Louis R wrote: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...
Oh agreed, I'm definitely understating the build requirements for even a simplistic RD, but it does get easier after the first ghetto drone is built. But to address your main points, which sort of tie into the ghetto drone.
Currently the US Armed Forces deploy Predator UAV's for recon (and one could argue also attack, since its rumoured they do have some Anti-Tank TOW missiles on some Predators). These Predator UAV's are some of the most modern reconnaisance tools on Earth that are known of, we can equate Predator drones (unarmed) as Ghost Rider drones, and the armed Preds as Mistletoe Ghost Rider drones.
But for basic reconnaisance, even a kid with a cheap (relatively of course) remote control airplane or helicopter can do limited scouting. Your example of the Somalia pirates, if they had a few RC planes/choppers with a camera, they could check to see if a freigher had anyone walking around, prior to getting close enough for the freighter crews to spot them. Outside of the military, most people don't think to look
up while supposedly pulling guard duty.
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.
"I'm not certain how many probes we have in stores, Ma'am, but I am certain you're right about our inability to achieve complete coverage even if we can—I mean, even after we have fitted them all with station-keeping drives." He was speaking stiffly, and he knew it, but he was also contributing to the solution of a problem for the first time since Harrington had come on never intended for long-term deployment like this. But we might be able to increase their effective time on station by setting them for burst activation. They've got a passive detection range of just over twenty light-minutes against an active impeller drive. If they're on the ten-light-minute shell, they'll have a reach of over half a light-hour from the primary—call it forty minutes' flight time."
"If we set them to come up for, say, thirty seconds every half-hour, they should detect any incoming vessel under power in normal-space at least twenty light-minutes out. That should give us sufficient time to respond, and at the same time increase their endurance by a factor of sixty."
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?
