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

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.

Ok, onto the prime discussion, it seems a big thing, not just in Silesia but elsewhere for piracy to happen. And that trolling warships lure in pirates with apparently alarming ease, yet according to the books, pirates have fairly good survival instincts (Honor Among Enemies, a briefing of Captain Honor Harrington, with Rafe Cardones, Alice Truman, and a few others about Honors "Catch and release, once only then shoot em" policy.)

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.

Typical doctrine basically consists of loafing about just outside the hyper limit of a system, particularly near where a grav-wave intersects the system. Merchies like riding waves into systems for lower wear and tear, so it's more likely to happen.

After a potential prize comes over the hyper limit, the pirate will light off their drive and chase the merchy, until they are noticed and then fire off a warning missile. Merchy might spend some time dodging (as this is exactly what every Naval unit, whether RMN, PNS, RHN, IAN seem to do) before obeying.

It's at the stage of running down the prize that an RD would be used, your potential prize is running a nice easy course, you could send the RD in ballistic, to save impeller time, and get an actual graphic camera shot of your target. If you see hammerheads, reverse course, GTFO. If no hammerheads, proceed with intercept.

Unless, somewhere buried in these forums, is a cost analysis of operation of even ultra old recon drones, pre-Ghost Rider, requires, that even having an RD work for as little as 4-6 hours is so high no pirate ever seems to use one.

Somtaaw wrote: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....

Unless, somewhere buried in these forums, is a cost analysis of operation of even ultra old recon drones, pre-Ghost Rider, requires, that even having an RD work for as little as 4-6 hours is so high no pirate ever seems to use one.

It's a speculation, but I'm pretty sure it's exactly that at work. Pirates' survival instincts work mostly by not getting that close to a warship anyway.

Choice of hunting ground comes first - go where you've reason to think freighters will be and warships won't. That's very likely to come from inside information: freighter route plans or schedules, warship patrol schedules, bribed naval officers, etc. They're not operating in an intelligence vacuum or as outside humanity. And any of that is going to be cheaper to get than a recon drone.

Sheer luck - luck that they can statistically count on, really - helps too. There are lots of freighters; there are few warships. If it's acting like a freighter, chances are it's a freighter. If it's acting like a warship, heck, the chances that it is a freighter trying to make you think it's a warship and go away may well be better than that it is a warship. The shipboard sensors of a typical pirate ship are crappy, so it's going to be a tactical judgment based on what a naval officer would regard as too limited information.

And if the shipboard sensors tend to be crappy, the recon drone capacity is likely to be so much worse. It may not have the stealth to get in close and get a good look without the wedge being put in the way. It may not be all that informative if it does. It may not be recoverable - heck, if it has to get close enough for a good enough look, spinning the wedge into it may destroy it. And you'll only get data back from it at light speed.

And "pretty good" survival instincts have to be taken in context. These are people who take to a criminal, violent profession, among other criminal, violent people, depending for their living on selling to treacherous people outside the law's protection goods stolen from people who will, if they can, kill you, who are sometimes protected by far more effectively violent people, usually based on information sold to you by other treacherous people who, again, can screw you with nothing but you to deter them and may in fact be part of a sting operation to get you. Pirates ARE willing to accept some chances of ending up dead, and they do.

For the drone wedge, thats why I figured even ballistic courses (ballistic means no wedge, which means hard to detect without going active sensors)

Alot of times in the books, the pirates seem to always come in from above, pop off an RD that comes in ballistic, maybe even two and offset them by 90 degrees so no matter how the "merchy" rolls ship, one of the RD's is going to see past the wedge and get a hull shot.

Even with light speed telemetry, the RD would give more than enough warning to reverse course immediately, or alter course by 90 degrees and start adding lateral movement to crab away before even a low base speed warship can force action.


I guess I'm just a little boggled that nearly every single book that involves Silesia, involves at least one (or more, Honor Among Enemies features closer to 5) "freighters" trolling in pirates. With one exception of the intercept with, at the time, Commander Elvis Santino who screwed the pooch and "cleared the wedge" on a pirate, not one interception smells a rat and (tries to) run away.

I would agree that it seems like a privateer ought to be smart enough and well enough equipped to carry drones and use them, I suspect that the reason very few pirates would is "those thing's ain't cheap" (CL-56 drone shell in OBS cost hundreds of millions of Manticoran dollars, recovering a couple of them used in an Exercise in Short Victorious War saved millions for the RMN), plus the fact IIRC [and no idea which book I would look up the info in...] that at least Solarian RD's are fairly easy for an RMN warship to spot and maneuver against (still hiding behind a wedge), short legged and tend to have extremely short shelf lives, seems like it was minutes or at most a few hours. So deploying drones would raise costs immensely versus popping off a single warning shot to say "pull over".

When the Peeps went commerce raiding in Silesia in Honor Among Enemies, they started taking out Manticoran freighters in job lots, as they were obviously VERY willing to use RD(s) copiously.

SharkHunter wrote:I would agree that it seems like a privateer ought to be smart enough and well enough equipped to carry drones and use them, I suspect that the reason very few pirates would is "those thing's ain't cheap" (CL-56 drone shell in OBS cost hundreds of millions of Manticoran dollars, recovering a couple of them used in an Exercise in Short Victorious War saved millions for the RMN), plus the fact IIRC [and no idea which book I would look up the info in...] that at least Solarian RD's are fairly easy for an RMN warship to spot and maneuver against (still hiding behind a wedge), short legged and tend to have extremely short shelf lives, seems like it was minutes or at most a few hours. So deploying drones would raise costs immensely versus popping off a single warning shot to say "pull over".

When the Peeps went commerce raiding in Silesia in Honor Among Enemies, they started taking out Manticoran freighters in job lots, as they were obviously VERY willing to use RD(s) copiously.

Those are some good points, I know the RD's are expensive. But hell, at the bare minimum for "freighter checking" all you need is something with a few gyro's to align, some optic camera's, and a comm unit to send information back to the mothership. Perhaps a few radar units to get a hull mapping, but that would be considered extra, as you're really only using the RD to get visual around the wedge to check for hammerhead's. Naval combat units have them, and merchies do not.

Pop a few of those camera units out your chaser missile launchers, without a wedge they're totally ballistic, gyros align it, camera gets some pictures, and it all gets sent back to the pirate. Hammerheads spotted = break off.

Something that cheap would cost merely in the thousands, one million tops, could be carried by the dozens, and easily assembled to produce more.

Somtaaw wrote:Something that cheap would cost merely in the thousands, one million tops, could be carried by the dozens, and easily assembled to produce more.

How easily manufactured would it be though? If it's something your average geek could knock out at home with a 3D printer then yeah it's possible, but it if needs a vaguely decent manufacturing plant then problems start to creep in. Because someone like the RMN will end up capturing some, and then they're going to start trying to trace it back to where it came from.

Do you want to be the person explaining to the RMN why your cheap-ass recon drone for pirates is in fact something else entirely and you've never knowingly sold any to pirates?

PalmerSperry wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:Something that cheap would cost merely in the thousands, one million tops, could be carried by the dozens, and easily assembled to produce more.

How easily manufactured would it be though? If it's something your average geek could knock out at home with a 3D printer then yeah it's possible, but it if needs a vaguely decent manufacturing plant then problems start to creep in. Because someone like the RMN will end up capturing some, and then they're going to start trying to trace it back to where it came from.

Do you want to be the person explaining to the RMN why your cheap-ass recon drone for pirates is in fact something else entirely and you've never knowingly sold any to pirates?

Some how I don't think anything with impellers is going to be produced cheaply, anywhere, anyhow, and nothing else is fast enough to be useful.

Somtaaw wrote: I guess I'm just a little boggled that nearly every single book that involves Silesia, involves at least one (or more, Honor Among Enemies features closer to 5) "freighters" trolling in pirates. With one exception of the intercept with, at the time, Commander Elvis Santino who screwed the pooch and "cleared the wedge" on a pirate, not one interception smells a rat and (tries to) run away.

There's some selection bias. 'Pirate eyes target; opts not to attack' could be the norm, but it's a shaggy-dog story which doesn't add to the plot. Unless you can make it about a character, as in the Santino incident.

Bill Woods wrote:

Somtaaw wrote: I guess I'm just a little boggled that nearly every single book that involves Silesia, involves at least one (or more, Honor Among Enemies features closer to 5) "freighters" trolling in pirates. With one exception of the intercept with, at the time, Commander Elvis Santino who screwed the pooch and "cleared the wedge" on a pirate, not one interception smells a rat and (tries to) run away.

There's some selection bias. 'Pirate eyes target; opts not to attack' could be the norm, but it's a shaggy-dog story which doesn't add to the plot. Unless you can make it about a character, as in the Santino incident.

Right, that selection bias deserves emphasizing.

In the books, you're seeing warships drawing in pirates. You're not seeing anything representative about pirate or freighter living.

Every time a pirate approaches what turns out to be a warship faking being a freighter, the pirate would've done better to be a lot more cautious. Or a dentist far away. Or both! But most of the time, what a pirate approaches that looks like a freighter is a freighter. That's most of what is out there, after all. For that matter, if it's looking like a warship, odds are it's still a freighter, trying to make you run off instead of come take it.

But that's not what we're seeing, because we're seeing examples drawn from (1) warship activities, and (2) warship activities worth writing about for entertainment. Little or nothing useful about pirate ecology can be drawn from these. It's like wondering why these people ever go outside, when the only people you are interviewing are lightning strike survivors.

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?