Brandon Cope:
>Leaving the ship behind is NOT a silly idea. It may be worth more than
>the cargo, but the cargo doesn't take a year or more to build. Let's
>say you have a subsector that builds 300 merchant ships a year. This
>come out to 25 a month.
>It will take 25 successful pirating missions a month to get all the
>ships built that year. Spread that over about 15-20 inhabited systems,
>and you get a system being hit about 1 to 1.5 times a month -- not a
>very high number. Also, taking the ship has other problems -- you have
>to have a place to keep it until you get rid of it, and you have to
>split your crew to man it, and you still have the problem of selling
>it. I could see them taking the ship if (a) their ship was too badly
>damaged, (b) if the crew was splitting up, going seperate ways, and
>needed another ship, or (c) the pirates were real scum-of-the-earth.
>The disagreement we have here is based on the perception of
>pirates -- I use the early ones (about 1650-1700) as the basis for
>mine: relatively honorable, and not intrested in the personal wealth of
>the crewmen or passengers (unless of course such a person was worth a
>great deal of money in ransom -- like a princess). Even when such
>pirates took the ship, they made sure that the crew and passengers were
>put on a small boat (longboat or smaller) and provisioned well enough
>so that they could reach land. The early pirates were not common
>murderers or robbers. Not taking a ship mean that they could steal from
it again (and often did).
A novel set of theories. It ignores one or two fairly relevant points:
1) Pirates probably do not care whether the victims can be robbed
again and again. Take one Tukera liner home, sell it, and retire.
2) Probably more relevant to your picture - in the 15th and 16th
centuries, the cargo from a ship was frequently worth more than the
ship. Sometimes A LOT more. In MT, most cargos are worth no more than
a small fraction of the value of the ship.
3) There is also a lot of room between taking the ship and killing
the crew. Neither especially implies the other. You can put the crew
out in vacc suits, and they could probably be rescued in plenty of time.
They are, after all, within a few million Km from the main world (unless
they are stupid, or somehow unable to add).
4) As to selling the ship, that's where the Vargr come in. I doubt
the Vargr care from clean papers. Selling a ship in the Extants should
be a matter of listing it in the classifieds, and waiting a bit.
5) As to the crew difficulties, notice that pirates traditionally
carried large crews for that very purpose.
My own opinion of pirates is that they are in it for the money, and not
likely to worry about leaving ships behind to be robbed again. There is
more money in carrying the ship to the Extants to sell than there is in
leaving it behind. For that matter, the amount of damage (in Cr) that
can be done by fairly trivial resistance costs more to repair than most
cargos are worth. Keep in mind that one triple laser turret costs MCr3
to replace if destroyed (fairly likely if using merchant weaponry), and
the cargo from a free trader is worth maybe MCr6 at most. Take two
hits, and the profits evaporate. Take the ship, and it can pay for your
repairs (unless you take good hits. Notice that a J-drive hit will
probably cost MCr10 or so to repair).
>Some more stuff about my honorable pirates:
>
>If pirates are know to steal the ships and space the crews, then
>virtually no merchant ships (company or private) are going to surrender
>if they know they will die anyway.
SO why space them? Take their ship and let the crew live to run home.
Then they can surrender another ship to you later.
> There is also
>historical presedence (from the Carribean) for a Brotherhood amongst
>pirates -- they would not lie, steal, or cheat each other. In such a
>case, a pirate crew WOULD care about the repurcussions of its actions
>on other pirates, unless it was a rogue (ie, non-Brotherhood) ship.
Sounds like you have been reading GURPS Swashbucklers. I notice that
those pirates (Brethren of the Coast) usually took the ships, and
marooned the crews in small boats. Obviously THEY didn't worry too much
about robbing the ships repeatedly.
BTW, why do pirates care how long it takes to build a ship?
And why use an impoverished subsector that can only build 300 ships per
year? Efate probably builds 5000+ per year by itself.
Later...
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I have learned to use the word "impossible" with the greatest caution.
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