Piracy

Piracy: The socioeconomics of Piracy within Charted Space have long been controversial.

Description (Specifications)

Is Piracy Possible?:

Point one is easy:

• Canon makes it clearly happen.

However, it's hard to say how to make it profitable, given Traveller rules, and assuming that we can use current physics to understand the logistics of piracy.

There are more efficient uses for a starship than piracy, but there are people who cannot do legal careers for various reasons and ships they'd not be able to use legally. Combine the two, and you get Corsairs. Even if a pirate has to hunt for an entire year to bag one Fat Trader, he's still making reasonable money. This leads us to points two and three:

• Pirates can make money, if the setting allows them to survive and travel.

• Risk and Reward are very high.

Economic Considerations

One starship taken in the course of a corsair ship's career will pretty much amortize the entire value of the pirate ship for five years or more. However, it is very difficult to jump away a starship you take. Also, fenced starships probably only bring 10% of their current value.

On the other hand, small craft can be popped into the cargo bay, and are likely to fetch half of their value. Each small craft taken will pay expenses for a few years, or pay part of the value of the pirate vessel. 15 lifeboat/launches is all it takes to completely pay off the current value of a 400t Corsair. Pinnaces and ship's boats are worth even more.

• Pirates will take small craft.

Un-patrolled systems are the only systems where a pirate will want to fight at all - the risks are too high compared to the rewards in a system where patrol ships are en route to the fight. Targets taken in un-patrolled systems can almost always be considered valuable enough to cover cost of damage, unless the damage stops the pirate from jumping back to base.

• Pirates will only fight in un-patrolled systems.

Even if a pirate has to hunt for an entire year to bag one Fat Trader, he's still making reasonable money. I believe this answers some arguments that a pirate loses too much money by lying in wait for targets, or by having to transit several systems to get from a base to a good hunting area.

Income can be far, far higher than just expenses if the pirate hits a few good targets. This allows there to be enough income potential to make up for the really bad luck a pirate can have - one missile hit can cost millions, even if it doesn't kill you. Piracy therefore becomes high-risk, but very profitable if the risks pan out.

Further Discussion

Pirates are a part of the Traveller milieu; they appear in Book 2 of the original set. In a frontier zone, it is clear pirates could function. In a core area, though, piracy may be easy to suppress.

The problem is that a pirate must have a base of some sort. Privateers have a de-facto base in the principality that issued the Letters of Marque. For goods taken, it must have a market. If they go all the way to taking ships, they need a place to sell them, or refit them to fighting use.

• Pirates have bases of operations.

So, we can assume the ability to find wandering planets, and set up pirate bases on them. There, they would transfer the goods taken in piracy to merchant vessels not noted as pirates, and the merchant would sell them as normal speculative goods.

The existence of speculative goods, and large variance in law levels, means that a merchant selling a cargo is no big deal, so unless the cargo is unique in some way selling it would be simple.

So, what of ship title, and so on? Pirates who took ships in a "civilized" area must somehow forge new transponders, or scavenge them from boneyards, derelicts, and so on. They would have to replace the transponders, come up with some forged log to make it plausible for the ship to be where it is, and so on. A good distance for the forged port of manufacture or transfer would be something like 2 months away by X-boat, an expensive message to send just to check on a random trader appearing at port. There might even arise a black market in transponders for common ship classes. Rare ships, unique ships, and so on would have to be transited to about 30 parsecs from the location of its former activity. Setting up so many pirate bases to be able to do that would be prohibitive, so those flying a custom ship are probably safer from seizure of the ship by pirates.

• Disguising a corsair as a legitimate ship carries too-high risk.

Now the third piracy income stream - kidnapping and ransoms. First, care must be taken to assure you don't let on where your base is to the targets. So, you would want to "disappear" the people for a few weeks. Then, you want to bring them to either their destination or origin, or where the personage tells you to contact their friends or relatives. The hazards are in setting up the handoff; in taking the risk that the contact information is going to lead to a private investigator tracking the pirate to his or her lair; and, of course, pissing off someone with enough power to get the military searching for wandering planets and checking them for pirate bases, ruining the whole setup. The perfect targets are the social standing 8-9 mid-level execs and military personnel, with fairly deep pockets but not enough clout to trigger the full-on military response.

• Kidnapping and ransoms are very high risk, high reward.

Piracy without a base would be limited to stealing the cargo and staying ahead of the reports-- perhaps even kidnapping, if done right and the crew is willing to risk it.

Alternate View

by Walt Smith

For purposes of this discussion, we'll limit "Pirate" to mean independent or small groups of ships acting illegally and taking ships as their primary criminal activity.

Being a pirate is dangerous, risky, and a bad idea. Many people find it the best choice from a list of really bad ones, or are good at making bad choices - or even good at making bad choices work out.

The "average" pirate will be a small (100 to 400 ton) jump capable vessel.

The objective of all but the most psychopathic (or fanatic) pirate is taking ship's cargos (and the occasional ship) for money, _not_ killing people. Killing happens, but is usually bad for business - Impie attention starts to come to bear much faster.

Desperados

Note for the "must swim with the fishes" people out there: the average pirate ship will _never_ call at a starport that has any kind of legal controls or Imperial presence. It will never, except at long ranges or in the most cursory manner, be able to play the role of honest merchant - and it works within these limitations.

• Corsairs do not pretend to be merchants, and do not call at Imperial starports.

Pirates make arrangements with criminal groups or even individual smugglers to buy cargos they have stolen. They keep what they need for their jury-rigged ship repairs, and hope for the big haul - except that the mind-set that leads someone into being a pirate often has the big haul make them overconfident, so they go for a bigger one.

The Type S

Type S Scout ships are minimally capable for this task, but are popular because they are ubiquitous, often travel with no flight plans, have oddball paper trails as a normal course of business and (IMTU at least) can be kept barely functional without seeing a class-B starport for years - though at a cost of steadily increasing field maintenance efforts.

The Corsair

A variety of 400 ton range vessels are the more common pirate, usually mutinied patrol cruisers or starmerc commerce raiders that ran out of war or were otherwise cashiered - the StarMerc that can't get contracts anymore because of incompetence or inability to follow the rules is a popular image of the "Classic Pirate", and does exist though is rare. Mutinied patrol vessels occur with some frequency because the officers of such vessels are the least competent or least experienced in the Navy (experienced and competent ones get to command Destroyers and up). Further, the crews of such vessels tend to be people that aren't doing well in the big happy family of the Navy. Note that "Navy" here means the Subsector & Sector Navies - the Imperial Navy does a better job at maintaining its reputation as professionals, even at the patrol vessel level.

Note 1

Patrol Cruisers, BTW, aren't front-line combat vessels - they are designed as long duration multi-role ships, able to do everything from search & rescue to boarding of suspected smugglers. The enforcement of red zones against ethically challenged free trader captains can be great training for a Patrol Cruiser crew - the skills and actions needed are almost identical to what they'll need after they mutiny and take up piracy. ;)

Note 2

The average patrol vessel encountered is Subsector or Sector Navy, colonial ships. Imperial patrols are only encountered around Impie Navy bases and operational fleets, or the occasional anti piracy sweep or patrol maneuvers. The fact that Impie patrol squadrons will do anti piracy sweeps through areas already at least nominally patrolled by local forces should show you what the Impies think of local capabilities. The free trader is ambivalent about the situation - Impies are good at clearing out pirates, but tend to perform board & inspect more often, which can make the free trader a bit nervous.

X-Boat Tenders

The Imperial Scout Service has lost a few X-Boat Tenders to pirates. These ships often make long trips to outlying systems to pick up misdirected X-Boats, and some of these systems turn out to be more dangerous than expected. These ships would be used as mobile bases of operations, rather than as attack ships in their own right.

• A captured X-Boat Tender can be a base of operations.

Base of Operations

Pirates will usually try to create a base of operations to perform repairs, stockpile supplies and store stolen cargos. Asteroids are popular, due to the distance from gravity wells and how lonely the average asteroid is. The asteroid will be hollowed out, chunks from a captured ship will be welded into it (hatches, power plant, life support, etc.) and it will be ready for action.

• An asteroid is a popular base of operations.

Operations

This kind of jury-rigged building and maintenance are a hallmark of all but the best connected pirates. Annual maintenance, battle damage repairs, even refits are performed under dangerous, difficult and poorly equipped conditions, kind of like a medic performing field surgery on someone who ought to be in a hospital. Burn-scarred, maimed pirates are not just the stuff of holovid shows - pulling a fusion plant with nothing but a chopped-down Launch is _dangerous_.

• Pirate operations themselves are high-risk.

Mainly due to this kind of abuse, pirate vessels won't last the hundreds of years one might get out a well maintained ship. In a hard fight with a patrol cruiser, a pirate vessel is in as much danger from a system failing under stress as it is from the patrol cruiser's guns.

A ship hunted by a pirate can expect the following to happen:

1) Some deception may occur. A pirate may pretend to be a customs or patrol vessel - a deception that will not last long, but may allow the first stages of an intercept to occur. Stealth capabilities, for those pirates lucky enough to have them, are made use of.

2) Calling for help will probably do little good, unless they can delay the pirate through unexpected thrust capabilities or good battle tactics/weaponry - many of which will make the pirate give up anyway, unless desperation or prospect of an unusually great haul perks up the pirate's courage. The target was detected by the pirate too far from help, either due to a minor misjump outside the usual traffic lanes or because the target is in a place where patrols don't go. Or perhaps something has already happened to the local patrol ship - if the planet Pinata only has two Patrol Ships, and five or six pirates club together to bushwhack the patrol, they'll have free rein of the system (away from whatever planetary defenses there might be) for weeks.

3) The pirate will intercept. She may order the target to cut engines pretty early - high speed passes won't get you cargo, but they will wreck your merchant ship. It's easier to intercept a target if you don't care about relative velocities at intercept, but impossible to board a ship unless you match velocities - the threat of a battle pass should suffice to keep the target from evading, or even get the target to maneuver to rendezvous with you.

4) The merchant will be boarded. Some pirate vessels have (or the merchant will think they have) too small a crew to force a boarding - the loss of the boarding party might leave the pirate ship too undermanned to keep the merchant from escaping, even from right under it's guns. This will lead to merchant passengers or crew, in some situations, to resist the boarding party. Considering how many interstellar travellers will be wealthy/noble (and have bodyguards) or will be military/ex-military, this happens more often than you might think. Considering how many pirate vessels have severe manpower problems, this works more often than you might think. A rare, though not unheard-of occurrence is for a merchant to come to port with a captured pirate ship following behind it.

5) The merchant will be looted. Damage (to the ship and people aboard) will often depend on how much trouble they gave the pirate. Depending on the time factor, varying amounts of looting will occur. The ship's safe may be cleaned out, usually with the help of the Shipmaster or Chief Purser (obtained at gunpoint). Personal weapons, vacc suits, spare parts, even ship's vehicles or craft may be stolen. Cargo will be a prime target, though the lack of starport loading facilities will hamper this somewhat - you may see improvised cargo transfer gear on a pirate ship. Passengers and crew may be molested, robbed, even raped or kidnapped - the last depending on the pirate crew's connections and capabilities. If a pirate finds the winner of the Miss Regina Beauty Pageant on board, he might decide to kidnap her now and figure out the multi-millon Credit ransom scheme later, even if he doesn't currently have the capabilities to conduct ransom negotiations.

6) The Pirates will go their merry way. Their target will need some restocking and repairs, but won't be destroyed - unless they resist, in which case as an object lesson their ship might be left a gutted hulk, perhaps with them adrift in a life boat or vacc suit - perhaps not.

History & Background (Dossier)

Sunbeard Declaration on Piracy: The below is the Sunbeard Declaration, the peace statement authored by Ian Whitchurch and moderated by Robert Eaglestone at the end of the Great TML Piracy Flamewar of 1997-98.

• 1. Mainworlds, with either significant trade or significant economies, can and will defend their space out to about their 100-diameter limits.
• 2. These anti-pirate defenses will make piracy in and around those mainworlds unprofitable.
• 3. These anti-pirate defenses do not extend to the entire system.
• 4. Pirates concentrate on less-patrolled systems or areas, or balance risk with reward, in whatever forms that takes.
• 5a. Shipping corporations apply risk premiums to trade with known unsafe areas.
• 5b. A corollary of 4. and 5a. is that Outsystems will tend to be places of high risk and correspondingly high reward for all concerned.
• 6. Merchant ships that trade in safe areas are lightly armed or unarmed.
• 7. Merchant ships that trade in unsafe areas are armed with at least one turret.
• 8. The best markets for stolen starships are in other states. However, unsafe areas will buy ships they know to be stolen at heavily discounted rates.
• 9a. Pirate ships tend to be converted Adventure Class Ships, rather than custom builds. Unsafe areas tend to be high-risk and high-reward for all.
• 9b. Safe areas are too dangerous for corsairs.
• 9c. Pirate warships may exist from mutinous or rebel crews.

References & Contributors (Sources)

This list of sources was used by the Traveller Wiki Editorial Team and individual contributors to compose this article. Copyrighted material is used under license from Mongoose Publishing or by permission of the author. The page history lists all of the contributions.

• Loren Wiseman. "The Ecology of Piracy in the Spinward Main." Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society 19 (1984): 9-17.
• Lester Smith. "Solving the Piracy Problem." Milieu 0 (1996): 8.
• Martin Dougherty. Traders & Raiders (Mongoose Publishing, 2015), TBD.
• Author & Contributor: Ian Whitchurch
• Author & Contributor: Sunbeard the Pirate