Hans Rancke-Madsen:
>I'd like to keep the cost of civilian ships down as much as possible
>(while making warships as expensive as possible - that's the
>dillema).
It is that, all right.
>I'm not saying that pirates ought to be able to stand up to the Navy.
>But if the average pirate can deal with a Gazelle, then the Navy will
>need to use Chrysanthemums to patrol, which more than halves the number
>of patrols they can afford. If the average pirate can deal with a
>Chrysanthemum, then the Navy will need to use Sloans and so on. The
>problem is that the bigger a pirate becomes, the bigger prey it needs
>and the bigger nuisance it becomes, so there is a limit to how big they
>can become.
This is mostly true. But if the pirate is big anough and tough
enough,it's prey becomes frontier worlds, not ships. And all the
anlysis I ever did assumed SEH-class light cruisers numbered in the
100,000s in the Imperium. I haven't even gotten down to the Sloan or
Chrysnthemum level yet. Start counting at millions and work up.
>You're wrong when you assume that merchant traffic will collapse unless
>the Navy can suppress piracy. On the contrary, piracy is
>self-regulating. If it becomes too great a burden on trade, then the
>number of merchants will decrease, true, but then the number of pirates
>will dwindle too, whereupon merchant traffic will pick up, which will
>allow the piracy traffic to pick up too, etc. etc.. You can't _have_
>pirates without trade to prey on. And when the potential profit
>outweighs the risks, merchants will be out there trading, pirates or no
>pirates.
Of course merchant traffic won't really collapse. What will really
happen is that the merchants will arm their ships to the point that they
can deal with pirates, or force the Navy to deal with them.
>Look at history. It's only in the last two centuries that piracy has
>really been brought under control, chiefly because the various
>government fleets finally became big and/or efficient enough to make
>piracy unprofitable (and even today we sometimes hear of pirate-style
>robberies). Certainly the 16th 17th and 18th Centuries (where the great
>trading companies flourished) had their share of pirates as well as
>national fleets.
Chiefly because piracy became impossible when a pirate required coal to
make his ship go. When you go to get coal, they arrest you. Piracy is
a trivial problem now, and that is more due to other factors.
>No, pirates need to be able to hide from government fleets, which is
>not quite the same. The whole problem arises out of the fact that it
>_is_ the same in the Traveller universe as it is now (because the
>Navy is big enough to patrol all systems adequately at all times),
>so what Bertil and I want is to reduce the size of the Navy.
No, pirates need to be able to operate in the target areas, and get
somewhere for maintenance and resale of loot. MT's Jump technology
limits the pirate's ability to operate far from a refuge world.
>Never worked that way on pre-spaceflight Terra. Merchant traffic will
>cease only when it becomes unprofitable and pirates can't make trade
>unprofitable (unless state-subsidized).
Piracy was never much of a problem on pre-spaceflight Terra. Something
to do with the trivial cost of a ship, and the EXTREMELY high profits to
be made from even one successful voyage. When one successful voyage
will replace the ship that failed to come home, piracy can remove 50% of
all shipping without affecting shipping volume. When a voyage brings
home 0.25% of the cost of a ship, then even a small amount of piracy
will be lethal to trade.
>>Try looking at historical examples of piracy. Piracy as a problem
>>appeared when there was something to steal, and vanished shortly
>>thereafter (except during wartime, when the Navy was busy elsewhere),
>>when the merchants forced the Navy to deal with the problem.
>
>We seem to have read different history books ;-) Try one about the
>Caribbean and see how long it took from the first government attempt
>to suppress piracy until the last pirate was caught.
I know about the Caribbean pirates. How many of them were operating
under a Letter of Marque and Reprisal from one European country or
another. In virtually every case of persistent piracy in this world,
the "pirates" were essentially foreign warships operating against
merchant shipping.
>Only if the Navy can find them. The problem is that there aren't all
>that many areas to patrol and more than enough Navy ships to patrol
>them. Pirates can rely on disguise to keep them safe between strikes
>(looking like innocent merchants), but that dosen't help if there's
>warship within range when the pirate actually attacks its prey.
MOST ships in MT (Jump-capable ones at least) are never more than 100
diameters from the main world of a system. If you check, you will find
that 12 warships can be deployed so that that ENTIRE VOLUME can be
brought under fire at any time. ANd it is hard to disguise a ship as an
"innocent merchant" that carries a fusion plant big enough to fight off
a Sloan. These things are noticable by Customs inspectors, as well as
System Defense Squadrons.
>Yes and no. It is limited by the amount of money that the citizenry is
>willing to or can be coreced into spending. Look at what happened after
>the Peace of Amiens. Most military men and quite a few politicians knew
>that they would most likely be at war with Napoleon again as soon as he
>had had time to rebuild his forces, and yet the government reduced the
>navy to its peacetime complement. Why? Not because they didn't need the
>ships, but because people refused to keep up paying an income tax of
>four shilling in the pound.
Again, I concede the point. My example was from US history alone.
There are, in fact, examples of abject stupidity in every country and at
every time in the history of the world.
Later...
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I have learned to use the word "impossible" with the greatest caution.
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