How does space piracy work in your setting? Bonus question: are space pirates cooler or gayer than ye olden pirates?
>>98834617>spoiler Pirates were incredibly gay
>>98834617Insurance fraud.
It's piracy.But in space.
>>98834617Most space powers practice planetary autarchy simply because a reliance on just-in-time logistics is a recipe for disaster when applied on an interstellar scale. The HTR (Holy Terran Empire) is the exception because they are willing to eat the cost of having an absolutely fuckoff massive navy to protect the shipping routes that allow them to utilize comparative advantage to optimize their economy.The result is that they're 4-5 times as productive as the other powers, but the system is very fragile and deeply vulnerable to attacks on merchant shipping--which includes piracy. They can field enormous naval power which is enough to negate this effect in peacetime, but other powers have begun funding piracy and privateers against them, and they cannot be everywhere at once.Without state backing piracy was essentially highly lucrative suicide. You might catch a supertanker or a bulk-transport ship--and catching one would be enough to secure the retirement of a 500 man crew as billionaires, but you're much more likely to die. But WITH state backing, meaning thinner patrol vessels and reduced escorts as well as better equipment for the pirates, this became very profitable as a form of economic warfare against the Reich.Unfortunately for everyone, when wars ended and piracy against the Reich stopped being easy, the pirates were still there, and now had the money to simply buy the advantages the states had previously given them--so now pirates are everywhere and have started hitting planets, even defended ones--ironically preferring their former employers to the Empire they were created to harass since the HTR has experience fighting them.
>>98834617I have a comic I'm working on that has space pirates.>premiseStory takes place in a cluster of far away colonized planets. These planets had a huge economic boom where everything became very cheap and affordable very fast for everyone, including spaceships. This is where space pirates appeared and suddenly shipping your stuff off to another planet seemed too risky. Complete collapse of economy happened as most planets were hyperspecialized to do things and heavily relied on space trade.>the storyStory itself is not much relevant to the topic as it takes place on the surface of one planet that was affected by space piracy. It follows a cop protagonist that witnessed firsthand the complete collapse of economy and society. Space pirates are seen as worst of the worst and they are to be killed on sight or (more favorably) captured for either public execution or slow and painful hard labour until death.>spoilerBeing a space pirate is very evil, gay and bad just like every other real life piratepic not related
>>98834617I find space 'piracy' hard to justify because it feels like something that'd be just not worth it.The ship has every reason to be incomprehensibly armed and go full ham on an assailant.A space "pirate" group would probably be closer to an invasion force
>>98834874well, obviously but I've always had a hard time wrapping my head around how it would work. Space is huge compared to the oceans on Earth so I'd think finding ships to plunder as a space pirate would be a pain in the ass unless your setting has Hyperspace Lanes or something that pirates can use to camp out and lie in wait for unsuspecting merchant ships.
>>98834915Starships aren't exactly subtle unless you specifically make them so.
>>98834911It could be a MAD thing. There'd be a tacit understanding that if the merchant vessel surrenders, its crew will be dropped off at a port somewhere unharmed. If they start throwing nukes at each other everyone is probably going to die, but the merchant vessel has an even lower chance of survival than the pirates because they're in a big cargo vessel. Is it worth it to die over 500,000,000 tons of cobalt that someone else paid for and insured? Probably not. The people you'd get fighting to the death would be ones hauling some essential cargo for their homeworlds or something illegal where if they lose it their boss is going to cartel murder them anyway, but then you just don't attack those, you hit the space truckers whose union grants them the right to surrender immediately.
>>98834915If you're hunting interstellar shipping you could probably calculate the exact most optimal route between and two stellar bodies at any given time and then place yourself there. Since any venture in space is a matter of optimizing delta V oxygen etc. you should be able to bet on vessels following very predictable optimized routes between stars, because to do otherwise would be to waste enormous amounts of money and risk some disaster leaving them with too little fuel/air to make it to the destination. I imagine that you'd position such that you're catching incoming merchants during their decelleration burn as they approach their destination, which could potentially be a weeks-long process, so they're unwittingly slowing down to meet you as you get ready to attack them.But it would depend on how the setting works I guess. Definitely not the same as just rolling around Tortuga at random looking for grain barques to hijack, more like a train robbery.
>>98834915The ocean is also fuck-all big. However, shipping lanes, ports, and refuges are all going to be in fixed locations. There will always be a preferred route that is known for being safer or faster or just traditional for a cargo company to use. Pirates are going to want to go for those known entities and, given time, will become a known entity themselves.>>98834911Just like in the world today, it's not feasible to turn every shipping boat into a warship. Just like today, it's more likely a massive hauler will have a crew of a dozen or so people and sit on top of uncountable piles of valuables. It may be lucrative to be a pirate in space if the potential risk-reward rates keep pace. It might also just be useful for space pirates to be agents of chaos for military and political power.
>>98834617Humanity's version of FTL travel depends on gate travel. Translation between systems using these gates is instantaneous, but constructing these gates requires the use of slow-burning, atomically powered construction fleets.These 'torch ships' (so-called because they are a light in the darkness) launch from the gate closest to their destination, containing all the cargo and crew necessary to construct a fully functioning gate once they arrive, all of which is packaged way neatly in cryogenic containers.Pirates in recent years have begun using the magic of transversal velocity, basic bitch astrometrics and launch dates to figure out the relative destination of these torch ships. They physically place fleets in the oncoming path of these torch ships, catch them as they pass, strip them for goods and disappear without a single shot fired.
>>98834617They send a drone that attaches itself to your propellant/fuel/reactor section and politely ask you to surrender or they will blow up the ship.
>>98834915irl shipping announces its exact location and company details at all times on required standardized networks you can go look at right now. No reason it wouldn't be the same in space.
>>98834915Space shipping lanes.
>>98834617Either preying on isolated colonies without the resources necessary to maintain a planetary defense force that's able to protect their orbit or rapidly deploy forces to any point on the planet (the pirates land near some isolated settlement and capture slaves and valuable resources before the military can get there), or hanging out in uninhabited systems ships have to jump through to ambush cargo ships (warp drives in the setting have a maximum range they can cover before having to recharge, which takes several days, so if two inhabited systems are too far to reach in one jump, ships have to stop in an uninhabited system between them to recharge, leaving them vulnerable to pirates).
>>98834617Setting is steampunk-ish (like Treasure Planet) DND setting and most Space Pirates are pretty much like classical pirates (aka pretty darn gay). With that said, there are also slightly less gay pirates, mostly because the definition of "pirate" has been expanded by the Great Powers (ruling interstellar civilizations of the setting) to basically include any independent group/nation that doesn't bend the knee to at least one of them. A LOT of humans tend to be such Freebooters, since their homeplanet was destroyed during a war between two Great Powers and humanity was scattered amongst the star as a result. Free Humans (or Wild Humans as the Great Powers call them) do NOT like the Great Powers and despite being basically just independent civilizations they tend to go out of their way to be a pain in the butt for agents of the Great Powers.
>>98834617Setting is a Star Wars/Firefly/Starcraft tier Space Opera and space is mostly ocean metaphors.Piracy requires a strait (i.e. a hyperspace junction narrow enough that there's a reasonable chance an interdiction field could catch a passing ship), weak local governance (so that there's no chance that "caught" ship is a battlecruiser), and military sailors with no better employment (so usually areas which are recently but no longer war-torn).As such, certain areas are notorious for piracy problems for a while, until a shipping conglomerate or government get pissed off and send an expeditionary force to restore local order (sometimes via genocide), but the setting is such that no single polity has the reach and power to knock all the piracy-prone areas down at once.It is theoretically possible for a tail-and-intercept type stuff to happen but it requires extremely good crew and ship facilities to the point where you wouldn't expect them to be doing piracy.Common piracy setups are a planetoid with solar panels and an interdiction field, plus lots of small raiding vessels, or just one large stolen ship supporting its own interdiction field and cruiser/carrier warfare.
>>98834617The answer is yes. Just yes.
>>98834617They're mostly just small bands of scavengers, looters, and outlaws who live on the outskirts of systems, mostly holding up lone space travelers or colonies for resources/credits. Most of the time, you can talk your way out with them, as they're mostly sane, but that doesn't mean they won't shoot you if you get in their wayBut there is one pirate fleet that is big enough to take on larger targets; they are angry, unpredictable madmen on a rampage. They show up to your colony's doorstep, make outrageous demands, then massacre the majority of its residents, all because the captain didn't like the way the colony's governor looked at him, before proceeding to go on a weeks-long rampage and pillaging the planet's colonies before razing them to the ground for shits and giggles
oh jeez I really hope OP will respond to these and not just use it for his ai content...
>>98834917>injects heat into a heat sink and releases it in a narrow band behind me so it's not picked up by the anyone in front of me.Piece of cake.
>>98834940I don't mean to be a cuntrarian asshole, but wouldn't what you posit also make it relatively risky for pirates? I suppose in space you wouldn't have a big time navy to keep the space lanes open in the manner that the US Navy has generally been keeping the waterways open on Earth, but conceivably you could have someone you could pay to have a military presence there whose mission is to fuck up pirates.Not saying it would stop piracy, but maybe just another factor.
>>98837991Sprinkle a few slurs into the thread in subtle places/midway through long posts.If he's scraping inattentively you might get him the scalpers just reward doing so.
Space Pirates are the best.
In my setting FTL drives are so expensive that private starship ownership doesn't exist. From the largest battleship to the lowliest freighter every one of them is state or mega corp owned. Theoretically one of the alien threats to humanity could raid their space lanes but that isn't piracy it's skirmish warfare.
>>98834617>How does space piracy work in your setting?Depends on the culture or species doing the piracy. Sometimes energy weapons or magic to disable craft then send in the marines. If the target doesn't have shields, they might find a human mage teleporting in and turning everyone into petunias.>Bonus question: are space pirates cooler or gayer than ye olden pirates?One and the same for humans since they mostly fly jammers that are typically ocean-going spaceships.
Later stage capitalism. Human life is worthless. Inevitably countless people become criminals to survive because living in space costs millions of dollars going in and out of a ship. They go in, mow down all the wagecucks, loot or sell the ship, and move on.
>>98839215>I don't mean to be a cuntrarian asshole, but wouldn't what you posit also make it relatively risky for pirates?Piracy has never been a safe occupation.
>>98834617While there are technically only two full sized Oneil cylinders with a third one half-way finished to orbit around Mars and act as the main hub for Mars and expansion into the outer system.That hasn't stopped prospective private miners and corporations from pushing out to get at the resource rich asteroids so it's essentially the wild west and you take your life and security in your own hands so claim jumping, slavery, and larceny is fairly common but you have to prove the guy selling your hard dug precious metals stole your stuff otherwise people arn't too concerned as long as they get the resources, especially water ice.
>>98838020This is as scientific as your spaceship fuel being pixie dust. Any object that isn't a black hole is going to radiate heat.
>>98834869Based and bodacious>>98834876Mine is similarExcept the holy Terran empire crumbled 10k years ago and the Navy is fully roboticized
>>98834915Traveller has a cool in-universe answer to this: Stellar bodies have a "mass shadow" that is larger the more massive a body is. Ships can't Jump while within this "shadow", so places like gas giants (where people frequently skim gas to save a buck on fuel) represent places where pirates might hide in ambush to try and take advantage of ships not fast enough to escape. The prey comes to them, essentially. That, and opportunistic pirates who otherwise have a "day job" but who turn corsair if they come across a vessel in distress.
>>98834911>>98834933Spaceship battle at all is difficult to justify, near impossible the more realistic you go.Old caribbean pirates existed because:>ship of the time didn't require fuel>maintenance & supplies was easy>making a profit was easy>stealth was as simple as removing a flag and not have a ship easy to recognize>every authority were overstretching themselves, with no way to communicate fastIn space you get none of these:>spaceship require fuel>maintenance is crazy hard & having omni-factory would make 99% of what you can steal worthless>you can't make of profit without revealing where you got the cargo>stealth is impossible in space, unless you invent some fantasy FTL which can destroy your setting>communication are easy, worst you get is a hour long lag, everyone's identity has to be loggedIf you want to justify both space battleship & space piracy, you'll have a better chance through politicFirst: Everyone is scared shitless of space debris, so you can avoid being nuked midway by having your spaceship on a collision course with costly stuff, you grab a spaceship with a drone that will damage them if they move.You'd fight using as little force as possible to minimize debris.Then you may want to decentralize authority to the point there's not a single authority and each colony need to hire their own local police forces. It can also let you hide identity of pirates.Beware that you will still want a globally accepted justice, because if there's distinct side, they will work together against the other. You'll also want standardization & redundancy so pirate ships can repair themselves.IMO, you'll certainly need a "bloodless" piracy just destroy robots of something that can be ignored by authorities as an overcost. This PEACEFUL SETTING is important to minimize the preparation against pirates.You can still make it bloody if you have amazing medical technologies.
>>98834617in my setting space pirates raid anal cherries and pound that ass mercilessly while singing greasy shanties and grunting lustily
>>98834617I have a scifi setting I working on for stories and for a Traveller/Stars without Number campaign. Piracy is mostly done by raiding small colonies and using "quasar nets" to catch transport ships in shipping lanes and basically raid and run off with the loot. However, it was high risk/high reward. Since people often would rather blow their cargo then give it up. That and most merchants join caravans with plenty of protection. So often the only targets are smugglers and those risking it by going alone.
