The Economics of Piracy

cthia wrote:I fully expect that BCs will become synonymous pirate platforms - "the right tool for the fool?" Pirate ships have to be fast. I imagine they do lots of illicit goods running. (Reminiscent of the prohibition era, guns and alcohol.)

I'd like to add that milgrade sensors should be a high priority as well.

The problem is a good quality BC is probably a dozen times more expensive to acquire, operate, and supply than a frigate. But it's not a dozen of times more likely to capture prey; as it can still only be in one place at one time, plus it's got lower accel than the frigate.
Yes, it could crush an armed merchant ship that could wreck the frigate. But pirates don't make money by turning their targets into scrap - they don't have the volume or time to transfer bulk cargo onto their own ship so they need to capture merchant ships in operable condition. Plus of course the merchant ship is worth a pretty hefty chunk of change on its own.
So much greater expense, but not any great likelihood of greater income.

Pirates just don't bump into warships often enough for survivability to economically trump coverage. So multiple light units are just more cost effective, even if the single heavy unit is more likely to survive the fairly rare case when an escort is encountered.

Heck with a BC or two it'd be far lower risk to go play warlord and flat out take over some out of the way system than to go try and run down ships carrying ultia high-value goods.


Now commerce raiding is a different matter, because that's capturing or destroying merchants solely to deny their supplies and economic benefit to your enemy. It's not a profit making operating, so fielding forces heavy enough to take on an escorted convoy makes some sense there.

Duckk wrote:

I fully expect that BCs will become synonymous pirate platforms - "the right tool for the fool?" Pirate ships have to be fast. I imagine they do lots of illicit goods running. (Reminiscent of the prohibition era, guns and alcohol.)

That's like saying the synonymous pirate vessel today is a Somali pirate running an old Spruance-class guided missile destroyer. That's a ridiculous amount of ship for your run of the mill pirate. You're paying for both a large crew - thus, splitting the booty into smaller shares - and the increased maintenance costs. I can't think of any time a genuine pirate (as opposed to a state sanctioned privateer or covert cat's paw) has run a BC in the Honorverse. There's no way that a battlecruiser would become "synonymous" with piracy.

Perhaps that was a stretch. But my thoughts aren't directed towards run of the mill pirates.

My entire point is that I can't understand why there hasn't been a pirate genus of crab that has clawed his way out of the barrel, to the top. And has become a not so run of the mill pirate. Where do pirates get the motivation to exist if there aren't any tales of filthy riches instead of just riches of filth?

And my point is that a BC would become synonymous with the must have "tool for the fool" within the pirate world. Whether it is ever attained or not - except by a few. I'm willing to bet that there's a good chance that some BCs exist on the black market for three reasons...

1. Corruption.
2. CORRUPTion.
3. Corrupt tion.

Yay or nay, I'm pretty certain that there are pirates smart enough to formulate "We gotta get our hands on a BC!"

If I were that rare breed of a quite successful pirate Captain, I'd rather fly my flag aboard an anonymously acquired BC of classified origins, amongst my own Harrington-like circle of friends.

Again, for the same reasons you don't see Somali pirates in guided missile destroyers. Successful pirates don't stick out. Navies get very twitchy when they hear battlecruisers are running around, and they'll take great pains to stomp the threat. Hell, not even the Silesians were crazy enough to sell off their battlecruisers, even though they sold pretty much everything else.

cthia wrote:Yay or nay, I'm pretty certain that there are pirates smart enough to formulate "We gotta get our hands on a BC!"

Back in the old days, going pirate was called "going on the account". Because successful piracy cannot happen without real good accounting, and any pirate smart enough to actually be good at pirating knows that the overhead of running something bigger than light Cruiser means that profits go away quite quickly.

So nay. No pirate is stupid enough to try to get his hands on a BC, unless their ambitions are going away from pirating and into taking over planets.

That said, there's something that bugs me about interstellar piracy in the Honorverse. The preferred prey are freighters carrying millions of tons of cargo; each load equivalent to the yearly output of some minor country like, say, Germany or Japan. That's an unbelievable amount of stuff for a shadow economy to swallow and distribute; the proceeds from one successful raid should be enough to set the crew of the raider up for life.

Charlie Stross had an interesting take on this in Neptune's Brood. In an environment where news travels only as fast as the fastest ship, it is possible to find ways of exploiting the modus operandi of pirates (you know, the whole boarding thing) without the headaches of having to distribute loads of stolen cargo.
What you do instead is auditing. You still stop and search cargo vessels, but instead of taking all their stuff, you simply figure out what they're carrying. That information can then be used for market speculation at the cargo's destination. Not as exciting as the piracy honorverse pirates are described as doing, but certainly much safer.

Duckk wrote:Again, for the same reasons you don't see Somali pirates in guided missile destroyers. Successful pirates don't stick out. Navies get very twitchy when they hear battlecruisers are running around, and they'll take great pains to stomp the threat. Hell, not even the Silesians were crazy enough to sell off their battlecruisers, even though they sold pretty much everything else.

You do know that's not a fair comparison, don't you? A Somali pirate under those circumstances would stick out like the Space Needle in a haystack. A BC under those conditions would stick out like a regular needle in space.

I'm talking about that very rare breed of Preston of the Chaseways. Who has acquired tactics and strategy from classified sources. He knows how to best use a BC in support of piracy. Even if just her sensor suite is the most utilized. I suspect, that the mettle of pirate that sails aboard a BC also has a couple of DDs. He's rolling in the dough. But you can best believe that this brand of pirate doesn't waste the talents of his BC. Especially when he's receiving detailed travel itinerary and predetermined payoff. Deploy drones about your attack area, that reports to your pre-positioned BC. I imagine that with a BC you can run down a few scatterers.

This Preston also kills to keep his secret. No survivors. He has his drones prepositioned telling him that there is no other ship in sensor range to see what is about to happen.



Also remember, this is a dashing Preston of the Chaseways. A cross between Blackbeard, Harrington and 007. He doesn't care about the operating cost of a BC. Hell, he doesn't care about the BC. The scores this pirate goes after can pay for a BC in petty celebration after-party money. How much can an aging BC cost, acquired for a single mission against this kind of score.

There should be some legendary, just plain smart, accomplished, seasoned, well trained resourceful pirates out there. Whose long since gotten rich, and are now pirating as an addiction, or a favor. Or for an opportunity that can't be passed.

There's gotta be at least a few successful pirates that are stealing the universe blind. After all, its a large universe.

By the way, if you have a BC, and the correct info, you can take military secrets away from assholes like Young and Santino. You wouldn't care to lose all of your ships, as long as you bring home the booty.




For foreigners:

Space Needle
http://cdn.rentalhomes.com/blog/wp-cont ... 24x674.jpg

http://www.spaceneedle.com/home/


Needle in a haystack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Needle_in_a_haystack

.

Also a lot of piracy in Silesia and similar places is similar to piracy in the 21st centaury.

It's more about the ransom than actually getting your hands on the sweet loot in the holds. This is mentioned explicitly in Honor amongst enemies when they talk about ransoms for the crew of Hauptman's captured by Warneck's loonies. Really high value cargos will be retrieved by whatever means necessary, in RL they ransomed the ship full of T72s the pirates captured but do you really think that the major governments were ever going to let them keep/sell those tanks?

I have to agree with Duck that the chance of anything bigger than a DD is out of the question, again if you look at things in real life the typical pirate vessel is a rubber dingy with some yahoos armed with AK's and RPG's with a mother ship which is a dilapidated light fishing vessel. This is not a high tech outfit and the equivalent in most Honorverse backwater locations is a minimally armed Frigate.

Another vote that there's no simply no reason for a pirate to be in anything more than the smallest ship he can field.

Smaller ships will actually capture more loot than big ones--because they're faster. This means their prey is less likely to be able to make it to safety before being run down.

Furthermore, the proper behavior of any pirate upon encountering an armed vessel is to run away. Engagements will be at short range, they'll take damage and they'll almost certainly render the target worthless--thus a \
"successful" engagement means expended weapons and likely battle damage for no return. Running is the better deal.

Furthermore, suppose you had a BC that could smash the DD on piracy patrol--think you would get away with it?? Much more likely you would find a bunch of BBs or higher hunting you. Shooting at the law is a desperation move, those who do it rarely survive long.

Duckk wrote:Again, for the same reasons you don't see Somali pirates in guided missile destroyers. Successful pirates don't stick out. Navies get very twitchy when they hear battlecruisers are running around, and they'll take great pains to stomp the threat. Hell, not even the Silesians were crazy enough to sell off their battlecruisers, even though they sold pretty much everything else.

Case in point House of Steel elaborates on Saganami's final battle; and it's aftermath.
Manpower supported stupidly overpowered "pirates" to prey on Manticoran shipping in Silesia, culminating with the Battle of Carson where Saganami's BC flagship fought to the death against superior odds to defend the convoy he was escorting.

"The SKM’s response to the Battle of Carson, unfortunately for the Silesians (and Manpower), was the exact opposite of the one they had anticipated." Using BCs drew an entire squadron of front line Battleships to hunt them and their bases down, then afterwards an additional 2 divisions of dreadnaughts to make a "courtesy call" on the Silesian government.

In terms of getting rich, or accomplishing Manpower's secret goals, using BCs was very counter productive..

First make a clear distinction between a pirate and a privateer. The privateer has at least a fig leaf of legitimacy in acting as a warship by haveing a letter of marc from a government and can claim- probably with difficulty depending who catches him- he is not a pirate. Somebody, somewhere, with nominally sovereign authority has granted the letter of marc. Best used against ships of the nation with which the issuer is already at war or allies of the same enemy. If you take (under you letter presuming you can take them) a ship of someone with whom the issuer is NOT at war -and get caught- you have a problem.

Classic pirates are generaly just in it for the money. They also are not going to try and take anything that can even fight back or, if it can fight a little bit, something that they can convince that the choice is surrender or death.

Pirates have a couple of big needs that have to be met for them to be successful beyond taking helpless merchant ships etc. You need a place to sell what you capture. That would be anything on the ship and the ship itself. Crippleing a 4megaton freighter really sucks because if you can only sell what you can take away from a ship that isn't going to move in hyperspace without massive repairs, you aren't going to get much in cargo or scavenged components to sell. There is, of course the problem of the captured crew who are going to be a liability unless you can keep them from being able to lead others back to you IF you ransom them.

This is what made Silesia so profitable for pirates. They had markets from both ships and cargo. They also had places where they could get repairs and maintenance done with little in the way of questions about either any damage or about any "odd" or unusual equipment. Not every ship is like Pirates's Bane in that it had purpose built weapons AND the Capt/Owner had paperwork as a legitimate armed merchant sanctioned for operation. He might not be able to go everywhere because he was armed BUT with clean history AND paperwork he could go most places, at least far enough in-systems to be able to load and unload cargo.

Pirates very much need people who can and will fence the goods etc they need to sell. Fences get paid for this by giving low prices for the goods they receive since 1) they have large risks, 2) they have to find buyers who will both not look too closely at the source of the goods and they have to avoid selling to people who can't also pass along the good without raising questions. 3) getting too demanding of a fence could result in running into a small accident.
There is also the need to keep your weapons functional. Replacing missiles spent intimidating prey gets dam expensive. There are dam few "rockets are us" surplus stores for that kind of thing and the weapons come at a premium. Same for keeping energy systems up to snuff.

You also have a challange if you piss off the wrong people who run the systems you frequent by not providing them with enough in "fees" to look the other way or for helping you. Then there is the chance that somebody is going to have a real warship and stop you "just because" you are in the wrong place and board you for an inspection or search. At one point, if I recall correctly, the British Navy would treat as a pirate any ship which had the marks on a deck from using naval guns (unless they had the proper papers) even if there were no longer any guns there - you could have deep sixed them to get rid of the evidence

Why would a pirate need anything bigger than a destroyer? Their entire reason for existence is to pray on a helpless victim rather than fight it out with an actual warship. Their needs extend to a weapon that can force a merchantmen to stop and let them board, engaging in any sort of combat is bad business because a naval ship can go back to port and be repaired and the crew brought to 100%, a pirate most likely does not have that capability unless they have a repair ship that Andre Warnecke had and even that is limited in capability. Any combat no matter how trivial runs the risk of damage and thus costly repairs and need to get new crewmembers. There is little reward for defeating a warship other than maybe capturing more modern and capable wreck than the one you are left with.

As for successful pirates? There may be a few and there may very well be many who simply retired to a quiet life somewhere far from their hunting grounds and/or became "respectable" politicians who organize piracy in their immediate area or nationwide.


We hear of the brutal and failed pirates but just because most of the stories revolve around failure and/or sloppy maintained vessels does not mean all pirates are equally sloppy with equally sloppy and poorly maintained ships. We just have less of a reason to hear about once that got rich and went to live in some safe planet far from their hunting grounds.