Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
Thank you, it has been a while since I read anything about the Phantom.
On Corsairs, Pirates, Smugglers and Privateers.
- Thread starter Magnus von Thornwood
- Start date
Thank you, it has been a while since I read anything about the Phantom.
That is what led to the eventual end of their scheme, once the pirates began to improve their personal weapons and armor, and started getting much more violent....and their fellow merchants began to get really upset about pirates who were unusually violent.
Silverhawk
SOC-12
Your absolutely right that there is no comparison between Alliance-Union Space and the 3rd Imperium. I mentioned it for the value as a "What is the origin of this particular band of pirates" story. Would likely be a stretch for a pirate group operating in the 3rd Imperium but not necessarily for a Vargr band. A defeated Vargr Admiral (for a fleet) or Captain (for a single ship) whose charisma loss is with his superiors but not his crew(s).
Just an idea.
I gotta run with Rancke on this one. It sounds fun and all, but why is the pirate boarding the target unless he plans to seize the ship? In which case your combat force is seizing his ship while his combat force seizes yours, and you have control of his ship while he has control of yours and hostages to boot. I can't see that the passengers are so wealthy that it's worth the risk to board just to rob them.
The target travels from world to world buying and selling cargoes and paying off a mortgage; it has some means of transferring wealth. Demand a ransom - it's not only safer, but has the advantage of being something you can do and be gone when there's a risk of some interfering rescuer coming out. Amateurs might board a ship that they didn't intend to seize for their own, or might fumble a seizure bad enough to withdraw and return to their own ship; pro's stand off and make you give them what they want, or else they have the kinds of tools and skills that a good gamemaster lets his players read about in the newspapers rather than actually having them face it.
I also recall having a devil of a time getting through the airlocks of the odd derelict we came across from time to time. I'm wondering how one forces an airlock without making it obvious to the folk on board that their airlock's just been violently opened, or barring that what kind of clever engineering trick could be pulled to trick an airlock into cooperation that hasn't been tried and counter-engineered over several thousand years of trying to keep intruders from gaining control of your ship. I can see combat-armored star marines forcing access and taking the ship by strength of arms; I can't see how they do that without the other boarding party becoming aware there was a problem - if for no other reason than the loss of communication with their ship - and grabbing hostages.
Maybe I described it to simply, they didn't just walk in and taaa-dahhhhh they beat the pirates.
I had planned the encounter as a set up from the beginning...they trusted a shady broker. and he set them up to have the cargo jacked.
One of the players had acted like an ass when he asked for a larger cut to keep giving them good runs....So later when he called them up and went..."hey, look I was out of line with you guys after that last deal ..let me make it up to you..." or something to that effect they took the "sweet deal"
the plan was for no one to get killed,the broker collects his insurance on a personal cargo...and a cut of the pirates take, In addition the crew looses their ass on the cargo they had purchased to trade at the destination, and the broker gets some petty payback.
as for the hatch they bypassed the external controls....they had breaching charges and were ready to deal with the boarding team if things went south...
I had planned the encounter as a set up from the beginning...they trusted a shady broker. and he set them up to have the cargo jacked.
One of the players had acted like an ass when he asked for a larger cut to keep giving them good runs....So later when he called them up and went..."hey, look I was out of line with you guys after that last deal ..let me make it up to you..." or something to that effect they took the "sweet deal"
the plan was for no one to get killed,the broker collects his insurance on a personal cargo...and a cut of the pirates take, In addition the crew looses their ass on the cargo they had purchased to trade at the destination, and the broker gets some petty payback.
as for the hatch they bypassed the external controls....they had breaching charges and were ready to deal with the boarding team if things went south...
Well, as Sabredog said, sometimes you have to give the PCs a break, and I don't see one ship-full of arrogant, unwary pirates as implausible. But any successful pirate must surely be wary of Q-ships and so be prepared for something like battledresses, an easily concealable force multiplier. Pirates have a lot of problems, but taking control of an outgunned ship once they've matched vectors isn't one of them. They just send over a boarding party of expendables and inform the prize that if there is any resistance or they lose contact with the boarding party, they will open fire. And, as I said, a counterattacking boarding party would be detected on approach and blasted by the ship's cannons.
Hans
Hans
the possibility of the ship backing off and raking the freighter with weapons fire if they fought back was the primary reason they decided to try and go around the hull and use another air lock in the first place...
I understand why you don't think they could make it to the other ship. My reasoning was fairly straight forward. the two ships were docked, not drifting next to one another. radar/lidar would be useless while the two ships were in physical contact.
cameras and thermal sensors would be a possible problem, but then again they are also meant to detect large objects thousands of kilometers away. so their ability to detect man sized objects walking across the hull..especially if they were familiar with where the sensors are placed, and their angle of view.
Well, and as I said, it sounded like fun, and it doesn't sound implausible. It just sounds like the broker hired guys who don't do this kind of thing professionally. I'm curious whether, after discovering that external controls could be bypassed in that manner without triggering an alarm, it occurred to them that their own ship almost certainly had the same design weakness. Also a little jealous since my own efforts way back when ended up involving a laser cutter.
Lazy evil.
See this is exactly why I strive not to be evil, because kiddies if you're gonna go, go all out. Those pirates deserved to be clowned, seriously why would you dock when sending over a boat with a couple of gun-bunnies and a middie (basically the expendable crew member) with a bomb is so much easier. Hell, even without the bomb you still send over a boat. Never attach yourself to an enemy ship.
it was fun, for me as well. I love watching players scramble to solve a problem.
the first event was a simple snatch and grab by petty thugs with access to an armed ship...more of a bank heist than a professional take down. it was never meant to be a serious loose your ship and die scenario...I had planned for them to loose some money, and some of their overstock of ego inspired trash talking....they of course did not cooperate.
Afterward they didn't think about the problem. Which I used against them at a later date. A crew of really paranoid very professional pirates executed the same maneuver on them. The shoot out was nasty, since these guys were armed to the teeth, and ex marines themselves.
After they had the bad guys mimic their "clever" trick they resorted to a Lo-tech solution..modified the airlocks to be secured with a simple 8-inch ceramic sheathed, titanium pin passing though the structure of the door,and into the frame....several of them actually.
No worries man, telling a story one paragraph at a time, without being able to go into the sort of detail you can in person causes things to get muddied...and the fact it's a ten year old story....stored in a brain that looks like Swiss cheese don't help.
I have always believed that the bad guys can be arrogant, overconfident, and just plain idiots as much as the players. When I set up an encounter I try to determine how professional, and forward thinking the opposition is.
In several cases they were dealing with the low rent pirate types, armed goons with a starship... dangerous, skilled at handling a ship, but not the best at dealing with more than the average merchant crew.
the ones they ran into that had their act together gave them a fight....and nearly killed two of them.
Gravitics?
So, while we are on the topic of being boarded by or boarding scum, why doesn't anybody just wait till the enemy is is the lock and then toss the gravitic plate control lever to 6g and pin them to the floor, or the ceiling, or maybe even a bit of both several times?
So, while we are on the topic of being boarded by or boarding scum, why doesn't anybody just wait till the enemy is is the lock and then toss the gravitic plate control lever to 6g and pin them to the floor, or the ceiling, or maybe even a bit of both several times?
selunatic2397
SOC-12
That's pretty much how I handle my opposition forces...figure out how smart they are and plot accordingly.
Once my players commented on a particular thick witted thugs tactics by stating that the team obviously hadn't worked their way up the threat tree to the local mobs top teams...I just quietly said "Yet!".
In D&D my ogres are generally about as smart as a decent potato...my orcs are avg int and use tools quite well...but some of those giant have been waging war for centuries and are quite good at it.
In Traveller, my pirates range from down on their luck free traders hoping to get a fast credit, to rogue imperial navy officers with state of the art ships.
Thus far my players have no idea that the harsh/strict IN ship that confiscated "Illegal Cargo...Banned Weapons...Major Fines"...was a pirate passing through...
Although since at least one player lurks here occasionally...they do now!
Once my players commented on a particular thick witted thugs tactics by stating that the team obviously hadn't worked their way up the threat tree to the local mobs top teams...I just quietly said "Yet!".
In D&D my ogres are generally about as smart as a decent potato...my orcs are avg int and use tools quite well...but some of those giant have been waging war for centuries and are quite good at it.
In Traveller, my pirates range from down on their luck free traders hoping to get a fast credit, to rogue imperial navy officers with state of the art ships.
Thus far my players have no idea that the harsh/strict IN ship that confiscated "Illegal Cargo...Banned Weapons...Major Fines"...was a pirate passing through...
Although since at least one player lurks here occasionally...they do now!
Carl, that's a great idea! It's what pirate do around the HOrn of Africa today, and leads to a lot of common sense in the OTU too. If pirates seize a vessel and crew, and the ship owner has ransom insurance, then it can be claimed and the ransom paid (bullion of some sort? Fusion plants?) and the seized vessel goes on it's way. The corsairs destroy those who resist them, but release those who don't in an attempt to create a permissive environment. It generates additional costs for merchants, who lobby the nobility, who see to it that resources are devoted to primary routes (see GT for that), which in turn further drives piracy, marginalised traders, and other channeling of trade in the other areas.
It also leads to great opportunities for a PC party who were employed by a merchant line, insurance company, or wealthy scion for the purpose of recovering their property from the pirates without having to pay out the money. Think the movie Proof of Life.
A lot of counter-terrorist exercises are based on premises that are not implausible, and rely on the idea that the black hats have made a mistake at some point. While there's been some obscene and horrendous successes by bad guys since the fall of the USSR, the professionals and expert terrorists they trained have been a bit thinner on the ground of late, which leads to a number of them making rookie mistakes.
Because then the pirates back on the pirate ship shoot a lot of holes in your ship and send a second boarding party to make sure everyone is dead (and to collect any valuables that haven't been blown to bits).
If you can run, you do. If you can fight them off, you do. If you can't do either, you try very hard not to make them angry.
It's different for a national ship, of course. An outgunned national ship may decide to fight anyway in order to inflict damage on the pirate.
Hans
that handles the boarding team, but the bridge crew of the other ship can still back off and punch holes in the hull with their weapons. Usually if you antagonize the pirates the odds of getting shoved out an airlock, blown to debris by the crew of the pirate ship after you kill their buddies, goes up.
Which is probably why the smart move is to kick a couple of cargo containers out the back, and run for it while the pirates pick up the cargo...but players seldom do the "smart thing"
That's about as accurate a spread as you could get. Not every opponent is a top notch savvy professional. Of course you have to toss in the occasional serious threat into the mix, just to keep the players on their toes.
If you look at the mix of people who rob banks... most are barely competent, and depend on the victims just handing over the money. Not all of them arm themselves tot eh teeth, carry military grade weapons and body armor..
I have played the corrupt naval/customs enforcement crew option out in a game or two. Even my gun happy, lets shoot 'em, players take a second look at the problem. Then decide that maybe letting the bad guys cherry pick the cargo beats a fight with a heavily armed, well trained baddie team.
I like that line of thinking. I've always worked on the "give us what we want and no one gets hurt." acrew who is sure they are gonna be shot and tossed out the airlock is going to fight like cornered rats.... a crew that thinks.."Hmm give them the cargo and we go home" is gonna give up their cargo and file an insurance claim for the losses...same reason modern banks don't usually have armed guards...it's more financially expedient to just let the robbery happen, and file a claim.
Now a shady sort might even play into the trade by occasionally shipping a cargo, having a friendly group Jack it. Then claiming insurance, and a slice of the take from their co-conspirators.Sort of a futuristic twist on an arson scheme.
I've ran that scenario before, and have suggested it in the adventure seed section of the book I just finished.
A story I read had a cargo ship that was a disbursed structure type over a kilometer in length and a cargo handling corridor down it's length with the cargo hatch at the stern and the high value cargo area at the other end of the corridor. It was boarded by pirates ( 3 of them in battledress ) that floated up the corridor at 0-G and in vac as their ship docked at the open cargo hatch.
Just as the first pirate was reaching for the controls for the airlock to the crew area. The grav was switched on with the direction of gravity being lengthwise down the corridor and a 100 G pull. The first 2 pirates did horrendous damage to the interior of their ship. The 3rd pirate went out the other side of the pirate ship. Messy
And evidently totally unexpected. And fair enough, no one would expect a freighter to have installed an expensive artificial gravity system capable of generating a 100G field, since something like that would have no other use than to turn pirates into ammunition for anti-ship ordnance.Just as the first pirate was reaching for the controls for the airlock to the crew area. The grav was switched on with the direction of gravity being lengthwise down the corridor and a 100 G pull. The first 2 pirates did horrendous damage to the interior of their ship. The 3rd pirate went out the other side of the pirate ship. Messy
Hans
Not to mention that a "cargo tube" becomes a orbital gun by loading a container full of nickle iron into the bore and projecting it at 100 Gees....
Still I'd have paid credits to see the expression on the pirate's face."Huh...whaaaaa.......Aaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeee...BOOM."
and for trivia a 100 k pirate generates as much energy as 27 pounds of TNT....of course since they are basically a large balloon full of red water the odds are they would go SPLATTTTTTT.......ugh...never get that image in your head while eating dinner....
Still I'd have paid credits to see the expression on the pirate's face."Huh...whaaaaa.......Aaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeee...BOOM."
and for trivia a 100 k pirate generates as much energy as 27 pounds of TNT....of course since they are basically a large balloon full of red water the odds are they would go SPLATTTTTTT.......ugh...never get that image in your head while eating dinner....
But in battle dress they'd only go splat on the inside, while the outside produced a reasonably viable blunt instrument!
