The Economics of Piracy

Silverwall wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:So the Verge had armed freighters already floating about, and the Verge is the very edge of Solarian influence. Silesia must be absolutely rotten with armed freighters, regardless of the prior Silesian stance of 'no-privately armed ships'


Which makes Manticore pretty damn brave, or pretty damn stupid to be operating unarmed freighters, when the pirates in Silesia had already crept into commonly being large frigate and light cruiser ranges without batting eyelashes.

There is no evidence of armed freighters being common anywhere. The Solly designs such as the dromadary are not only unarmed and so unconcerned by the possibility of damage that they are spinal mounts with core components in highly exposed by easy to maintain locations. Manty and Andy freighters are not armed as is shown by various events in silesia but do design ships to take light battle damage with a central core design.

Weird Harold wrote:

Shadow of Saganami
Chapter Forty wrote:She was also armed, although no one in his right mind—and certainly not Duan Binyan—would ever confuse her with a warship. She didn't make any effort to pretend she wasn't armed, although her official papers significantly understated the power of the two lasers she mounted in each broadside and her engineering log always showed that at least one of them was down for lack of spare parts. The Verge could be a dangerous place, and probably ten or fifteen percent of the merchies which plied it were armed, after a fashion, at least. The "inoperable" broadside mount was simply part of Marianne's down-at-the-heels masquerade, and half her point defense clusters and counter-missiles tubes were concealed behind jettisonable plating, again in keeping with her pretense of parsimonious owners.

All in all, Marianne was capable of holding her own against any pirate she was likely to meet. She could even encounter a light warship—a destroyer, say—from one of the podunk navies out here with a more than even chance of success. And on at least two occasions, Marianne herself had turned "pirate" for specific operations. On the other hand, any modern warship would turn her into so much drifting debris in short order. Which was the reason Duan and his crew vastly preferred to depend upon stealth and guile.

Silverwall wrote:Somtaaw, your too quick for me. I posted fast then realised the mistake and went to edit it but got caught up trying to estimate the real value of a BC and got delayed an hour before I fixed the error.

BTW my estimated cost of a new BC is actually a minimum of 2.75 billion manty dollars.

Somtaaw wrote:So the Verge had armed freighters already floating about, and the Verge is the very edge of Solarian influence. Silesia must be absolutely rotten with armed freighters, regardless of the prior Silesian stance of 'no-privately armed ships'


Which makes Manticore pretty damn brave, or pretty damn stupid to be operating unarmed freighters, when the pirates in Silesia had already crept into commonly being large frigate and light cruiser ranges without batting eyelashes.

The E wrote:

cthia wrote:I'm not rejecting the more practical use of eight frigates. I'm just saying that if a capable captain & crew found itself with the possibility of purchasing a BC, that they wouldn't pass it up. Or may even go out to explicitly acquire one to execute the big score, which would render the BC as a use once get away vehicle. Then you destroy it in a back alley of space if you can't sell it to a chop shop.

No, they wouldn't, because any pirate with the ability to acquire heavy firepower knows it would be stupid for him to do so (unless he has backing by some major power like Frontier Fleet).

Again. Nice posts. Everyone. Thanks for the guestimates munroburton. There I go thinking that a BC costs lots more. But an aging BC would have to be worth what, half that? If sold at cost, or within the "good ol' boy network."

His estimates are based on false assumptions though. 400 Million Dollars is what the RMN would pay to buy these ships into service, not what Haven paid to build them.

By comparison. A modern day cargo ship can carry a maximum of 169M DWT. High-grade marijuana sells for $6,000 lb. If a container ship shipped loaded with high grade weed. That would be 169T X 2204.62lb X $6000 = a shipment valued at
$2,235,484,680. Surely there are many items in the Honorverse shipping lanes with values significantly higher than Old Earth pot. Even if it is high-grade weed. And an Honorverse freighter can carry just how much more DWT? (Deadweight tonnage)

Seriously, I wouldn't be surprised, of the capability at least, if several hundred billion to quite more in shipments of a single freighter are common!

I just can't shake the feeling that we may be jumping the gun at the value of a BC to that rare breed of pirate with impeccable tactics&strategy that can plan, implement and pull off, this type of heist. Let's say a scorned ex-payee on Janacek's payroll. This calibre of pirate can take this sort of shipment away from even a convoy escorted by two DDs. And if he can get a double freighter grab??? Ultra-booty-licious! Then retire and buy yourself a small planet in the Verge.

Except that it doesn't work that way.

Assume you intercept a mid-sized honorverse freighter, packed to capacity with goods. Something on the order of 3 or 4 million tons of cargo, or roughly equivalent to the output of one of Earth's bigger industrialized countries for a year. There is no single buyer able to take that cargo off your hands, let alone at book value, so it has to be parcelled off and fed into the shadow economy piecemeal, or held in custody until the shipping company pays a ransom. Neither method will result in quick payouts, and whatever the final payout will be, it's not going to be anywhere close to the book value of the goods.

Meanwhile, your supposed pirate still had to go through the troubles involved in acquiring a capital ship, getting a crew, getting the ship set up for a raiding mission, and for what purpose? The mission you describe doesn't require a Battlecruiser to pull off, a couple smaller ships are perfectly sufficient for it, increasing the overall payout and decreasing the individual risk.

No, cthia. What you describe is something only a terminally stupid pirate would do.

Silverwall wrote:Lets make a couple of not very sound assumptions about this money.

1) Captains get the 1/4 of the money awared in napoleonic periods. (personally I expect the captains share to much smaller in the honorverse probably closer to 10% given the changes in culture and such)

2) the crown actually buys ships in a book value to the crew not on a % basis, I would expect less than full book value to be assigned to the crews given the way ship costs have changed since the napoleonic days.

3) the only captains with a claim on this money are those in Sarnows squadron and excludes the dispersed DD's and minelayers and they decide that Dansislav's forces get a big fat 0$ as the Havenites just up and surrended before they engaged.

This gives us 25% of the ships value divided amongst the 8 BC captains and 8 CA captains.

If we take the 2.75 billion for a BC and assume that a DN is 3 times the cost that gives us a grand total prize pool of 44 billion dollars paid by the Exchecquer for the ships.

Given the assumptions above this would have given honor approx 680 million dollars prize money which sounds about right for how her wealth is described in the books.

What do you think I'm describing? My original premise is 'why aren't there some very rich pirates,' who can afford to at least pimp and trick out their ships - even if they're DD's? Milgrade everything, even coffee!