SD as pirate vessel

akira.taylor wrote:

svenhauke wrote:totally agree not for long...

but for a short time they have real power

remember 15 000 SD sold as scrap metal ...

But as soon as an actual fleet hears about you, they are going to send warships to deal with you - a Battle Squadron, not some piddling cruisers. Then, they are going to crush your little nation. Since you are a really scary pirate, and need to be stopped before you get even more powerful. Remember the comment about Theisman making sure no SDs got away during the Havenite Civil War - plenty of lighter ships did (like the whole People's Navy in Exile), but he hunted down and destroyed the SDs (and DNs and BBs, I think - my recollection is nothing heavier than battlecruisers, if that, got away to play pirate).

Judging by http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/si ... gton/106/1 the RHN no longer had BB's by the Second Havenite War, and I don't believe StateSec ever claimed any - not as zippy or sexy as battlecruisers, not as terrifying at SD's.

Very few DN's were still in Havenite service then either, and I don't think StateSec ever took any of those either, likely for the same reasons.

DN's were never as common for Haven as they were for Manticore. Each navy needed more capital ships than they could afford SD's. The RMN went for almost-an-SD DN's, and didn't care for the results in the course of the First Havenite War. The PHN went for more-than-a-BC BB's, did fine with them for rear-area security, but kept losing them when they tried to or had to use them in place of real wallers.

So, what Theisman had to keep track of from rebels for capital ships was almost entirely, perhaps exactly, superdreadnoughts only. (Although I'm sure he'd've also been plenty interested in minimizing the escape of BC's too.)

I think the SLN Reserve has a very small number (proportionately) of BB's and DN's unlikely to be reactivated ever. Mind, many of their SD's are DN sized by Haven Sector standards. I suspect the DN/SD class distinction evolved over time and the SLN standard may lag behind the rest of the galaxy.

svenhauke wrote:theres still 15 000 SD in the reserve of the solarian navy

obsolete and useless

so they will be sold to the brakers

how many will end up in the hands of crazy people, tyrants and pirates ?

considering the corruption of the solarian league id expect as many as people are interested in

they may be obsolete but they are SD´s

what is going to happen ?

No pirate in his right mind would want anything that big.
Piracy is a business. The business is chasing down honest folks and robbing them. It all revolves around money. You have to make money to feed and pay the crew, have weapons available to fight your ship and keep it maintained well enough to move and fight at a moment's notice. Yes, you can supplement those requirements through using items from the loot you take from prizes but you may not consistently get everything you need from your captures, so having some hard currency available for repairs or parts is necessary, too.


It's too slow to chase anything down.

To make money as a pirate, you have to be taking prizes. If you have a big crew, you have to take a LOT of prizes or very rich ones- preferably both. Slow ships don't take prizes because those potential victims can just run away. no prizes, no money. No money means an angry crew. Angry crews mean a very short captaincy.

It takes too much crew.

If Honorverse pirates are like 17th, 18th and 19th Century pirates on Earth, the way a prize is split up is written in the articles everyone signs when they come aboard. The Captain gets a cut, the officers get smaller ones, the NCO's split a cretain percentage and the rest is divided up between the crew. The bigger the crew, the smaller each individual share ends up. The smaller the shares are, the quicker the crew decides that a new captain may be a good idea because they aren't making enough money with the current one. Such 'crew restructurings' are usually rather permanent- as in permanently dead- in nature.

It costs too much to operate.

Even pirates have expenses. If you are using all or almost all of the usable stores you capture instead of selling them for cash, you are losing money. Money you need to pay the crew to keep them happy.

Having one makes you the #1 target in every navy's shooting gallery.

Naval types tend to frown on civilian types running around with their own personal warships ships- much less capital warships- as a general rule. Once said civilians decide to start taking prizes with said warships, those naval types, without fail, will decide to take that shiny warship away if for no other reason than because of they don't like the competition. The whole 'I've got an SD, what can they do to me?" theory doesn't cut it either. They have trained crews that fight their ships for a living. A pirate isn't going to have that kind of time and money to invest in training a crew to naval standards.

Even if you take a prize, who are you going to sell your loot to when every government in the sector is out looking for you? Fences aren't going to want to deal with you because of the attention. Attention on you will lead the authorities to them and they can't do business with the that kind of heat. Besides, both sides are crooks and one of them has insurmountable firepower at their fingertips. Would you want to do business with them?

Oh I don't know, maybe the SL, will start handing out refurbished SD's like lollipops at the dentist office after a check up...

The objections to using SDs as pirate vessels are valid.

But I can see a local warlord putting together a vest pocket empire being interested in them along with screening elements if his pockets are deep enough to set up proper maintainence at the same time. As long as he didn't have to face Haven sector hardware, there are still sectors of the galaxy where he could cut a pretty wide swath with, say, a squadron os Scientists.

Don

n7axw wrote:The objections to using SDs as pirate vessels are valid.

But I can see a local warlord putting together a vest pocket empire being interested in them along with screening elements if his pockets are deep enough to set up proper maintainence at the same time. As long as he didn't have to face Haven sector hardware, there are still sectors of the galaxy where he could cut a pretty wide swath with, say, a squadron os Scientists.

Don

Quite possibly; the local warlord can leverage the output and manpower of at least one entire planet to keep the SDs manned and operational. So he doesn't have to make them directly pay their own way through capturing ships. (But potentially may make them pay their way through capturing planets )

You'd still need a decent shipyard if you're going to keep them going long, but that's not an insurmountable obstacle for every warlord.

when i was thinking of pirates and SD i was thinking more of raiding planets then raiding ships

an sd with 1-2 smaller ships in a fleet would be better then defensive fleets of most single star systems

so take the planet and all its wealth, disapear again, its a big universe


and fences don t care who sells what

svenhauke wrote:when i was thinking of pirates and SD i was thinking more of raiding planets then raiding ships

an sd with 1-2 smaller ships in a fleet would be better then defensive fleets of most single star systems

so take the planet and all its wealth, disapear again, its a big universe


and fences don t care who sells what

Sure, you can overpower most defensive forces.

But you're going to take incremental damage, which you need to repair. Which means SD-capable shipyards. Which means infrastructure for such a thing. Which means a planet of your own.

Which means that, as soon as word gets out about what you're doing, someone with an actual fleet will come over and smack you back into the stone age in an hour or so.

(And this is before the "raid a planet" thing, which is even less cost-effective than regular raiding due to the time you will need to spend deep inside a grav well doing nothing but cycling cargo shuttles)

The E wrote:

svenhauke wrote:when i was thinking of pirates and SD i was thinking more of raiding planets then raiding ships

an sd with 1-2 smaller ships in a fleet would be better then defensive fleets of most single star systems

so take the planet and all its wealth, disapear again, its a big universe


and fences don t care who sells what

Sure, you can overpower most defensive forces.

But you're going to take incremental damage, which you need to repair. Which means SD-capable shipyards. Which means infrastructure for such a thing. Which means a planet of your own.

Which means that, as soon as word gets out about what you're doing, someone with an actual fleet will come over and smack you back into the stone age in an hour or so.

(And this is before the "raid a planet" thing, which is even less cost-effective than regular raiding due to the time you will need to spend deep inside a grav well doing nothing but cycling cargo shuttles)

They would have to find you first. The galaxy is a BIG place.

But in the main, I agree with your point.

Don

Relax wrote:Oh I don't know, maybe the SL, will start handing out refurbished SD's like lollipops at the dentist office after a check up...

Please don't help others associate starships as something they put in their mouths. It's bad enough when the authors have the heroes pick their teeth with'em.

svenhauke wrote:totally agree not for long...

but for a short time they have real power

remember 15 000 SD sold as scrap metal ...

akira.taylor wrote:But as soon as an actual fleet hears about you, they are going to send warships to deal with you - a Battle Squadron, not some piddling cruisers. Then, they are going to crush your little nation. Since you are a really scary pirate, and need to be stopped before you get even more powerful. Remember the comment about Theisman making sure no SDs got away during the Havenite Civil War - plenty of lighter ships did (like the whole People's Navy in Exile), but he hunted down and destroyed the SDs (and DNs and BBs, I think - my recollection is nothing heavier than battlecruisers, if that, got away to play pirate).

JeffEngel wrote:Judging by http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/si ... gton/106/1 the RHN no longer had BB's by the Second Havenite War, and I don't believe StateSec ever claimed any - not as zippy or sexy as battlecruisers, not as terrifying at SD's.

Very few DN's were still in Havenite service then either, and I don't think StateSec ever took any of those either, likely for the same reasons.

DN's were never as common for Haven as they were for Manticore. Each navy needed more capital ships than they could afford SD's. The RMN went for almost-an-SD DN's, and didn't care for the results in the course of the First Havenite War. The PHN went for more-than-a-BC BB's, did fine with them for rear-area security, but kept losing them when they tried to or had to use them in place of real wallers.

So, what Theisman had to keep track of from rebels for capital ships was almost entirely, perhaps exactly, superdreadnoughts only. (Although I'm sure he'd've also been plenty interested in minimizing the escape of BC's too.)

I think the SLN Reserve has a very small number (proportionately) of BB's and DN's unlikely to be reactivated ever. Mind, many of their SD's are DN sized by Haven Sector standards. I suspect the DN/SD class distinction evolved over time and the SLN standard may lag behind the rest of the galaxy.

Yeah, StateSec only had SDs, because they were egomaniacs, and threatening the Navy (not fighting a war). However, not every ship that went rogue was StateSec - some were former Navy. There were some battleships around (Honor kills one in the Second War), though not many.

Theisman tried to keep any ships from going rogue, but knew he couldn't - too many ships he didn't control, too many fires to stomp on. So, make absolutely sure no SDs get away, and accept that lighter units aren't nearly the threat to random systems that the SDs are.

As for the SLN reserve - it doesn't include any battleships, and I think they long ago scraped the dreadnaughts. We know they haven't built dreadnaughts in centuries, and I think Weber said they scraped the ones they had, but I could be wrong.

Vince wrote:Some PRN BCs did manage to get away to play pirate. When SLN Rear Admiral Rozsack (Frontier Fleet) went up against the Mesan Alignment backed PRN in Exile, (Torch of Freedom), he went for the BCs as primary targets. Although ten of the BCs were ex-SLN Indefatigables (provided by the Mesan Alignment using Mesa and Manpower as fronts), there were four PRN Warlord-class BCs as well as eight Mars-class heavy cruisers and the smaller vessels (light cruisers and destroyers).

I couldn't remember if there were PRN BCs, or just SLN. I'm really not surprised some got away (too many fires, not enough boots to stomp on them).