Why do pirates (privateers) not seem to carry any form of RD

JohnRoth wrote:Now that the subject has come up, there's something a bit strange going on. The smallest merchant ship I've seen described is the Halie Sowle, at around a million tons. That thing can carry a couple of frigates on its external racks without anyone noticing. Honor pulled something similar off with a destroyer and a freighter in Let's Dance.

A quick look at House of Steel shows that the smallest warships that are close to the megaton range are battlecruisers. The biggest heavy cruiser isn't quite a half megaton. Destroyers and light cruisers all seem to be under 200 kilotons.

Given the size disparity, I wonder how difficult it really is to tell the difference between the kind of warship that's on anti-pirate patrol and a merchant ship?

Apparently wedge size hardly vary with ship size. So as long as the little ship only shows its wedge, and holds down acceleration to what a merchant can pull it's very hard to tell it apart from a much bigger ship.

JohnRoth wrote:Now that the subject has come up, there's something a bit strange going on. The smallest merchant ship I've seen described is the Halie Sowle, at around a million tons. That thing can carry a couple of frigates on its external racks without anyone noticing. Honor pulled something similar off with a destroyer and a freighter in Let's Dance.

A quick look at House of Steel shows that the smallest warships that are close to the megaton range are battlecruisers. The biggest heavy cruiser isn't quite a half megaton. Destroyers and light cruisers all seem to be under 200 kilotons.

Given the size disparity, I wonder how difficult it really is to tell the difference between the kind of warship that's on anti-pirate patrol and a merchant ship?

I have a terrifying feeling there's going to be a suggestion to use old SD's - perhaps Solarian ones - for the duty on that basis....

It's a matter of identifying things, or encouraging a misidentification of oneself, based on wedge strengths and patterns. It's done often enough among warships too. Either way, you don't expect it to work indefinitely, and if it's not going to work long enough, you probably don't bother at all. Against warships, you can expect both sides to close, or send in plenty of RD's, so not bothering at all is more the norm than the exception. Trolling in a pirate, you can expect them not to be quite so suspicious, or at least, not so willing and able to check out suspicions before it's too late.

I would guess that the former military turned pirate is going to have at least a couple of RDs that it can send in to look at targets. They are also going to have mil-spec sensors and be able to get a fairly good look at the target that way.

Your garden variety pirate probably has a hard time getting actual military grade RDs and sensor systems. The Pirate's Bane -with a half pay RMN Admiral commanding- was formerly an Aldermani military transport and, along with the weapons suite, is probably going to have good sensors and targeting gear. Keeping it all in good repair and people trained would be the tough part.

If you do have a RD- and probably not a RMN or RHN or IAM piece of surplus equipment- you may have some old Silesia Confederation Navy or something sold off by a SL contractor having come from the SLN either used/surplus or from your friendly local armes dealer.
Can you imagin some pirate pushing a surplus SLN RD at a RHN CA to find out if it is a freighter or not? First the CA commander has his tac people spoof the RD and then waits till the pirate is nicely withing the RHN powered missile range before launching on him THEN calling for surrender. Oh my:)

Pirates tend to be ambush hunters. They also- mostly- have to be inside they hyper-limit of a given system before springing on the victim or said victim will jump out.
If you (the pirate) launches an RD, you may or may not be able to get it back. If the target turns out to be a warship, you are NOT getting the drone back. You may make the ID soon enough to get away but the loss of the drone is just cost of doing business.
Have enough of those costs and live to tell about it and you are probably going to try and find another line of work to feed yourself, pay your crew and keep your ship running.

Brigade XO wrote:Can you imagin some pirate pushing a surplus SLN RD at a RHN CA to find out if it is a freighter or not? First the CA commander has his tac people spoof the RD and then waits till the pirate is nicely withing the RHN powered missile range before launching on him THEN calling for surrender. Oh my:)

The optical sensors, when the get a look around the wedge,will tell them everything they need to know. It's really hard to spoof a zoom lens.

Brigade XO wrote:If you (the pirate) launches an RD, you may or may not be able to get it back. If the target turns out to be a warship, you are NOT getting the drone back. You may make the ID soon enough to get away but the loss of the drone is just cost of doing business.
Have enough of those costs and live to tell about it and you are probably going to try and find another line of work to feed yourself, pay your crew and keep your ship running.

In Honor Among Enemies, Truman pointed out that if pirates take even 30% of their prizes, they're more than running a surplus. It'd eat a little into profits to always pop off a (possibly wedge-less) camera with a few gyros to orient at the target and take optical pictures.

Without a wedge, any form of optical cameras, with gyros will be next to be invisible, because unless you had optics on the pirate, you wouldn't even release he'd fired something. Build this "pirate" RD with composites so even radar won't detect it, and even a warship going full active would have difficulty.

The destroyers in tSVW almost didn't find the Argus data hub, even going active. Admittedly that had Solarian stealth technology used, but it gives a general idea of how hard something without a wedge is to detect.

[quote="Somtaaw"]In a spin off from my other topic, and while reading through the book series repeatedly, I'm always struck by how remarkably "easy" Naval officers troll pirates in and then engage at point blank.


Since pirates only expend a few warheads per prize ship, mostly used as "hey idiot, I can kill you from here" warning shots, there should be plenty of room for recon elements. Even in the decades prior to Ghost Rider, even a few RD's could ensure a pirate never gets too close, to regular men-of-war and avoid even a chance of capture.

-------------

I think there are 2 basic reasons
(1) RD's are essentially expensive expendables -- cuts into the pirate's profit margin (despite the tactical advantages)
(2) The pirates will quickly run out of RD's. Even if they recover them (not a guarantee), the RD's would need a refurbishment / inspection (for pirates I will avoid the term Re-Certification) which would require a electronic repair shop and reasonably skilled technicians.

If the pirate vessel is a warship gone-rogue (Warneke's crowd, x-State Sec/PNE, Silesian/Manpower (Refuge incident) they may have RD's in inventory but will likely expend them in first year or two with limited re-supply options.

-- Stewart

Somtaaw wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:If you (the pirate) launches an RD, you may or may not be able to get it back. If the target turns out to be a warship, you are NOT getting the drone back. You may make the ID soon enough to get away but the loss of the drone is just cost of doing business.
Have enough of those costs and live to tell about it and you are probably going to try and find another line of work to feed yourself, pay your crew and keep your ship running.

In Honor Among Enemies, Truman pointed out that if pirates take even 30% of their prizes, they're more than running a surplus. It'd eat a little into profits to always pop off a (possibly wedge-less) camera with a few gyros to orient at the target and take optical pictures.

Without a wedge, any form of optical cameras, with gyros will be next to be invisible, because unless you had optics on the pirate, you wouldn't even release he'd fired something. Build this "pirate" RD with composites so even radar won't detect it, and even a warship going full active would have difficulty.

The destroyers in tSVW almost didn't find the Argus data hub, even going active. Admittedly that had Solarian stealth technology used, but it gives a general idea of how hard something without a wedge is to detect.

How is this wedge-less drone expected to catch a freighter that can accel at up to 200g? Something energetic enough to run it down ballistically from a distance is almost certainly going to have quite the signature. And the other points about sending out an impeller drone that you may or may not recover are valid. Especially, when the majority of pirates are DD or smaller. Pirates tend to be over gunned and over manned, so that cuts into room for other things like drones.

While missile impellers are set it and forget it, drones are not. I wonder if there is a cost difference between the two. Since pirates don't tend to use drones, I can't think of one off hand in textev, the cost difference between the types of impellers could be a factor.

The pirate caught by a warship, is apparently a rare event amongst the number of pirates. While the stories are almost exclusively written from the perspective of the warship, there are lot of pirates taking ships without being caught. The number of officers who have had to deal with the aftermath of the pirates that they did find, supports the theory that lots of pirates don't run into warships.

Kizarvexis wrote:How is this wedge-less drone expected to catch a freighter that can accel at up to 200g? Something energetic enough to run it down ballistically from a distance is almost certainly going to have quite the signature. And the other points about sending out an impeller drone that you may or may not recover are valid. Especially, when the majority of pirates are DD or smaller. Pirates tend to be over gunned and over manned, so that cuts into room for other things like drones.

While missile impellers are set it and forget it, drones are not. I wonder if there is a cost difference between the two. Since pirates don't tend to use drones, I can't think of one off hand in textev, the cost difference between the types of impellers could be a factor.

The pirate caught by a warship, is apparently a rare event amongst the number of pirates. While the stories are almost exclusively written from the perspective of the warship, there are lot of pirates taking ships without being caught. The number of officers who have had to deal with the aftermath of the pirates that they did find, supports the theory that lots of pirates don't run into warships.

Missile launchers are mass drivers, which at a very very simple level, simply "fling" something.

Think of the sport paintball, the paintball is a wedge-less camera, the marker is now a missile launcher, and players are ships. I don't need paintballs with scram-jet propulsion to get them to hit you at long range, I just need to adjust my aim for where you are moving towards and you walk into my rounds.

The same with a wedge-less camera, I point the ship and "fire" my camera, and simply wait until it gets near you. If it's made even half decent, it'd be low detection composites to defeat most radar (think the mine ambush in Hancock), no wedge and the two combined means a warship would probably not even realise you just threw camera's on a close approach.

Think of the "drone" I'm proposing more like... you probably have a cell phone, that has an inbuilt camera. You tape your phone with the camera sticking out to a cylinder, and then add some gyro's to give it some turning possibility. Add a small processing core, and some programming that allows it to orient your phone to aim at a specific target. Lastly add an antenna for long-range communication. Congratulations, you now have a pirate "Long Range Warship Detection Probe", for the low low cost of what, $500?

Obviously it would be slightly better constructed, but that's more or less all thats needed to check a potential prize for hammerheads, hours before you get nearby. The longest bit of construction is doing the programming for aligning your camera, and the communication protocols so the camera sends the picture (or live camera stream, like our Mars probes send back to Earth) back to the pirate ship.

It just may be that ones we have seen haven't carried RDs, hence why the Warship got the drop on them.

or

The supply network for RDs doesn't exist, as most contain advance (for the relevant navy) stealth features (and other bell and whistles) so they be more tightly controlled than contact nukes (after all nukes are used as part of the construction industry).

Garth 2 wrote:The supply network for RDs doesn't exist, as most contain advance (for the relevant navy) stealth features (and other bell and whistles) so they be more tightly controlled than contact nukes (after all nukes are used as part of the construction industry).

But getting a supply of anti-ship missiles is not hard? If you had to choose, which one would you more tightly control?