that goes both ways. if bribery is what it takes then the legitimate ship owners will have more money and will bribe those officials to turn over the fences. what piracy advocates miss the most is the fact that if piracy is big business then stopping it always will be bigger business.
A Hidden Pirate Base.....
- Thread starter DickNervous
- Start date
that goes both ways. if bribery is what it takes then the legitimate ship owners will have more money and will bribe those officials to turn over the fences. what piracy advocates miss the most is the fact that if piracy is big business then stopping it always will be bigger business.
Wrong. Only GT/GTIW actually require a gravity well at the far end.
In ct, there's one explicit in TTA, which only requires having the fuel for the second jump, and a slightly longer time to navigate due to distance from reference points.
MT makes no changes.
TNE implies a higher difficulty for the navigation if not using a known one, but the importance there is the fuel dump.
The way we have successfully wiped out all organized crime on Earth?
**********
The bottom line is that there is a Pirate result in the encounter tables, and a Pirate career, and an OTU adventure with a pirate base ... I think that it is pretty obvious that whatever anyone's preference, PIRACY does exist in the Official Traveller Universe of the Third Imperium.
Anyone claiming otherwise has the burden of proof to show that it CAN NOT exist.
I have seen nothing even remotely close to proof that it can not exist.
The Third Imperium ...
"The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers."
This draconian OTU will increase piracy, not eliminate it.
**********
The bottom line is that there is a Pirate result in the encounter tables, and a Pirate career, and an OTU adventure with a pirate base ... I think that it is pretty obvious that whatever anyone's preference, PIRACY does exist in the Official Traveller Universe of the Third Imperium.
Anyone claiming otherwise has the burden of proof to show that it CAN NOT exist.
I have seen nothing even remotely close to proof that it can not exist.
The Third Imperium ...
- that overthrows governments for failing to eradicate crime on their world
- that inspects tracking chips on every part sold in every shipment of every speculative cargo
- that dedicates its J6 Navy comm network to tracking reports of stolen ships and cargo.
- that dedicates staggering resources to tracking a crate of stolen parts back through every transaction that it has passed through
- that arrests everyone involved in buying/selling stolen goods until they track it back to the pirate ship that stole it.
"The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers."
This draconian OTU will increase piracy, not eliminate it.
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
Hmm, well again I am reading between the lines of some wiki entries and other material assuming that it was drawn from other versions without having gotten my hands on any much less read thoroughly/own, so certainly I expect to be corrected about a lot of that sort of version comparisons by the good folks here.
Traveller pirates face problems no pirate on Earth ever faced. Likw merchants teleporting from just outside one harbor to just outside the next. Try running a pirate campaign on an alternate historical Earth with that little change and see how far your pirates get.
Of course they do. Who has ever claimed otherwise? All I say is that they don't seem to make much sense.
Replaces governments for supporting piracy. That's as canonical as pirates.
Just the expensive bits. Like starship components.
The navy has J6 couriers. Why wouldn't it use it to improve its performance? On that the burden of proof seems to lie on you.
A single crate of stolen parts is probably not worth going to that sort of trouble for. More likely the stolen parts get confiscated. Something that mwould lower the fencing value. According to several crime fiction stories I've read fences usually pays 10-20% of the true value,
A multi-million starship, OTOH... that should be worth a substantial amount of man-hours to acquire proof of ownership (or non-ownership).
But has it been shown that it wouldn't make sense that it would exist? IMO the answer to that one is a resounding YES.
Hans
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
Oh I don't know about that. Asian trade seemed to continue in the face of probably the largest pirate fleet in history in operation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ching_Shih
Note the tactic the Chinese took to defeat the pirates- amnesty and taking home the loot (the British did the same with the Tortuga pirates). Get big enough and tough enough, and you CAN have it all and a retirement package.
Ships still sail through the Suez Canal.
(the closest that I can come to saying it without getting political.)
Rampant Piracy is a believably problem.
A 1 in 36 encounter rate or a 1 in 100 attack rate or a 1 in 1000 total loss rate among hundreds of thousands of starships each charging hundreds of thousands of credits carrying tens of millions of credits worth of cargo between worlds where that cargo is the difference between living at TL 5 and TL 12 ... may be an acceptable risk. [shrug]
Personally, I prefer something closer to a post hard times setting with lots of wild frontier and few, small safe areas. It explains why the common merchant ships are armed in the first place. No piracy means no turrets or gunners are really needed ... just report the event and wait for the dreadnoughts to recover your cargo.
How much firepower will the Port of Tampa (FL) have on hand to bring to bear on a former USSR Destroyer that teleports 100 miles off the coast of Florida to capture a Panamax Freighter before teleporting off?
And when the Navy starts deploying an aircraft carrier task group to defend the Florida Coast, then I guess that it would be a better time for a pirate to attack 100 miles off the Port of Newark (NJ).
Real pirates are not, AFAIK, attacking ships in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
There in lies the problem.
I hear lots of people saying it doesn't make sense, but offering little explanation of "WHY" that can survive even cursory comparison with the real world piracy.
Like the "Just Outside The Harbor" argument above.
I will have to take your word for that.
I am largely indifferent to Traveller canon history, so I can speak neither for or against the issue.
However, at face value, it contradicts the trope that the Imperium rules between the stars and respects local autonomy of worlds.
I leave it to canonista to iron that discrepancy out.
When I suggested that my hypothetical pirate would pull all of the parts out of a starship computer and sell them as 'electronic components', it was countered that the ID and forensics would be down to almost the chip level.
So at least some of your 'anti-piracy' coalition would disagree.
My logical complaint is that Traveller rules and games do not generally paint a picture of 1 week in jump and 2 weeks in customs while they scan every ID chip on every component, with visual verification to detect tampering, both entering and leaving to detect criminal transfers of cargo and check all data against the mega-database that the IN provides via secret J6 network.
OK. Recovery of Stolen Parts is not a mission on the Navy Career table, so disseminating serial numbers of stolen parts is probably not a Navy function.
It has been argued elsewhere that the Navy may not transport parts for use in building Navy warships, so carrying routine crime reports seems even less likely.
Have I proved it, no, but I offer more of a response than "Why would they do it?"
A MCr 1 Starship computer becomes a (20%) Cr 200,000 cargo of Electronic Parts (not too different from the legitimate electronic parts cargoes that pass through the starport daily).
Which sells for Cr 100,000 (50% of base price). Some salvage yard got a good deal and adds the parts to the 4 dTons of legitimate salvage that he had on stock and ships it all off to a Class C starport desperate for parts to keep its 30 year old fleet running ... where his Cr 100,000 (50% base) purchase sells for Cr 400,000 (200% base).
Now the NAVY is tracking ALL Electronic Parts sales in the sector looking to see where parts from a missing Free Trader might turn up. We may need to agree to disagree, but that snaps my suspenders of disbelief more than the chance of a Pirate encounter when arriving in a system.
I think that I have presented at least plausible challenges to your assumptions.
Piracy exists, IMO, because the Navy has bigger things to worry about than a lone pirate (a pirate fleet would get their attention, I yield that point).
Local Fleets, that can worry about one pirate, can not be everywhere. Piracy is about crimes of opportunity and fencing loot between opportunities.
I suspect that having two transponders is a Pirate's Friend and swapping transponders is the far future version of raising the Jolly Roger.
... if only there was a Class B starport that could do annual maintenance without asking lots of questions about wiring and quick release connections. Or inspecting serial numbers too closely.
Nope.
It's certainly not uncontrolled, or you'd see pirates showing up everywhere - which they clearly don't (per the LBB2 encounter tables). Never at A & B Starports (which, arguably are what the Navy is most interested in protecting), rarely but possible at a C Starport (again, a clear Navy/Imperial interest - but they are clear minority of the encounters there) - and even at D, E, & X Starports they are hardly a common occurrence.
It certainly doesn't require that LEOs be incompetent, merely either understaffed or with higher priorities. It doesn't require the Navy (or the Scouts) to be morons, but more concerned with the ZhodaniAslanSolomaniVargrBarbariansWhatever than a bunch of (relatively speaking) much lower threat pirates. The Navy can't go haring off after every pirate attack because if they do, they won't be around when the balloon actually goes up.
And in a Big Ship / Big Fleet universe can you imagine that arguments that the bean counters get into around the costs involved in sending even a destroyer after one of those 400dton corsairs? Consumables, salaries, maintenance, etc.
IMTU, to be truthful, pirates rarely take the actual ship. More often than not they are stealing cargo and reselling it, possibly hostage taking (much more rarely slaving - and never of crew). Piracy is more "stand and deliver" rather "rape and pillage" because *that* is what gets the Navy/LEO's hot and bothered. The unspoken rules that the merchants and the pirates operate under is that no harm comes to crew or ship as long as no pirates get hurt and the merchant only flees, doesn't fire.
Fleece the sheep, don't kill it...
D.
:rofl:
Big thumbs up.
Exactly!
So far the only ships my group have taken were from other (more violent and ruthless) pirates and slavers they have encountered. The times they "approached" a normal merchant ship they simply took a small "fee" (about 10% of the cargo) and let them on their way.
100 miles? The proper analogy would be 3 miles (i.e. within range of the shore batteries.) Which means that instead of covering 100 miles of mangrove swamps where pirate ships can lurk unseen, a navy only has to cover 3 miles where pirate can't lurk. There's no stealth in space.
But many member worlds have system defenses of their own that doesn't rely on the IN. Such defenses depends a lot more on population size than on starport type.
Another difference is that an armed 400T Traveller merchant has a decent chance of outfighting a 400T pirate, whereas an Age of Sail merchant couldn't outfight an Age of Sail pirate. Or rather, the rare merchant that could outfight pirates (like East Indiamen) wasn't attacked by them.
Didn't we have some recent reports about ships passing the Somalian coast having sub-machinegun-armed guards and being avoided by the Somali pirates in consequence?
Real pirates are not, currently, attacking ships anywhere with armed warships of their own. The only reason why they manage nowadays is because merchant ships, for some strange reason, are not allowed/do not want to be armed. Put a couple ofmachineguns on a merchant ship and you'll see piracy go down very fast.
Real world piracy is not a good analogy for Traveller piracy.
The argument you "refuted" by changing it to something else?
They probably are, but it's the big expensive bits that will be subject to the most scrutiny.
And as I've said before, selling the loot is a long way down the list of problems the pirate has to overcome before he reachedthat part.
No, the IN would be involved in the othere end of the list: preventing the pirate from capturing his prey in the first place. But electronic data are so easy to carry that it makes no sense that the IN would not do it.
Um... carrying cargo for a civilian business for free is not the same thing as carrying official Imperial Bureaucracy bumpf.
Starships begin at 40 million credits.
Which fences for 20-40,000 credits. The fence may be able to turn that into something a bit more semi-legit.
It's more likely to be a MoJ agents in cooperation with various people eager to recover a multimillion credit asset.
It doesn't have to be everywhere. It just has to be in one place, the jump limit of its planet. Or perhaps a couple of places if it wants to protect its system defense challenged trade partners.
But Traveller movement rules means that there aren't very many opportunities and the risk of running into an armed merchant tips those odds even further against the pirate.
Hans
So let's dissect that on it's face, minus the snark, for a moment.
In the grand world of Traveller economics, it is a pretty amazing Free Trader that has managed to cram 80MCr of goods inside, same for a Far Trader. It is certainly not impossible, but it would not exactly be common.
Next, why in the heck are "a hundred major merchant traders" using a Podunk Free/Far Trader to move their cargo instead of, as one might reasonably expect of a "major merchant trader" moving it on a large bulk trader?
But, even if they are, for reason that passes understanding, shipping valuable cargos worth that much on such indefensible ships. Then perhaps the real threat isn't the Navy, but the Starmercs that get hired by those major merchant traders to deal with the problem when it gets to be too much of a hassle for business - or that accompany particularly valuable cargos or ships.
Remember, Traveller not only has pirates it also a absolutely thriving private military industry. Tradewars are fought both on the ground and in space. In fact that may be where pirates make their real coin. It's not looting merchant ships, it's working as semi- or "less than legal" mercenaries, and/or surface raids on low to mid tech worlds that find it difficult to fend off more highly TL equipped foes.
That is likely to be the bread and butter of pirate fundraising, more so than trying to intercept merchant ships in backwater systems that may or may not have valuable cargo.
D.
No, you seem to purposely miss the point.
The pirates are not in opposition or contrary to the very frightening patchwork of the "military-industrial complex" of the era of the Third Imperium, they are part of it. They exist because they have a purpose - arguably several purposes. They are deniable assets, usable by corporations, political groups and factions, the intelligence community, and organized crime. They range in organization and attitude from PMCs to Outlaw Biker Gangs to Revolutionaries. But all of the them, when operating as pirates, exist on the fringes of civilized space (as defined by Starport type) - and their survivability probably depends upon how well they fill their economic and ecological niche in combination with how well they blend in.
Pretty much the same way PMCs, Outlaw Motorcyles Gangs, and Revolutionaries exist and survive now...
D.
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I selected 100 miles as US territorial limits - analogous to the 100 diameter limit being the Planetary territorial limit.
Tampa has no shore batteries, because it has no significant threat from piracy, which is what you propose for the OTU.
The US Navy has 272 deployable ships. The US has 149+ ports to guard. If the Navy deploys more than half of its ships to defense of ports, it ceases to be a Navy. Since this discussion is not primarily about the US Navy, how many ships are needed to patrol the jump limit of every world in the Imperium (if for no other reason than to catch that evil merchant selling stolen parts)? How many ships are in the Imperial Navy? Can the Imperial Navy be everywhere?
"There's no stealth in space." - This statement is false. From LBB2 (1977):
"DETECTION:
Starships can detect other ships at a range of approximately a half million miles (500 inches). Military vessels and scouts have detection ranges out to two million miles (2000 inches).
Ships which are maintaining complete silence cannot be detected at distances of greater than 100,000 miles; ships in orbit around a world and also maintaining complete silence cannot be detected at distances greater than 10,000 miles. Planetary masses and stars will completely conceal a ship from detection."
There are real and significant limitations on starship detection in the OTU. If you have no ship within detection range, the pirate ship is, for all practical purposes, fully concealed.
Please quantify those defenses if we are going to consider them proof against piracy. Under most rules, a Starship can mount enough Armor to make it immune to fighters ... And Class C, D, & E Starports cannot maintain larger than small craft. Per the encounter tables, Pirates avoid well defended A and B starports likely to have a Naval Base and tend to appear infrequently in lower TL, lower population, lower class starports. They can't afford a fuel purifier, do they really have significant warships? It makes sense to me. What am I missing?
Pirate college probably teaches Sun Tzu. I would suspect that pirates tend to attack smaller ships. A 1000 dTon pirate stands a better chance of intimidating that 400 dTon merchant into surrendering without a fight.
Or an arms race between merchants and pirates. Pirates have ready access to RPGs, will real world merchants start to add reactive armor?
In the Traveller Technology paradigm, Pirates would probably mount Bay Weapons to outclass a Merchant's Turrets.
Agreed, but it is all we have.
You suggested that I address real pirates attacking ships teleporting to ports as a better analogy, so I did.
It seemed to make little difference since the Navy still could not be everywhere all the time.
Sorry, I only have data on cars to use as a reference. There are VERY few parts on a car that contain trackable serial numbers. There is both a large value in and demand for used car parts. Anything without a serial number is fair game for a chop shop to sell. Absent any hard data on the Far Future, I am left to assume that Starships are similar. I would argue that the fact that players can skip with a starship and pirates can be encountered means that there is a Far Future solution to the problem of selling stolen goods. However, even if by some unimaginable stretch of imagination, it were utterly impossible to sell even one bolt of an Imperial Merchant Ship anywhere in the Third Imperium, there are other polities with interface lines happy to ship cargo to waiting markets in the Sword Worlds, Darian, Vargr or other territories.
Yup. Which is not to say that they cannot sell them.
Except that it makes the Imperial Navy's 'Secret J6 Network' the worst kept secret in the Imperium. Every SPA and MOJ clerk knows about it, as does every criminal who is outrun by the data. Yet when the emperor is killed, that the Navy decided to keep secret.
Serial numbers of stolen cargo parts and starship components is Official Bureaucracy mail? OK, if you say so.
So, I don't see your point. I was just using one easily defined starship component at a proof of concept illustration.
A Model 1 Computer is 1 dTon and MCr 2. You gave figures of 10-20% for a fence. So half price for a used computer is 1 dTon at MCr 1 and 20% of that is 200,000 credits for the potentially untraceable "Electronic Parts" that will go on to repair many an old starship through legitimate sales channels ... not unlike the parts from a stolen car that leave the chop shop in boxes for sale to legitimate repair shops.
Actually, hundreds of thousands of multi-KCr assets. Remember this topic was about a Class B Pirate Shipyard.
Limited Detection Range (LBB2), large 100 diameter volume, vulnerable Class C, D & E starports ... apparently a few pirates slip through to threaten legitimate merchant ships. It would appear to happen enough that those Merchant Ships choose to mount expensive turrets and hire gunners, but not so much that the Navy needs to withdraw the Fleet from defending the frontier to deal with it.
Actually, I tend to agree with you here. I imagine a pirate trawling for targets suffers a lot of misses for every hit. IMO, the detection rules make it possible to succeed, but it is still not an easy profession.
The armed merchant is just a relative thing.
It just raises the bar on up gunning a pirate ship.
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No I don't. We've been over that. I'm proposing that it doesn't make sense that there is piracy in the Imperium. Since canon claims that there is, obviously there would be defenses against piracy.
"But many member worlds have system defenses of their own that doesn't rely on the IN. Such defenses depends a lot more on population size than on starport type." [Me, in the post you were just quoting from]
So what you're saying is that the pirate ship will have problems detecting merchant ships? (Since the canny merchant will communicate with System Control by laser, undetectable from anywhere outside the beam).
Anyway, I take those rules to be game artifacts since there is no mention of stealth fields anywhere in Traveller technology. Perhaps they're "let's pretend" in order to give pirates a shot at succeeding? Without stealth fields there is no such thing as being undetectable even if you maintain silence, because you're blazing away like a torch in the IR spectrum. The statement you quote is complete and utter nonsense, however canonical. It's not something to base setting-building on.
An average naval defense budget of 1.26% of GWP.
Worlds with the requisite tech level can build ships for their governments regardless of starport type; they should certainly be able to maintain them. Other worlds can have their ships maintained at neighboring worlds and transported back and forth.
That they do, but they ALSO avoid ill defended A and B starport without naval bases and go after well-defended C starports..
That the original writers didn't consider how unlikely it was that a world with any decent population (defined as big enough to attract any significant trade) would have anything worse than a Class C starport. Obviously they can afford a fuel purifier, but, for reasons the writers felt was the referee's job to explain, they choose not to sell refined fuel.
Piracy isn't the only feature of the OTU that doesn't make much sense.
Yes, but the pirate vessel we hear about are not 1000T, are they. They're 400T. Which is a good thing from a game POW, because players like to have a chance to escape from or fight off randomly encountered pirates.
There's also the practical concern that a 1000T pirate needs to capture 2.5 times as many ships to stay in the black.
I, on the other hand, assume that the current trend in increased tagging, new tagging methods and improved forensic science will continue as technology improves.
I would argue that this is one reason why piracy does not make sense. Not the biggest one (that would be the problem of intercepting suitable prey), but a contributing factor.
Secret? What's secret about it? Everybody knows the IN has J6 couriers. The IN even carries dispatches from one end of the Imperium to the other and pass them on to news services (well, at least one news service, TNS). The only people who don't know about the IN's J6 couriers appears to be the Traveller writers who came up with that unbelievable story about Norris' advance notice of Strephon's death.Except that it makes the Imperial Navy's 'Secret J6 Network' the worst kept secret in the Imperium. Every SPA and MOJ clerk knows about it, as does every criminal who is outrun by the data. Yet when the emperor is killed, that the Navy decided to keep secret.
Hans
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Cause and effect.
- Either there is a risk of attack (like from piracy). Then there is a need for armed ships to defend themselves. There is a need for Starport based planetary defenses ...
- Or there is NO risk of attack (like from piracy). Then there is NO need for armed ships to defend themselves. There is NO need for Starport based planetary defenses ...
People do not build defenses against threats that do not exist. There are no weapon systems on the ISS to defend against alien attack, because there are no aliens to attack it.
Either Traveller has a threat of piracy that needs defending against, and defenses to minimize that threat, or it has no threat of piracy and no need for defenses.
The two (Threat and Defense) go hand in hand.
Worlds with robust defenses are not the ones that Pirates are likely to attack ... it is a red herring response.
Not me, but the 'Rules as Written' ... but otherwise, Yes. The RAW present a more 'submarine' like environment with vast areas to hide in (Pirate and Merchant and SDB) and limited detection range.
For Your Traveller Universe, things can work however you want them. The core rules for the OTU do not appear to reflect the 'blazing away like a torch in the IR spectrum' reality.
How is solving the IR problem 'somehow' in the Far Furure different from ...
- solving the Conservation of Momentum problem 'somehow' with Grav Drives
- solving the Speed of Light problem 'somehow' with Jump Drives.
If you discard concealment in space, you should discard reaction-less drives and FTL travel for exactly the same reasons ... but you are not, then playing Traveller as written.
I like to change lots of things in MY Universe, but the rules should be the yardstick for their published universe.
I agree that Pirates should not attack well defended, high tech worlds with robust planetary defenses.
If they do, they will probably not live to retire from that career.
It must, therefore, be the worlds with limited budgets or weak defenses that are more likely to be attacked by a pirate ... "the Class D starport watches in horror as the Merchant is looted in space, unable to assist in its defense."
I have no idea WHY this is so, but in the OTU of the rules, it apparently is.
Offering a WAG: The Imperium defends its starports, not the world. That TL 6 world with a Class D starport has minimal Imperial Defenses allocated and, due to stellar geography or economics, may be unable to support a robust Imported TL defense of its own. That tiny Class A starport on an otherwise weak world has a robust Imperial Defense. Pirates tend to go where the defenses are weak and the defenses are weaker on C, D, & E Starports than on A & B Starports.
I am open to listen to another explanation of why.
However, the rules suggest that it is so.
Fair enough, but the 400 dTon Pirate is usually chasing players in a 100 dTon Scout (outgunned 4:1) or a 200 dTon Free Trader (outgunned 2:1).
A 400 dTon player ship would be unusual and either given a pass by a 400 dTon Pirate ship or attacked by a small pack of pirate ships.
(I avoided speculation on the writer's motives ... tilting at windmills and all that.)
Your complaint almost seems to boil down to: Traveller (the Third Imperium) isn't 2300 with harder science at its core.
I question whether your expectation might be more flawed than the rules.
