If you commit a crime in space and no one sees it…..
- Thread starter Thanos
- Start date
Just like when a crime happens on a cruise ship.
IIRC any crime commited in a starship falls into Imperial jurisdiction in OTU, so it will be prosecuted by Imperial MOJ agents (one of the least defined Imperial institutions) or, according to some adventures, Imperial nobles.
Of course, if the corpse is disposed in space, it will be quite difficult to find...
The ship's registry may also be a big source of informatin for Imperial agents.
I wonder if the fact taht your ship arrive at destination with less people than it departed (according to ship's registry, that should be quie difficult to tamper with, as are transponers and black boxes), this might lead, at least, to immobilize the ship until a query is sent to departing world, so stopping the ship (and probably crew and passengers) for at least 2 weeks. In the meanwhile, I guess the imperial agents on spot (of any agency) will try to get clues from the ship itself if they have a hint that fool play is on.
Also, I guess the ressources used will depend more on who the disappeared person was than other things. If an Imperial Marquis disappears this way, I guess there will be a harder inquiry than if it was Johnny-next-door. It wil lalso arise more suspiccions if the missing person was travelling under false identity, etc.
EDIT: don't forget, in any case, that into a starship privacy is a scarce commodity, and, according to MT:SOM seccurity cams and sensors are nearly everywhere, as hijacking is an ever-present risk, and any emergency might be catastrophic.
Of course, if the corpse is disposed in space, it will be quite difficult to find...
The ship's registry may also be a big source of informatin for Imperial agents.
I wonder if the fact taht your ship arrive at destination with less people than it departed (according to ship's registry, that should be quie difficult to tamper with, as are transponers and black boxes), this might lead, at least, to immobilize the ship until a query is sent to departing world, so stopping the ship (and probably crew and passengers) for at least 2 weeks. In the meanwhile, I guess the imperial agents on spot (of any agency) will try to get clues from the ship itself if they have a hint that fool play is on.
Also, I guess the ressources used will depend more on who the disappeared person was than other things. If an Imperial Marquis disappears this way, I guess there will be a harder inquiry than if it was Johnny-next-door. It wil lalso arise more suspiccions if the missing person was travelling under false identity, etc.
EDIT: don't forget, in any case, that into a starship privacy is a scarce commodity, and, according to MT:SOM seccurity cams and sensors are nearly everywhere, as hijacking is an ever-present risk, and any emergency might be catastrophic.
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Easterner9504
SOC-13
Silly question. The answer is the same though if you had asked,
If you commit a crime in Grand Central Station in rush hour on Black Friday and no one sees it….
Answer: Nothing.
If you commit a crime in Grand Central Station in rush hour on Black Friday and no one sees it….
Answer: Nothing.
Aboard ship, the ship's port of registry's law applies. Mention of this is made in at least one CT adventure.
If a body is found without a ship associated, then it's an imperial crime.
There are various stages: someone would have to report a criminal or suspicious act, perceived through some traces that remained after the fact; then someone would have to make the decisions to initiate an investigation; then that investigation would have to collect meaningful data; then that data would have to be matched to other data by someone (or something) who (or that) cared (or was programmed to treat it as relevant); then once the investigation "solved" the crime, at least to the stage of creating a list of meaningful suspects, then the suspects would have to be apprehended.
Some of the issues are techinical, some are jurisdictional, and some are matters of productivity and scale.
Begining at the beginning, what traces are detectable would depend on the crime: fingerprints, recording of emmissions, DNA, voice stress analysis, micro-changes in air density....the mind shudders. A homicide leaves a body. Some crimes are not effectively detectable in retrospect: if I take a legally owned firearm, for instance, and make a temporary, illegal modification that leaves no physical trace, without being contemporaneously received, and I reverse that modification before it is detected, then I would have commited a crime that leaves no trace.
Some crimes would leave traces, but the crime is not serious enough to warrant forensic collection.
Let's say, for instance, that your hypothetical is something like, "I shoot belter in the back with my laser rifle, while I am on an EVA over his claim, he dies, and there are no witnesses. How would [whomever may care] catch me?" Well, you might give yourself away, if it weren't random violence. Did you know him? Did you stand to benefit from his death? Did you take anything from the scene? As to forensic terminal ballistics on lasers, I'm a bit spotty, however just as the details current forensic terminal ballistics might have been impossible for one at TL 2 to guess, likewise there may be some technology able to measure the laser to its wound/damage/residue. What sort of remote sensing was present in the belt? On the claim? Video recording? Nearby small craft? A lot of variables. Usually, most investiations are social, relying on people who run their mouths, as most do. As Mickey Rourke's character said in a B Movie, "In any serious crime there are about 100 things that can go wrong; if you can think of 50 of them you're a genious."
leo knight
SOC-12
I actually had a group of players test this theory years ago. One of the PCs rolled up a Supplement 4 pirate, with a 400 ton corsair ship. Naturally, mayhem ensued. Of course, in most of my Traveller runs, mayhem ensues, even without the blatant provocation of owning a pirate ship.
They proceeded to cut a swath, usually lying in wait near a gas giant, and waylaying unsuspecting ships. I let them get away with it for a while, since they were having fun, but I kept asking myself, "Would any of the ships, crews, or passengers be missed? Had anyone gotten off a distress call? Would anyone put the pieces together and come after these miscreants?" My answer, of course, was yes, but I tried to work out how long, given the time delay of jump drive, it would take to figure out something was wrong, and take appropriate steps.
A run of the mill free trader, owned by her captain, might not be missed. A fat trader owned by a multi-world line, might. Any random passenger, no. Count Mimsy de Porpington, yes. A cargo of machine parts, no. A crime lord's drug shipment, yes. And don't even think of stealing the payroll for the local mercenary company. :devil:
Sadly the group broke up before I got the chance to run "Prison Planet".
They proceeded to cut a swath, usually lying in wait near a gas giant, and waylaying unsuspecting ships. I let them get away with it for a while, since they were having fun, but I kept asking myself, "Would any of the ships, crews, or passengers be missed? Had anyone gotten off a distress call? Would anyone put the pieces together and come after these miscreants?" My answer, of course, was yes, but I tried to work out how long, given the time delay of jump drive, it would take to figure out something was wrong, and take appropriate steps.
A run of the mill free trader, owned by her captain, might not be missed. A fat trader owned by a multi-world line, might. Any random passenger, no. Count Mimsy de Porpington, yes. A cargo of machine parts, no. A crime lord's drug shipment, yes. And don't even think of stealing the payroll for the local mercenary company. :devil:
Sadly the group broke up before I got the chance to run "Prison Planet".
It might be a crime prevention tactic for legitimate commercial ships to file flight plans with cargo and passenger manifests that are forwarded to the destination via mail(on another ship). At the destination the forwarded flight plans are feed into a computer which checks for arrivals and cross checks arriving cargo and passengers. That way if something happened it would at least be known. That could be a form of reliability/bond that would attract customers and any ship that refuses to file the flight plan would be seen as unreliable. The flight plan would be voluntary but not filing one would raise suspicions.
I always had issues with crime in the OTU. In general the perps could pretty much always stay a week ahead of pursuit. For example a serial killer commits a murder, hides the body well enough to get to the star port and jump out.
Now evn if the body is found relatively quickly it will take the local LEO's months to confirm it wasn't a local and the culprit has long since jumped away and jumped again and again , perpetually on the move. Due to the week lag in jump travel and comms how will anyone ever catch up?
Now evn if the body is found relatively quickly it will take the local LEO's months to confirm it wasn't a local and the culprit has long since jumped away and jumped again and again , perpetually on the move. Due to the week lag in jump travel and comms how will anyone ever catch up?
The criminal would have to be able to afford a starship ticket if he intends to escape to the next world over. If he plans to keep on running, he has to be able to afford a lot of starship tickets.
Then he will have to leave his homeworld, the society he grew up in, abandoning the job that allowed him to earn enough money to run, and never seeing any of his friends and relations again.
Finally, if the local police can identify him (and if they can't, why run?), they can put out a warrant for his arrest that will outrun the futigive, since it will be going by jump-6 courier instead of jump-2 or jump-3 or jump-4 liner. Whether that will lead to his arrest depends on how far he runs and how much the local authorities are prepared to pay to get him back.
But sure, anyone who can afford to run stands a good chance of escaping justice.
Hans
Unless the criminal has a Jump 4 ship then Imperial Arrest Warrants are going to get ahead of them via the XBoat network. What I'd do is just track how quickly the warrant would spread via xboat jumps in an ever expanding circle and then via regular mail transported off of the xboat routes.
Yes, it is possible that he may not afford it, or that the jump6 courier gets ahead of him, but once he jumps particularly in dense subsectors his options open up enormously. It also raises the issue of inter-system jurisdiction when the crime is not committed in space so the imperium doesn't get involved.
There just seems to be so may loopholes that the criminal with the means to flee each time will get away 9 out of 10 times. Cue the bounty hunter of course but he's already 6 months behind and three sub sectors distant
There just seems to be so may loopholes that the criminal with the means to flee each time will get away 9 out of 10 times. Cue the bounty hunter of course but he's already 6 months behind and three sub sectors distant
Sure, if the criminal is willing to keep travelling. Of course if he ever stops he's caught. The problem with running is that you are breaking contact with everyone you've ever known, i.e. Allies, Contacts, etc. And of course eventually you'd have to leave the Imperium. And then yea, there's the bounty hunters coming along behind you so stopping for too long would be problematic so stopping for ship repairs would be a problem. Eventually, you'd be forced to abandon your ship while it is broken down.
Logically it will be by the much more efficient IN couriers rather than the incredibly inefficient X-boats, so it will be in 5- and 6-parsec jumps.
Hans
And your issue with that is because you feel wrong for crime to be left without punishement or because you have a hard time to believe it?
We all can dislike the idea of unpunished crime, as it seems wrong to us too, but historically, when you could outrun communications, this was a very real possibility if you had the ressources to leave your country, and along history most times this was enough, not having to run any more (unless you commited crimes in your new country too, of course).
In the case of a serial killer as you say, if he acts in too many planets, I guess there's a chance for Imperial agents to take care of it, once they identify all those murders in different planets have been done by the same person. If so, while the possibility to outrun the pursuers still exists, the jurisdictional problems with extraditions don't.
The data would go out on the J-4 X-boat system. It would quickly pass and surround pretty much anyone. And as ships report their last few jumps when coming to a star port, a simple computer pgm would quickly pinpoint possible people who left from that world.
The issue of a warrant would mean there is some idea who the perp is and an idea of where he's heading. I can't imagine there's enough J6 couriers just hanging around waiting to carry warrants that being caught up is inevitable. Also don't really imagine imperial warrants are filed for every random killer passing through. No imperial laws broken, why a warrant?
I also posit the idea that it takes the cops on the scene 3 months to figure out it wasn't a local now they still have no idea who it was and have to spend how long checking on everyone who left the world in that time?
I think the head start is very adequate. For professional or organized killers they are well away. The disorganized or over emotional crook is perhaps more likely to slip up.
I also posit the idea that it takes the cops on the scene 3 months to figure out it wasn't a local now they still have no idea who it was and have to spend how long checking on everyone who left the world in that time?
I think the head start is very adequate. For professional or organized killers they are well away. The disorganized or over emotional crook is perhaps more likely to slip up.
Yea, good point. However, I'm sure there's going to be some out of the way systems that would take longer for the word to arrive.
However, eventually the whole Sector where there is any kind of Imperial outpost will know about it and then the on out. Data spread is a bit slow but it will spread...
(The following is my interpretation of canon).
Most Imperial member worlds will have an Imperial legate or, if it's too insignificant, just an Imperial consul. From time to time his superiors in the Imperial Bureaucracy like to send him instructions and to get reports from him. These orders and reports will be sent by the best available means. The real backwaters get an quarterly visit from a Scout courier. Any place big enough to have some sort of Imperial Navy presence will have regular courier service. Worlds with IN bases will have daily, or at the worst weekly, couriers going back and forth. And, of course, the Bureaucracy will have 400 year old instructions to forward everything by X-boat, even though the system has become largely irrelevant, so duplicate orders and reports go by X-boat; occasionally they may even get through faster than those that go by "NavyNet".
The member worlds can piggyback on those communication channels. Simple as that.
Not Imperial warrants. Just warrants. Forwarded by the Imperial Bureaucracy as a courtesy to member worlds. It's no problem to distribute copies to all member worlds. Some of them may not care, some may take action. It probably depends on what extradition treaties exist between the relevant member worlds.
Hans
