for Kings or Law or the King’s brand of religion, Kings see little plum rich ornaments they could add to their glittering collection. The problem, though, are those wharves filled with pretty, picturesque ships.
And here is a King pondering kicking over the merchant’s little capitalistic paradise.
Invasion by land requires this particular King to take all the land around the merchant’s little country and then push into the interior. Also, lighting cities on fire is fun. However, a land invasion involves invading and conquering a nearby country – his nephew’s. That would destabilize his nephew’s crown. And this King spent political and financial capital getting his nephew on that Throne.
The King decided to leave the nephew where he was for now.
Instead, undermining the merchant’s funding would be the fun thing to do. The funding came from overseas adventures and claiming of foreign goods. If the King weakened the merchant’s navy, he could cripple their source of capital. If he could weaken their source of capital, then their corporations would collapse. No corporations, no Murder Hobos, and no one to resist him. Then, the King could attempt a landing by sea. No need to get the nephew involved at all.
Thus, the King went to war by sea. He sent out the press gangs to force people to man his navy. He ordered forests chopped down to build more ships.
The Merchants could handle it.
Kings declaring war and sending out their well-funded Navy to attack merchant shipping was worrisome. But, the merchants weren’t resource-free. They had money and they had bankers. They also had plenty of ships. What they didn’t have is their own formal Navy.
So, they made one out of money.
Letters of marque weren’t exactly new. Sending out privateers in the name of the King is an old invention. In the days past, the letters of marque were in the name of a specific King or country and handed out, like prizes, to the King’s personal Murder Hobos. They were special and celebrated. They made pirates into Knights of the Seas.
Was there anything that made letters of marque special except they were rare? What happens if they’re less rare? Can merchants make a navy out of letters of marque and pure, naked capitalistic profit motivations?
Why not?
The merchants threw their letters of marque on the open market. Anyone could buy a letter of marque. Anyone can fund a privateer and keep the profits. Totally! Legally!
War wasn’t a problem. Hell, war was a profit opportunity.
Financing the Privateers
Time for everyone to make money regardless of alignment, God, or creed. The more unsavory, the better!
The King’s officers loaded the King’s navy with fun things to steal and sell. Cargo included: ships, magic weapons, magic cannons, wizard gear, and expensive clerical regalia.
And it worked like this:
The merchants printed piles of letters of marque for sale and dropped them on the open market. Profit collected went back into the country’s treasury. That money in turn was pumped into improving wharves for more ships;
Transmuter Bankers advertised loans at generous rates of interest for those wishing to finance a privateer ship (transmuting loans into profits!);
Merchant investors pooled together, formed companies, and signed loans from the Transmuter Bankers;
Those companies invested their cash into privateer ships. But, they got skittish and reached out to insurers;
The Guild of Abjurers, runners and executors of local Murder Hobo Insurance Agencies, offered insurance policies on privateer ships to these companies. Abjurers built insurance pools around privateer risk, which was quite high;
Shipbuilders and wainwrights hired every able-bodied worker available for a 50 mile radius to pump out ships for War;
Local companies constructed new warehouses as fast as they could build new warehouses;
Merchants legalized selling booty from privateers in local open markets;
Privateer captains, in the employ of companies, boarded crews of Murder Hobos with generous terms on taking and keeping treasure (i.e. most of it);
And the merchants running the country declared privateer bounties import tax-free.
Swarms of privateers left port eager to take the war against the King to the open seas. Once at sea, they jumped the King’s ships left and right. A successful privateer mission turned into free extra ships for the merchant’s companies. Once in port, sailors tore down flags, shaved off the King’s arms, and sent the ships back to seas. Privateers even stole supplies off the King’s ships, took them to various company’s on-land Murder Hobo encampments where they could get better prices (read: gouge), and sold goods to starving settlements.
Understandably, this pissed the King off. He sent more ships. And the Transmuter Bankers (who also financially backed the King’s debt-fueled Navy-building binge) lowered their interest rates. They offered the King generous loans. Shipwrights built more ships in both capitals.
War happened! Kerpow! Kablooie!
And then, Pirates
So, uh, yeah, those ships? Loaded with armed Murder Hobos? Once on the open sea, Murder Hobos weren’t really in the employ of those merchant investors. They had an armed ship full of supplies. Yes, they promised they would go hassle the King’s Navy and have some fun. But, that meant returning to port with booty, selling that booty, and handing the proceeds over to the merchants. Then, the merchants would pay off their loans to the Transmuter Bankers, cover those in arrears insurance payments, and fund the investors. Everyone was happy – except the privateer crew.
What did loan payments to Transmuter Bankers, payments to the Guild of Abjurers, and investors have to do with a privateer crew?
Little.
Privateer captains thought: “You know what else is full of super amazing and awesome booty we can just take?”
Other privateer ships.
Tasty tasty tasty privateer ships.
Not all privateer ships went bad. Many of them made money for their investors. But crews were expensive, and there’s only so many good-aligned sea seasoned ship captains and crews to go around. Even good-aligned ship captains go bad once on the open seas. Think of the fortunes they could make for themselves if they went rogue!
During the war:
The King’s naval vessels attacked the merchant’s privateers;
The merchant’s privateers attacked the King’s navy;
The merchant’s privateers went pirate and attacked privateers and naval ships alike;
The King’s naval ships occasionally went pirate too (because why not) and attacked privateers and naval ships.
The sea filled up with pirates. Ships that went rogue blew their investment. Insurance terms triggered. The Abjurers paid out, covered the costs of the loans, and hiked everyone’s rates. The hike in rates pissed off other investors, so they started calling for anti-pirate laws. Anti-pirate laws meant sending out more privateers to hunt down rogue Murder Hobos with pirate ships and sink them.
Pirate ships found haven with off-shored company-based Murder Hobo encampments busy making corporate profits. Pirates would sell their booty to fellow Murder Hobos, good or evil, for cheaper than the privateers or the company suppliers. On-land Murder Hobos even built the pirates little pirate hangouts with taverns and inns. The pirates would periodically return with gear refills and the occasional magic sword or upgraded wizard gadget they pulled off a King’s Naval or Company Privateer ship.
Company agents running Murder Hobo settlements wrote back to home base. The pirates weren’t that bad! They kept the Murder Hobos kicking over ork villages and taking their stuff afloat for cheaper! Maybe the company, already funding privateers fighting the King’s Navy, should consider funding the pirates under the table! Consider the profit motive! Adventuring groups! Cheaper!
But investors were screaming. They wanted to be made whole for their lost investments. Companies had to balance between the cheap Murder Hobo supply runs, investors, Transmuter Bankers, insurance agents and the loss of expensive ships to piracy.
What were merchants supposed to do? They had a war to fight and profits to make.
The merchants decided to make an example out of a couple of pirates, sink a few more, and crow about it in their nascent press. Look at all the famous pirates we’ve captured, they said. We’re merchants of Law and Order. The rest the merchants paid under the table and looked the other way.
And this only works for pirates as long as there’s money in it
War is war, and they are not always won.
Once the Merchants and the King got to a point of stalemate, the King looked at his dwindling supply of cash, took his ball, and went home. Until, of course, he asked for a loan from the merchants so he could go to war with his nephew.
Piracy only works as long as there’s money in it for Murder Hobos. Once the war was over, and fewer ships to jump, the pirates wandered off to go attack merchant shipping. But with fewer targets, pirates had less financial incentive. There’s more money in going on-land and carving up a few orks.
But then again, there’s always a new war. The moment the King and the King’s nephew went at it on the high seas, the pirates had new pickings. They were well-appointed ships. Lots of on-land Murder Hobs would pay handsomely for that gear. And there were always investors willing to take a pirate’s cargo off their hands to help them cover their delinquent loans to the Transmuter Bankers…
Merchants suffering their ships being ravaged and captured by pirates often wonder out loud if they shouldn't start putting a few anti-ship weapons on their cargo ships so they can fight back. Bad ideas. As a general rule, merchant ships cannot be armed, armored, and combat crewed enough to fight off a pirate attack, not without increasing the amortized and operating cost and reducing the cargo capacity to the point where the ship cannot turn a profit.
A "Q-ship" is a military warship disguised as a merchant vessel, traveling in a cargo convoy, intending to fatally surprise hostile convoy raiders during times of war. They would also work against piracy, and most merchants would be overjoyed to allow such a military vessel to travel with them. However since a Q-ship is a warship, it carries no cargo and returns no profit at all. Other than the "profit" of making all the pirates real skittish. In any event it belongs to the military, not to the merchant.
In Peter Hamilton's The Night's Dawn Trilogy, merchant starships can be armed yet still carry cargo with profit (by author fiat, i.e., because Peter Hamilton said so). The merchants tell everybody that the weapons are an anti-pirate measure (and because the ships sometimes hire out at mercenary warships). However some merchants ships actually commit piracy if they are sure no one will see or live to tell (which includes crewmembers with loose lips, who will suffer regrettable "accidents"). In other words such merchant ships are pirates hiding in plain sight.
MARGIN OF PROFIT: USING Q-SHIPS
(ed note: Warning, Spoilers for the story "Margin of Profit". Nicholas van Rijn is the master of an interstellar trading corporation. One of their trade routes goes through a choke point, right past the dreaded Borthudians. The Borthudians are using their navy to capture the merchant ships, seizing the ships and cargo, and electronically brain-washing the valuable crew so they will use their technical training on behalf of the navy. Bypassing the planet would render the trade route unprofitable, but neither van Rijn nor the guild of ship crews are happy about the piracy. 85% of the merchant ships make it through unharmed, but the 15% who are unlucky represent lost capital to van Rijn and brain-enslaved brothers to the guild. Trained crews are at a premium, they are the main item the Borthudians are after.)
(Escorting the merchant ships with warships in a convoy would make the route unprofitable. Arming the merchant ships would make the route unprofitable (a warship needs 20 expensive crew members, a merchant ship only needs 4).
(Nicholas van Rijn has an idea. He makes a Q-ship that looks just like a merchant ship, sends it past the Borthudians, and captures the next Borthudian raider. Then he explains the facts of life to the Borthudian captain, and sends the captain home with the bad news.)
"Ah, so. Greetings and salubrications," van Rijn boomed. "I trust you have had a pleasant stay? The local jails are much recommended, I am told."
"For your race, perhaps," the Borthudian said in dull anger. "My crew and I have been wretched."
"Dear me. My nose bleeds for you."
Pride spat: "More will bleed erelong, you pirate. His Mightiness will take measures."
"Your maggoty kinglet will take no measurements except of how far his chest is fallen," declared van Rijn. "If the civilized planets did not dare fight when he was playing buccaneer, he will not when the foot is in the other shoe. No, he will accept the facts and learn to love them."
"What are your immediate intentions?" Rentharik asked stoically.
Van Rijn stroked his goatee. "Well, now, it may be we can collect a little ransom, perhaps, eh? If not, the local mines are always short of labor, because conditions is kind of hard. Criminals get assigned to them. However, out of my sugar-sweet goodness, I let you choose one person, not yourself, what may go home freely and report what has happened. I will supply a boat what can make the trip. After that we negotiate, starting with rental on the boat."
Rentharik narrowed his eyes. "See here. I know how your vile mercantile society works. You do nothing that has no money return. You are not capable of it. And to equip a vessel like yours—able to seize a warship—must cost more than the vessel can ever hope to earn."
"Oh, very quite. It costs about three times as much. Of course, we gain some of that back from auctioning off our prizes, but I fear they is too specialized to raise high bids."
"So. We will strangle your Antares route. Do not imagine we will stop patrolling our sovereign realm. If you wish a struggle of attrition, we can outlast you."
"Ah, ah." Van Rijn waggled his pipestem. "That is what you cannot do, my friend. You can reduce our gains considerably, but you cannot eliminate them. Therefore we can continue our traffic so long as we choose. You see, each voyage nets an average thirty percent profit."
"But it costs three hundred percent of that profit to outfit a ship—"
"Indeed. But we are only special-equipping every fourth ship. That means we operate on a small margin, yes, but a little arithmetic should show you we can still scrape by in the black ink."
"Every fourth?" Rentharik shook his head, frankly puzzled. "What is your advantage? Out of every four encounters, we will win three."
"True. And by those three victories, you capture twelve slaves. The fourth time, we rope in twenty Borthudian spacemen. The loss of ships we can absorb, because it will not go on too long and will be repaid us. You see, you will never know beforehand which craft is going to be the one that can fight back. You will either have to disband your press gangs or quickly get them whittled away." Van Rijn swigged from his bottle. "Understand? You is up against loaded dice which will prong you edgewise unless you drop out of the game fast."
Rentharik crouched, as if to leap, and raged: "I learned, here, that your spacefolk will no longer travel through the Kossaluth. Do you think reducing the number of impressments by a quarter will change that resolution?"
Van Rijn demonstrated what it is to grin fatly. "If I know my spacefolk . . . why, of course. Because if you do continue to raid us, you will soon reduce yourselves to such few crews as you are helpless. Then you will have to deal with us, or else the League comes in and overthrows your whole silly hermit-kingdom system. That would be so quick and easy an operation, there would be no chance for the politicians at home to interfere.
"Our terms will include freeing of all slaves and big fat indemnities. Great big fat indemnities. They do right now, naturally, so the more prisoners you take in future, the worse it will cost you. Any man or woman worth salt can stand a couple years' service on your nasty rustbuckets, if this means afterward getting paid enough to retire on in luxuriance. Our main trouble will be fighting off the excessive volunteers."
He cleared his throat, buttered his tone, and went on: "Is you therefore not wise for making agreement right away? We will be very lenient if you do. Since you are then short of crews, you can send students to our academies at not much more than the usual fees. Otherwise we will just want a few minor trade concessions—"
"And in a hundred years, you will own us," Rentharik half-snarled, half-groaned.
A tall, slimly-built man with thinning blond hair
and blue eyes that were several shades lighter than
his impeccable uniform, rose to his feet and nodded
deferentially to Niebohr. “Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
To begin with, it appears to be the general opinion
that all that is needed to turn one of our ships—whether it be a freighter or a passenger vessel—into a
dreadnought comparable with Venturer Twelve, is the
installation of a few heavy-duty laser guns and a battery of launching tubes. Nothing could be further
from the truth, I assure you. Our ships are purpose-built for the jobs they are doing at the moment.
Apart from being costly, the physical modifications
involved in providing them with an effective degree of
fire-power would have serious side-effects.
“One of these would certainly be a lowering of the
efficiency of these ships as far as their original purpose was concerned. In most cases this would mean
that their operation was no longer economically
sound.”
Although there had obviously been an element of
nepotism in Prince’s initial appointment, any doubts
about the ex-Corpsman's ability had been quickly dispelled by the manner in which he had reorganized
the running of the Excelsior fleet. Gould knew that
most of the other members of the board, like himself,
had been forced to recognize that in Robert Prince
they were faced by that comparative novelty, an
honest man. Prince mainly held his own counsel, but
when asked for his opinions on any subject he gave
them without reserve. Despite his grudging respect
for the man, Gould could not allow such a blanket
assertion to go unchallenged.
“I’m sure that none of us here doubt your abilities,
Commander Prince,” Gould said carefully. “But are
you saying that the ships of our fleet could not be
modified?”
Prince turned to face Gould, his tanned face suddenly appearing at least ten years younger as his
light blue eyes twinkled in an open smile. “Not if
they are to continue to make a profit. And that, I
understand, is the object of the exercise. As you so
rightly point out, I am no accountant. As far as the
financial side is concerned, I’m quite incapable of
quoting figures and I shall not attempt to do so. If
you have any such questions after I have given the
technical explanations relating to my particular field, I
would appreciate your directing them at Mr. Roth.
We have talked, and I understand that he has prepared a detailed report on the cost-effectiveness of
the possible modifications.”
“Thank you, Commander,” said Gould. He looked
again at the silent, brooding figure of Niebohr, aware
that the old man must have anticipated him at every
point of his argument, might even welcome the
challenge. He had no doubt that Prince’s technical
explanations would be unimpeachable, and Rotlfs
figures correct beyond question. Gould savored the
bitterness of defeat, made even more galling by the
awareness that he had exposed, perhaps ruined, himself to no purpose.
“During my Corps service I had the pleasure, if
that is the word, of serving for some months under
Admiral Carter,” continued Prince. “He was at that
time supervising the construction of Venturer Ten.
Vee Ten was a comparatively lightly armed vessel
built mainly for speed, but even so, the generators
and control equipment needed to make that armament function would have been sufficient to account
for more than twenty-two percent of the payload of
one of our Elkan-class freighters. I should also remind
you of the maintenance and operational demands of
such equipment. The crew strength of a ship so modified would need to be doubled at the very least, and
the crew concerned would have to be trained in techniques and skills quite difierent from those at present
demanded of the normal merchant spacer. Such highly trained personnel do not in fact exist outside the
ranks of the Corps itself. To summarize, then, even if
we were to obtain permission from the government to
arm our ships, we would do so at the cost of losing a
minimum of twenty percent in effective payload,
plus at least a hundred percent increase in crew remuneration… plus the capital cost of the equipment
itself. But more important than any of these aspects
is the fact that we might well be undertaking such a
ruinous burden to no purpose.”
(ed note: to no purpose because the alien raiders apparently have some kind of jump FTL drive that makes them impossible to stop and impossible to catch)
The mental model is: shortly after a passenger cruise liner starship blasts off from the spaceport, one of the passenger whips out a laser raygun, storms the control room, and tells the pilot to fly the ship to Cuba. Or something like that.
If the ship's crew is initially aware of the hijacker's presence, but unaware that the person is a hijacker, that evildoer will probably be a paying customer of the ship packing a hidden gun. The first problem is smuggling the gun aboard, past all the metal detectors and porno scanners.
A later problem is the inability of the hijacker to capture a second or subsequent ship. As Doug said: "The trouble with hijacking is that it's near impossible to repeat it. If you were on the crew or a passenger than your biometrics will undoubtedly be checked by port security, and if you're crew there may be police background checks as well. So you do your heist and then you find another way of operating or another line of work." Meaning once the authorities have the hijacker's biometrics, if the hijacker is enough of an idiot to try a repeat performance they will be apprehended as soon as they try to purchase a passenger ticket.
If the ship's crew is initially unaware of the hijacker's presence, they will have to be stowaways. With all the problems that entails.
In the Traveller role playing game, for anti-hijacker and anti-pirate operations starship crew used cutlasses instead of slug-throwers or energy weapons. These were edged melee weapon because firearms might punch holes in the hull and let all the air out. And the edged weapons were specifically cutlasses for the sheer unmitigated romance of it all, since they were traditional shipboard weapons from the age of sail and a common feature of Errol Flynn pirate movies.
A better solution than a cutlass is submachine guns with special ammo designed to punch holes in people but not in ship hulls. Submachine guns because long rifles can get stuck in narrow corridors if you try to pivot. Maybe with an enlarged or entirely missing trigger guard if you want to use it while wearing space suit gloves. You'll want hearing protection as well. The metal corridor walls will amplify the "bang" to the point where you will be deaf for hours.
For riot control situations, the US Army is working on the Active Denial System(ADS). This is fundamentally a titanic microwave oven, without the oven. It emits microwaves with a wavelength of around a millimeter (95GHz). You can think of it as a "pain ray". Spray this beam of concentrated agony on the hostile crowd and they are guaranteed to run like scalded cats ... er, ah, "disperse". Initial tests show that it is reasonably non-lethal, but it will occasionally raise blisters.
This will quite challenging to make into a pistol, but may come in handy installed in the corridor outside the spacescraft's control room to provide a rude surprise for pirates, mutineers, and hijackers.
I am reminded of the "agony box" that Reverend Mother Mohiam used to test Paul Atreides in the novel DUNE. Not to mention the "agonizers" and "agony booths" from the classic Star Trek episode Mirror, Mirror. The TV Trope entry is "Agony Beam".
Not to be out done, the US Navy is working on its Electromagnetic Personnel Interdiction Control project, AKA the Vomit Ray. The US Department of Homeland Security is working on a pistol sized version, which is a very unsettling thought. There was rumors of a sonic device that would induce instant fecal incontinence (i.e., brown trousers time), that device thankfully appears to be an urban legend.
Traveller also has the concept of "anti-hijacking software". This is a suite of computer programs constantly running which try to prevent potential hijackers from entering high-security areas (like the control room) and otherwise doing its best to make the hijacker's lives as difficult as possible.
I'd say offhand that hijacker's motives will probably be more stealing a valuable spacecraft, and less crashing the ship into a populated area as a terrorist attack. If the latter was a problem, the Spaceguard will have range safety officers who can remotely trigger a captured ship's self destruct mechanism.
The Spaceguard is not going to blow up a ship just because it is being stolen. Hijackers will be well aware of this, unless they are total amateurs.
AIRCRAFT HIJACKING
Aircraft hijacking (also known as skyjacking, plane jacking, air robbery, air piracy, or aircraft piracy, with the latter term being used within the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States) is the unlawful seizure of an aircraft by an individual or a group. Dating from the earliest of hijackings, most cases involve the pilot being forced to fly according to the hijackers demands. However, in rare cases, the hijackers have flown the aircraft themselves and used them in suicide attacks; most notably in the September 11 attacks, and in several cases, planes have been seized by the official pilot or co-pilot.
Unlike carjacking or sea piracy, an aircraft hijacking is not usually committed for robbery or theft. Individuals driven by personal gain often divert planes to destinations where they are not planned to go. Some hijacking situations intend to use passengers or crew as hostages, either for monetary ransom or for some political or administrative concession by authorities. Various motives have driven such occurrences, such as demanding the release of certain high-profile individuals or for the right of political asylum (notably Flight ET 961). Hijackings involving hostages have produced violent confrontations between hijackers and the authorities, during negotiation and settlement. In the case of Lufthansa Flight 181 and Air France Flight 139, the hijackers were not satisfied and showed no inclination to surrender, resulting in attempts by special forces to rescue passengers.
In most jurisdictions of the world, aircraft hijacking is punishable by life imprisonment or a long prison sentence. In most jurisdictions where the death penalty is a legal punishment, aircraft hijacking is a capital crime, including in China, India, and the U.S. states of Georgia and Mississippi.
(ed note: in the Traveller jump drive, once the ship enters jumpspace, there isn't much for the crew to do until the ship exits into real space one week later. Oh, and keep in mind that this was written in 1988 when not many people were familiar with these new-fangled "computer" thingamabobs.)
COMPUTER AND SECURITY SYSTEMS
The earliest forms of security systems are all active in nature. That is, they require that the subject make an effort to identify himself. In general, this is done by some form of pattern recognition.
Electronic locks are simple computer terminals which
make use of a preset combination which must be keyed in
beiore access is granted. For security's sake, these codes
may be changed from time to time.
Magnetic readers require the insertion of a special card to
be passed. The card is read by the scanner and a specitic
code phrase or number is input to the computer. The subject is asked for this code and, if they cannot produce it,
access is denied and security personnel are alerted.
Voice readers maintain a record of the voiceprint of all
who are authorized to enter an area. Access is granted oniy
if the words spoken to the mechanism match the stored
data. It is not normally possible to fool such a device by disguising one's voice.
Fingerprint readers work in the same fashion. In each
case, an optical comparison of the subject's hand is made
and matched against records stored in the main computer's
memory. Print readers match up the creases and folds on
the surface of the skin.
Retinal scanners match the patterns of blood vessels in
the subject's retina with those on record. in some cases,
these incorporate an active security feature which, if a
match is not made, triggers a bright flash of light that causes
temporary blindness.
Active metabolic scanners require a sample of tissue from
the subject. The exact nature of this varies with the device
and may range from a drop of blood to a strand ot hair. The
sample is quickly analyzed and a verdict reached.
Passive metabolic scanners represent the state of the art
in security systems. As such, they are found on almost all
high-tech starships within the Imperium.
A scanner is installed at every important junction in the
ship's corridors and in every room. Anyone who is near a
scanner is swept with an ultrasonic beam which provides a
complete profile of his physiology. In addition to a complete
record, the individuals external features and bones are
measured and checked for healing scars. Brainwaves are
picked up by remote sensors, and medical implants (pacemakers, fillings, bionic limbs, and so on) are checked. All of
the compiled information is matched with the existing record
and instant confirmation of identity is received.
With a security system, the captain of a ship
has complete knowledge of the actions and locations of his
crew at any time. if an emergency arises, this information
can save vital seconds.
Security Sensors: These sensors can be any combination
of active or passive sensors. Placement varies (depending
on the sensor type) but at a minimum they are strategically
placed throughout the ship. Depending on the cultural philosophy of the ship's captain regarding privacy, the passenger staterooms may or may not have security sensors.
Generally however, security sensors are limited to public
access areas (corridors, galley, and so on) and to areas
restricted to just the crew (bridge, engineering, and so on).
Terminal Traffic Monitor. Terminal traffic going through the
terminal filter is monitored by this device. It searches for any
unusual traffic patterns; if any are discovered, the watch
officer is notified of a possible security breach.
Alarm Panel: If a security violation is detected, the watch
officer is notified and further instructions are requested.
Through the alarm panel, the watch officer monitors the violation. and instructs the security computer with the proper
action to take (jump the grav up to 6 Gs, gas the room, or
whatever). At higher tech levels. the security computer aiso
gives suggestions as to possible options available.
Security Computer (Local CPU): Data from the ship's
security sensors is fed into a local computer. If something
seems to be wrong, the computer is alerted and it sets off
an alarm on the alarm panel at once. Until a response is
received from the watch officer, the security computer takes
whatever limited actions it deems necessary to reduce the
security breach. In the event of a failure in the local CPU,
the main computer can take over the local CPU's function.
Passive Scanners: The passive metabolic scanners
employed on most starships do more than just spot imposters. They provide detailed information on a subject's possessions and emotional state. A typical response to the
Captain's query about Crewman Jones might be as follows:
"Crewman Annabell Jones just left her cabin and is heading aft toward the main entrance to the jump drive. She has
her mechanical toot kit secured to her belt, a snub pistol
loaded with high explosive ammunition in her right hand,
and is wearing a ship's jumper. She appears to be very nervous and quite angry. Do you wish more specific details?"
If the Captain desired, he could determine if Crewman
Jones was intoxicated, whether her jumper was made of
normal cloth or ballistic fabric, and who the last person was
that she spoke with. If he felt that she was a danger to the
ship or its crew, he could order all doors secured against
her and deny her access to a potential target.
Additional Security: On some craft, the security systems
itself can take direct action to stop a potential hazard.
Guards or security robots can be alerted or, in extreme cases, automated defenses can be activated. Among the most
common of these are sleep or tear gas vents.
On ships which lack such automated defenses, the craft's
environmental systems can be turned against hostile forces.
Gravity can be suddenty increased or its direction altered,
air can be pumped out of a secured area, and lights can be
cut off or made blinding. In short, it is almost impossible for
anyone but a highly trained professional to seize control of a
starship, either in flight or on the ground.
High Tech Recognition Sensors: By tech level 15, recognition sensors appear. These optical sensors can recognize individuals simpiy on sight, the same way we all
recognize each other. "Sure, I recognize him, that's Jeremy
Tolman" — it's just that simple. Such sensors operate just
like a crew member when recognizing an individual, and are
as difficult to fool, too.
Personal ID Chips: At lower tech levels (tech levels 9 to
11), starship crew members often carry some sort of ID chip
on their persons identifying them as crew, as well as giving
their names, job positions, ranks, and so on. This way, the
precise location of any individual can be determined at a
moment's notice. (Anybody know where the captain is?)
These ID chips also automatically permit or deny access to
certain areas based on job position.
The disadvantage of such a system, of course, is that all
one need do to appear to be a particular crew member
(such as the captain), is to steal his ID chip. An ID chip system is usually smart enough to detect two people with the
same position (such as two captains) to be a security
breach, however. Also, sometimes the steward does need
to get into engineering to help out during an emergency, but
the security system might not let him because he has been
defined as being off limits to engineering.
the Old Timer
As smart as anyone is, your
ship is helpless without a computer. All starships, for just that reason, have ai least three identical
computers, in different areas of
the ship, any of which can take
over operations. Every system
has a built-in computer, too.
Computers are remarkable
tools. What they realty do is multiply our abilities.
For example, I myself can't turn on the switches for
the jump drive hull net fast enough, in the right order, even it I had it all written out in front of me.
Instead, the computer handles the details, and "I"
from the nav chair can do it. The computer makes
me more powerful than I am.
The computer is also a powerful coordinator. It
can take a wealth of data and boil it down to real information. Take, for example, the last hour or so
before jump. The computer takes nav's time and
jump coordinates, and figures out a maneuver trajectory to be at the right spot at the right time with
the right velocity. Simultaneousiy, it figures a host of
alternate scenarios, knowing that the actual coordinates could be off a bit when the moment comes.
Meanwhile, other computers are making sure that
the power plant is producing enough juice, that the
particles in the thrusters are aimed right, and that
the jump drive reactor is pumped up hot enough.
Still other computers are keeping both eyes on the
sensors, to figure out where you are and where
you're going, and keeping the m-drive aimed
straight at the jump point. When the ship's at the target, things move fast. All the power stored up from
the j-drive has to be pushed out to the lanthanum at
once, but in a split-second sequence.
Once jump transition is over, of course, all that the
computer has to do is make sure you can breathe,
and minor stuff like that.
Fortunately, it doesn't all have to be done by one
computer, and in fact most systems use what they
call "dedicated" computers. Your main computer sits
quietly in the background, available to take over if
any of the smaller units fails.
The main computer also handles a lot of centralized data. If you're carrying passengers, I heartily
recommend you subscribe to a regular library data
service and make sure that there are terminals in
each cabin and lounge. For one thing, this gives
passengers something to do, and that keeps ‘em out
of your hair. I don‘t mind people wandering around a
little — they paid for their passage — but there's
nothing worse than having folks walk up to you and
ask questions while you're trying to get something
done. If you've got a library data setup on board,
then the passengers can watch holos, or read, or
listen to music, or whatever.
Make sure, too, that you buy an SIS — “Ship-
board lnformation Service‘ — for whatever kind of
vessel you have. That way, it can answer a lot of
questions that folks have about operations
Besides, if your steward knows his job, he can just
make that SIS sing, and passengers eat it up. The
program gets a lot of its info off the nav panel, and
things are almost automatic from then on. Passengers can tune their terminals to the SIS station, and
the blasted thing will keep them occupied the whole
voyage. Tells ‘em when to walk up to the lounge to
get a good view, describes everything in sight once
they get there, keeps a regular posting of how far
the vessel is, everything!
The SIS also organizes “special events” — say, a
dance in the lounge one night, with all the latest
music from hundreds of worlds, thanks to the library
data service. It usually runs a contest, too, to see
who can best predict the moment the ship comes
out of jump. Don‘t laugh — it keeps ‘em busy, and
that's exactly what you want.
One other thing that the computer does for you is
run the anti-hijacking program — programs, really,
since they run in concert throughout all the systems.
"It's no fun losing your ship, even if you aren't sold
into slavery," according to the old saying.
Crew members are all recognizable to the computer, just like to you or me. The bridge door, for
example, just won't open unless it detects an authorized person outside it. Even it some passenger
came to the door, he couldn't get the door to open
unless the computer recognizes him as crew.
Which isn't to say that I never allow visitors on my
bridge. I won't let folks on during operations, but
once we're in jump there isn't a lot tor a bridge crew
to do, and some passengers really enjoy taking a
tour. (I've known a few that didn‘t want to know anything about it — thought they were safer that way — but I've never understood it.)
If someone did gain control of my bridge, they'd
have to keep some of the crew with ‘em, because I
use random verification sequences on all my
boards. At any time (but less often during an emergency), the computer might insist that the operator
of the station press his palm to a sensor that reads
it. It he's not authorized to run that board, the computer shuts him down right then and there.
The sensor does good, too, because it makes
sure that whoever owns the hand is still kicking. I've
heard of hijackers cutting off people's arms to trick
older systems, but it wouldn't work on my setup.
Incidentally, the computer security system works
both ways. If the computer catches someone tinkering where he oughtn‘t, the whole crew knows it. No
klaxon sounds, so the hijackers don‘t realize they've
been detected, but the crew knows, and I've taught
‘em what to do. We've had four attempts, and never
lost a ship, a passenger, or a stick of cargo. There
were a few hijackers, though, who left jumpspace
before the week was up.