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

Kizarvexis wrote:IMO, it is strongly implied that the sensors placed in OBS were FTL the same way they were in HotQ. They did cost hundreds of millions of Manty dollars to emplace in OBS.

The Service of the Sword, With One Stone by Timothy Zahn wrote:It was Silesian space.
It was escort duty for convoys of Her Majesty's merchant marine.
It was going to be boring as hell.
Lieutenant (Senior Grade) Rafael Cardones stifled a sigh as the Star Knight-class heavy cruiser HMS Fearless slid smoothly into its slot in Sphinx orbit. It wasn't fair, and everyone aboard knew it. After all they'd gone through at Basilisk Station a few months back, and especially now with a shiny, brand-new-out-of-the-box warship wrapped around them, surely the Admiralty could have given them something more challenging than to run endlessly back and forth between Basilisk and the roiling cesspool of political chaos laughingly called the Silesian Confederacy.

...Snip...Skip to the end of the story...

Admiral of the Red Sonja Hemphill looked up from the report and steadied her gaze onto the face of the young man standing stiffly at parade rest in front of her desk. "And what, Lieutenant," she said frostily, "am I supposed to do with you?"

...Snip...

And maybe there was a third bird waiting to be winged by this particular stone. That trick Harrington had used, flickering her impellers to signal the Neue Bayern lurking out beyond the hyper limit, had some definite possibilities. Not as a standard interception tactic per se; the Andies had had to do some very precise maneuvering in order to circle through hyper-space and plant themselves squarely in the escaping raider's path that way. Most Manticoran astrogators weren't competent enough to pull off a trick like that, at least not on a regular basis.
But the maneuver itself was almost beside the point. The point was that Harrington had found a way to use gravitational waves to send a signal to the Andies.
And since gravity pulses effectively moved faster than light and were detectable from much farther away . . .
Especially if they could combine this idea with the new high-yield fusion bottles and superconductors being designed for the next-generation electronic warfare drones, and maybe throw in something from the compact LAC beta nodes already undergoing testing over at BuWeaps . . .
A third bird, indeed. Maybe.
Pulling Sandler's report from her memo pad, she slipped in Harrington's and began to carefully reread it.

Somtaaw wrote:To the second point, how about instead of full up drones (ballistic or otherwise) just using sensor head equipped beacons. That was done in OBS by Honor, so not only years before both FTL and Ghost Rider programs even existed.

...

Standard warning and navigation beacons seem to be carried by warships, pre-First Havenite war at least enough to provide a good chunk of system coverage. Now obviously a pirate would have to carry even more, but they can also cherrypick the sensor locations for maximum yield. Examples would be the section of a system where a grav wave intersects, or where ships have a high probability of coming out of hyper on a least-time course for assets deeper in system.


Thoughts on the beacons, rather than either full up RD's that were used at the same time frame of roughly 1900 PD, or a ballistic drone?

Vince wrote:since Admiral Sonja Hemphill did not come up with the idea of creating ripples along the alpha wall for FTL communications until the end of:

The Service of the Sword, With One Stone by Timothy Zahn wrote:

kzt wrote:

Vince wrote:since Admiral Sonja Hemphill did not come up with the idea of creating ripples along the alpha wall for FTL communications until the end of: "The Service of the Sword, With One Stone by Timothy Zahn"]

Given that the SL has been working on FTL for decades if not longer, don't believe everything you read. What she demonstrated is an obvious capability that has been known for centuries. It's the basis of dropping the wedge as a sign of surrender.

The problem is producing this without using a full ship and then doing it directionally. It's not something you are going to produce over a long weekend in the lab. I suspect it's all rolled into the same black developments that produced MDMs.

The Honor of the Queen, Chapter wrote:“Our R&D people have been working on a new approach, however, and for the first time, we now have a limited FTL transmission capability.”
“An FTL capability?” Calgary blurted, and he was far from alone in his astonishment, for the human race had sought a way to send messages faster than light for almost two thousand years.

SWM wrote:So the original question here is why pirates don't use RDs. I think this is related to a question that came up in an earlier thread--why don't early books show more people using RDs?

I believe there are no instances of RDs being used in a tactical situation to get close observation of enemy ships until Manticore introduces the Ghost Rider project. There are some instances of RDs being used for monitoring the edges of a system, but no instances of close-up monitoring by RDs. There are two possible answers: previous technology was not adequate for close-in tactical drones, or people just didn't think of it.

In either case, that answers why we have never seen pirates do it, either. None of those pirates had access to Manticoran technology.

This leaves open the possibility that future pirates may start using stealthed recon drones. But it might be too expensive for them.