Pirates

Carl Rigney:

>Which I think leads to the conclusion that successful piracy requires
>someone on the inside.  After all, if you know where & when someone
>plans to emerge from jump you can match courses *before* they emerge
>and then catch them & loot them in the 1 hour you have before that 6G
>missile crosses half a million kilometers to blow you both to space
>dust... err....
>
>Maybe it would be better to hijack the ship from the inside & then jump
>it where your ship can be waiting for it, away from all the nasty
>thousands of system defense boats & other sharp demographic teeth.

Probably the latter would be the most profitable way to do "piracy".
I can't see a way to make piracy pay without the resources of a planetary
government to back you up.  And then only by doing a "space viking"
number:  raid planets, not ships.  Hit those out-of-the -way planets,
the ones with enough loot to pay expenses, but no defenses to speak of.
Moving targets are too much trouble.

Later...

- -- Via DLG Pro v0.985b

[email removed]

I have learned to use the word "impossible" with the greatest caution.
                                    --W. von Braun

> Lastly, there are all kinds of possibilities for subterfuge:
>
>  o  hang around the jump point and pretend to have a drive failure,
>  o  maybe even ask your victims to come aboard and give you a hand.
>  o  beam a distress call to your victim when they are within sensor range
>     and the navy is not.
>  o  pose as customs inspectors.
>  o  pose as someone with a hot/lucretive cargo to unload.
>  o  lie at a good intercept point powered down to escape detection.

A strategy a party I was in once used:

o Get hold of an old warship, and update it with the latest equipment,
  especially sensors and electronic masking.  It doesn't even matter if
  all of the weapons work, really.
o Power down the pirate ship, perhaps trailing behind an asteroid or
  something, then use low-power passive sensors to detect a passing
  merchant.
o Send out an obviously damaged lifeboat that really contains a disguised
  boarding party.
o When the lifeboat is picked up by the trader, cause enough commotion
  and damage to prevent the ship from entering jump/running away/etc.
  while the warship powers up and moves in close.  With luck, the trader
  has been occupied by the boarding party.  If not, hopefully they have
  done enough damage to make the ship an easy target.
o It also helps if you have a way of towing the trader away easily.
o And yes, one catch does set you up for a while.  We disassembled the
  ships and sold the parts.

We also tried posing as customs inspectors once.  It's rather risky,
though.  Posing as someone with stolen cargo is also rather risky,
since people who buy stolen goods tend to be more cautious.

Another thing to do is this: forget about traders -- go after miners.
You don't even care too much about the ore -- just take the ships.
Miners are easier targets, tend to go to the same places, and tend to
work alone.  You should be able to hide a powered-down ship in an
asteroid belt.  You can even put a warhead in the asteroid being
mined, and clean up after it goes off.

Jerry Williams

Steve Higginbotham writes more about the impossibility of pirates.

Most of your points are all too cogent, alas. Perhaps the only
way to save the pirates is to ignore logic. Nevertheless (and
in order to reduce the leap of faith as much as possible) I'll
answer a few of them.

[Posing as customs inspectors.]

>It has merit.  But only if your ship is indistinguishable from a Customs
>ship.  Minor vagaries like your oversized power plant are sure to be
>noticed.

No it isn't. You keep it turned low. Not completely powered
down, but down to the level of the cutter you're trying to
impersonate. Turning it up full power will not involve the time
it takes to cold-start.

>And the first time a target gets away a message (which will be
>the first target, probably), then that game will no longer work.

Ooops....

>one gravity.  It's not safer if a pirate will jump you if you stop.

It is if the chance of getting jumped by a pirate if you stop
is less than the chance of being wrecked if you don't.

>                                                   The limitation on
>a pirate is that most targets only are in range for 1,000,000 Km or less.
>And that sensors only work over about half that range.
>If I re-analyze what I did yesterday to use the actual sensor ranges from MT,
>I find that the pirate locates you 53 minutes before you jump (IF he detects
>you right at the fringe of sensor range - rolls a 12 on a cautious task,
>with a model nine computer).

You forget the transponder that a benevolent Imperium demands
that all ships use at all times  -  that in the official
Traveller Universe _cannot_ be switched off unless you tamper
illegally with the mechanism. A pirate can get a passive
pinpoint the moment the merchant leaves orbit. But even in a
universe where the authorities sensibly allows it's merchants
to switch off this electronic beacon, pirates could have spies
on the planet, ready and eager to tightbeam travel information
to their ship.



      Hans Rancke
University of Copenhagen
     [email removed]
- ------------
        "A  subsector  official  pompously states that the
        subsector  armed  forces  have  four Kinunir class
        ships in service,  each with enough troop strength
        to put down any military operations that threathen
        the peace of the Imperium."

                        ---Adventure 1, The Kinunir

Hans Rancke-Madsen [email removed] writes:
> Steve Higginbotham writes more about the impossibility of pirates.
> [Posing as customs inspectors.]
>
> >It has merit.  But only if your ship is indistinguishable from a Customs
> >ship.  Minor vagaries like your oversized power plant are sure to be
> >noticed.
>
> No it isn't. You keep it turned low. Not completely powered
> down, but down to the level of the cutter you're trying to
> impersonate. Turning it up full power will not involve the time
> it takes to cold-start.

Well, it's unlikely to be a cutter you're impersonating, unless your
main ship is a starship which carries a cutter.  You do not want to
be tied to one system, or the navy will have a much easier time
finding you!  Now, if you can get your hands on an Imperial Type T
patrol cruiser, you would be in business.

> >And the first time a target gets away a message (which will be
> >the first target, probably), then that game will no longer work.
>
> Ooops....

So you do what commerce raiders did during WW2.  You approach using
your cover, and then signal the victim and tell him not to use his
radio, or you will leave the area in a hurry and leave him in a lot
of small pieces.  Your signal, of course, is tight beam and low power,
so that it will not be picked up by anyone else.

Besides, why would one signal prevent the same trick working later?
So the merchants now know that there is a Type T in pirate hands,
posing as an official Naval ship.  What are they going to do, ignore
all Type T cruisers that they see in future?

> > It's not safer if a pirate will jump you if you stop.
>
> It is if the chance of getting jumped by a pirate if you stop
> is less than the chance of being wrecked if you don't.

So you cut your manoeuvre drives just before you jump.  It is, of course,
not possible to make your ship stationary before you jump (stationary in
whose frame of reference?).

Another question which has been raised is jump points.  I assume that this
is an artificial concept, rather than a physical limitation - you can jump
from anywhere to anywhere (assuming that departure and destination are at
safe distances from their respective stars/planets), but the world's
government would prefer you to jump to and from a certain place.  This
increases the risk of collision, as one ship approaches preparing to jump
just as another ship exits jump space.  But you would probably not have a
jump "point", so much as a jump region.  This region would be a sphere of
radius 500,000km (the maximum range of sensors and weapons), with a warship
or two at the centre, and another one or two cruising along a line joining
the centre of the sphere to the planet.  The government would not forbid
jumping to somewhere outside this region, because if it can patrol outside
that region, then it is unnecessary to define the region in the first place.
But the government would be able to protect merchants who used that region,
and would make no attempt to help anyone who did not.

Another possibility would be to simply have a large space station at that
point, acting as a starport.  Thus, a ship could jump almost immediately
after launching, and could dock very soon after exiting jump space.  Or
would the use of jump drives near the station be likely to harm it?

Anyway, there are a few more points to chew on!

- --
 "Keyboard?  How quaint!" - M. Scott

 Adrian Hurt			     |	JANET:  [email removed]
 UUCP: ..!ukc!cs.hw.ac.uk!adrian     |  ARPA:   [email removed]

> I would think decreasing sensor range would help as well.  Even better,
> expand the range difference between an at rest pirate with advanced equipment
> actively watching for a victim, and a short crewed merchant with basic
> equipment in flight.

Perhaps Traveller Sensors should be like submarine sonar.  When you're
moving you're blind because you're making too much noise.  For
something like a neutrino detector this even sounds plausible.  Maximum
sensitivity comes from turning off your own plant.  The more power you
generate, the harder it is to detect other people's power plants.  When
you get close enough and have a bearing on a target you can switch to
optics, and when you get real close you can switch to something like
radar or laser-ranging.  Likewise the less power you're using the
harder you are to see on N-detectors.

Warfleets would have scout boats ahead doing bounding overwatch with
some moving while others coast on low power looking for unexpected
power sources, but a merchant can't afford to do that; it's pick up a
cargo and boost for jump because time is money.

I think the other thing that would aid pirates is reducing weapon
range, so that 12 warships in a dodecahedron around a planet can't
cover the entire volume to 100 meters without needing to move.

- --
Carl Rigney
[email removed]

> I can't see a way to make piracy pay without the resources of a planetary
> government to back you up.  And then only by doing a "space viking"
> number:  raid planets, not ships.  Hit those out-of-the -way planets,
> the ones with enough loot to pay expenses, but no defenses to speak of.

>From conversations with Robert Plamondon I believe that's how piracy
is commonly done in Gazis' Eight Worlds campaign, which has been alleged
to be Traveller now and then.  The poor worlds don't have any defense vs.
an orbiting ship's weapons so the pirates land, grab up whatever they like,
flatten whatever resists, and depart.

- --
Carl Rigney
[email removed]
EOF

Carl Rigney:

>> I would think decreasing sensor range would help as well.  Even better,
>> expand the range difference between an at rest pirate with advanced
>> equipment actively watching for a victim, and a short crewed merchant
>> with basic equipment in flight.
>
>Perhaps Traveller Sensors should be like submarine sonar.  When you're
>moving you're blind because you're making too much noise.  For
>something like a neutrino detector this even sounds plausible.  Maximum
>sensitivity comes from turning off your own plant.  The more power you
>generate, the harder it is to detect other people's power plants.  When
>you get close enough and have a bearing on a target you can switch to
>optics, and when you get real close you can switch to something like
>radar or laser-ranging.  Likewise the less power you're using the
>harder you are to see on N-detectors.

That makes a minute amount of sense.  But since pirates will have bigger
power plants, they will have larger signatures.  So once they start to
move to intercept, they lose you on their sensors, and you pick them up
on yours.  Then you change course and let them go on their merry way.
I should point out that ACTIVE sonar is not really affected by submarine
speed.  So radar would work just fine.  And the merchants don't mind using
radar, since they have nothing to hide.  The pirates can't use it because
they DO have something to hide.  Remember ESM.



>Warfleets would have scout boats ahead doing bounding overwatch with
>some moving while others coast on low power looking for unexpected
>power sources, but a merchant can't afford to do that; it's pick up a
>cargo and boost for jump because time is money.

No, warfleets won't.  They'll use drones to scout ahead, and the fleet will
accelerate normally.
And time may be money, but an extra three hours per week is trivial.  And
that's how much longer it would take.  Keep in mind all you have to do is
stop accelerating for a few minutes, look around, then accelerate again.
Warm start of a fusion plant only takes 3 or 4 minutes.  If you sacrifice
that much time every 15 minutes, you still take only 256 minutes to transit
to jump distance, as opposed  to 211 minutes of continuous boost.  I doubt
any merchant will get excited about losing 1.5 hours every two weeks.


>I think the other thing that would aid pirates is reducing weapon
>range, so that 12 warships in a dodecahedron around a planet can't
>cover the entire volume to 100 meters without needing to move.

NO!  That was the whole point of some of those posts.  If weapon ranges
are reduced, then the pirate will have a HARDER time of intercepting
targets in the 3 or 4 hour window he has between boost and jump.

Later...

- -- Via DLG Pro v0.985b

[email removed]

I have learned to use the word "impossible" with the greatest caution.
                                    --W. von Braun