there are a couple of things you are missing in all this.
first off, most of the galaxy's pirates are the equivalent of buccaneers trying to run down galleons in rowboats off the Caimans - they have neither the sophistication nor the capacity to operate any sort of drone. most of the rest are operating feebly armed yachts in the frigate size range - 60-70kT - and, while they may have the sophistication, still don't have the capacity to carry anything as big as a real RD. at 300-500T, RD's are bigger than pinnaces. and, as has been pointed out, are honking expensive to acquire and operate. that reduces them to something like your 'improv' design. however...
second, a ballistic RD of whatever size is completely useless. as has also already been pointed out, you _must_ ID that warship in time to get away. which means before you close to 6Mkm plus whatever range extension your closing velocity adds. guess what? that only works with ballistic drones if you're willing to take until sometime next week to catch your target. with 500g accel, the higher the velocity you impart to the drone, the closer behind it you're going to be when it reaches the other guy and the further you're going to overfly him - which gives a freighter that much more time to get away, and a warship that much more time to blow you to dust bunnies. as an example, let's assume that you've persuaded your victim to cut his accel [since you don't want him evading you] when you're 10M km away, closing at 10,000kps. you drop your drone to check on his bonafides, and it crosses his wedge 1000s later. sounds good, no? _but_, at that time, your velocity is still 5000kps, you won't come to rest wrt him for another 1000s & 12M km, _and_ you're less than 2.5M km away with your butt turned directly towards him. if it is a warship, you just wasted a drone, because you're dead whenever he pulls the trigger. if he isn't, you just wasted a drone, since it doesn't matter if you know for sure that he's a freighter before you pull up beside him. change any of the intercept parameters and you simply change the range you're blown away at, until you've changed them so much that a real freighter is simply going to be able to get away from you anyway.
and, finally [a 'couple' is kind of vague, you know], you are drastically underestimating the size, power requirements and sophistication needed even for your 'ballistic' drone. not only do you need a camera good enough to distinguish warship from freighter - probably not too difficult, in itself - you need a transmitter powerful enough to get the image back to you in reasonable time across many M km of space, possibly with something really noisy in the background. and you need a refrigeration system good enough to keep that transmitter functioning long enough to do that without frying itself. and you need a pretty high-gain antenna - as the price for avoiding an even bigger transmitter - that needs rather classy guidance and pointing systems. and an even better refrigerator, to keep them from frying themselves, the camera and the transmitter. and a control package for all the above, with yet more refrigeration to keep... start to get the picture?
Somtaaw wrote:Kizarvexis wrote:-snip-"Send a drone to check out the freighter." "Again? Boring." "Oh, look. Another freighter." After awhile, dropping the drone, using it and then recovery and refurbish it. Costs money for maintenance and spare parts. If you don't run into a warship over and over, then you would get tired of doing that. Keeping it up takes discipline and even military units have to work to keep that discipline. -snip-
True, but the moment you catch a trolling warship or two over a few weeks (accounting for travel time to another system after running away from the first), I'd imagine a pirate crew would put up with a pirate skipper's foible of verifying every single target. Especially if the pirate skip in question eats the share of the recon drone/bullet.
Somewhere in uh, think it was HH3, or HH4, we get an explaination of how the SKM military broke down prize money, in relation to buying in captured vessels. If pirates operate anywhere near the same, the captain likely gets a considerably larger cut. Although probably at the risk of operating more like a Star Trek Klingon vessel, he's likely to be looking over his shoulder alot, in case of mutiny.
Thinking hard on it though, it's also quite likely pirate crews, regardless of how many warships you detected by insisting on the probe, would have the attitude of "well when was the last warship you helped us evade?"
saber964 wrote:-snip-
Also where are you going to replace your consumables like missile reloads, reactor mass, food, spare parts ect, ect. What if your pirates ship need repairs after successfully fighting off a navy ship and you suffer damage that requires a shipyard to repair. Do you think a shipyard in not going to over charge you, for your repairs.
You'd expend anywhere from one to perhaps five missiles on merchants, as warning shots, that seems to be fairly standard doctrine from all the anti-pirate patrols we read.
For other consumables, other than food & water, your primary consumption would just be reactor mass, like any other hyper ship. Repairs would also become incredibly rarely needed, because you can escape most fights before they even start.
It's arguable that for all the potential expenses and services you'd need to have available without rd's, would be saved by using them.
So it's almost a balance of smart versus stupid. Smarter pirates might use rds (assuming they even have them, this would really have to be something asked to Weber himself), the stupid pirates are the ones we get to read about who don't rely on anything except impeller strength & acceleration.
