Impossibility of Piracy

Do I have some fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of hyperspace or should space piracy be wildly impractical? We are told that hyperspace is made of multiple bands, from the alpha band to at least the iota band, and at least it seems that a ship cannot see across one band into another as shown by the Artemis in Honor Among Enemies dropping down in hyper to hide from the oncoming PN ships. Given this, and that the PN ships didn't see some massive energy spike showing where the Artemis fled, shouldn't the interception of a ship in hyper be nearly impossible? Any ship in hyper that needed to hide from a ship chasing it could flee to any other band than the one it is currently in or clean into normal space. Since it is stated that sensors are scrambled when crossing a hyper wall it should be essentially impossible to find a ship that left your band of hyper into a random other band or normal space and then cut its drive to coast invisibly for a while before picking up on their journey after losing their attackers. Now I could see several counters to this strategy, namely having sufficient ships to be in each band where the fleeing ship would have to be assuming a known attacking time and place such as in a convoy raid. Alternatively you could have dedicated ships that carried essentially dispatch boats which are stated to be approximately the same size as a LAC, that could be dropped and sent to each band of hyper from a single ship to report back where the ship fled to its mothership. AS far as interception at the edge of a star system, this should also be far more difficult than it is depicted. While it is stated that ships tend to translate in on the ecliptic for both easiest access to planets, and also lower maintenance on the ship's propulsion equipment. However, if you are going into a system such as any of the Silesian systems where piracy is rampant, simply come in even just 5-10 degrees off the ecliptic and the volume in which you are translating in at is vastly increased. Surely the maintenance on a ship needing to be redone a bit sooner is cheaper than the ship, its crew, and its cargo after all. Perhaps I've missed something in the books or there are other factors I have not considered, but it seems that space piracy and convoy raiding should be impossible without overwhelming numerical superiority or specialized ships.

Piracy in hyper is unlikely. But what happened in HAE was not piracy, but commerce raiding. It drew on the resources of the entire People's Republic of Haven. That means intelligence assets to suss out merchant schedules and multiple squadrons to picket likely routes, among other things.

Virtually all real piracy happens inside the hyper limit, where the attacker can lie doggo waiting for the prey to draw within interception range and unable to flee.

Well, there is the whole 62:1 compression ratio, which means the average system with a ~20 light-minute hyperlimit is ~40 light seconds across on Alpha and three light seconds wide on Beta, and 1.6 light seconds wide on Gamma.

3 light seconds is within energy range against a ship without sidewalls. So a single raider sitting on top of the star in Gamma can pop any merchant that translates up to Gamma within about 81 light minutes of the primary. And on Delta it's two light hours.

The merchant (or, for that matter, a warship) signals it's arrival with a very detectable burst of energy and has no real sensors for a second or two. Plus it's nearly motionless as it has lost more than 97.5% of its velocity in the climb.

I don't believe you can translate to a random band. I see the bands more like walls that your hyper drive lets you hop over but you have to be near the wall to do that.

Loren Pechtel wrote:I don't believe you can translate to a random band. I see the bands more like walls that your hyper drive lets you hop over but you have to be near the wall to do that.

By a random band I didn’t mean that you press some button on your drive that sends you to a random band, rather that an attacking ship doesn’t know whether you went up or down or how far up or down so they can’t follow you.

TheInquisition wrote:Do I have some fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of hyperspace or should space piracy be wildly impractical? We are told that hyperspace is made of multiple bands, from the alpha band to at least the iota band, and at least it seems that a ship cannot see across one band into another as shown by the Artemis in Honor Among Enemies dropping down in hyper to hide from the oncoming PN ships. Given this, and that the PN ships didn't see some massive energy spike showing where the Artemis fled, shouldn't the interception of a ship in hyper be nearly impossible? Any ship in hyper that needed to hide from a ship chasing it could flee to any other band than the one it is currently in or clean into normal space. Since it is stated that sensors are scrambled when crossing a hyper wall it should be essentially impossible to find a ship that left your band of hyper into a random other band or normal space and then cut its drive to coast invisibly for a while before picking up on their journey after losing their attackers. Now I could see several counters to this strategy, namely having sufficient ships to be in each band where the fleeing ship would have to be assuming a known attacking time and place such as in a convoy raid. Alternatively you could have dedicated ships that carried essentially dispatch boats which are stated to be approximately the same size as a LAC, that could be dropped and sent to each band of hyper from a single ship to report back where the ship fled to its mothership. AS far as interception at the edge of a star system, this should also be far more difficult than it is depicted. While it is stated that ships tend to translate in on the ecliptic for both easiest access to planets, and also lower maintenance on the ship's propulsion equipment. However, if you are going into a system such as any of the Silesian systems where piracy is rampant, simply come in even just 5-10 degrees off the ecliptic and the volume in which you are translating in at is vastly increased. Surely the maintenance on a ship needing to be redone a bit sooner is cheaper than the ship, its crew, and its cargo after all. Perhaps I've missed something in the books or there are other factors I have not considered, but it seems that space piracy and convoy raiding should be impossible without overwhelming numerical superiority or specialized ships.

A couple points not alreadly mentioned

Dispatch boats are in the ~40,000 ton range. The Havenite Fracture class is ~37,000 tons, while a Star Falcon like Honor's Paul Tankersly is ~45,000 tons.

Traditional LACs are in the 10 kton range, Shrikes, Ferrets, and Katanas are ~20 ktons, while Havenite Cimmetares are ~26 ktons.

Your thoughts on avoiding pirates in system are good - pirates literally played a numbers game and stalked a volume of space, waiting for a victim to walk into their sights. Unfortunately, it appears the excess wear transiting outside the ecliptic was enough that merchies didn't do this do to costs. In addition, if there was any volume protected by warships ( or that a friendly warship might be passing through) it is the least-time path volume at the ecliptic. So while this is the most vulnerable location, it is also the most likely to be defended.

Now, In Silesia ( and probably all other Manty properties) Manticore has a standing defense covering the entirety of the least-time approach volume of the hyperlimit at the ecliptic, and roving patrols of the path between the habitable planets and the hyper locus volume, creating a protected path to all legimate traffic. Any planet with decent merchant traffic and a serious navy should be doing a version of this to protect merchie traffic.

Unfortunately, Silesia was a failed state, proped up by 2 competing Superpowers. The weak central government and constant state of collapse, created a situation where piracy was rampant, and the navy was made to look the other way, while local governments and oligarchs supported the pirates for their own goals. Remove the government support, the ports for repair, the source of ships, and the economies to fence the captured ships and goods, and piracy cannot happen.

So piracy is not going to be a central feature of the future Honorverse, unless we get another large failed state which gives pirates haven and support (ahem,.... Solarian League).

TheInquisition wrote:Do I have some fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of hyperspace or should space piracy be wildly impractical? We are told that hyperspace is made of multiple bands, from the alpha band to at least the iota band, and at least it seems that a ship cannot see across one band into another as shown by the Artemis in Honor Among Enemies dropping down in hyper to hide from the oncoming PN ships. Given this, and that the PN ships didn't see some massive energy spike showing where the Artemis fled, shouldn't the interception of a ship in hyper be nearly impossible? Any ship in hyper that needed to hide from a ship chasing it could flee to any other band than the one it is currently in or clean into normal space. Since it is stated that sensors are scrambled when crossing a hyper wall it should be essentially impossible to find a ship that left your band of hyper into a random other band or normal space and then cut its drive to coast invisibly for a while before picking up on their journey after losing their attackers. Now I could see several counters to this strategy, namely having sufficient ships to be in each band where the fleeing ship would have to be assuming a known attacking time and place such as in a convoy raid. Alternatively you could have dedicated ships that carried essentially dispatch boats which are stated to be approximately the same size as a LAC, that could be dropped and sent to each band of hyper from a single ship to report back where the ship fled to its mothership. AS far as interception at the edge of a star system, this should also be far more difficult than it is depicted. While it is stated that ships tend to translate in on the ecliptic for both easiest access to planets, and also lower maintenance on the ship's propulsion equipment. However, if you are going into a system such as any of the Silesian systems where piracy is rampant, simply come in even just 5-10 degrees off the ecliptic and the volume in which you are translating in at is vastly increased. Surely the maintenance on a ship needing to be redone a bit sooner is cheaper than the ship, its crew, and its cargo after all. Perhaps I've missed something in the books or there are other factors I have not considered, but it seems that space piracy and convoy raiding should be impossible without overwhelming numerical superiority or specialized ships.

The Honorvetse is huge and there is no way shipping can be protected everywhere. There must be a brotherhood of pirates hanging out at some dive, in some system where pirates go to feast and share secrets of the best fishing holes. Well, maybe not the best but certainly where the fish are biting without much of a tussle.

I can imagine out of the way ports in the backwoods of nowhere where the hunting is good, until word gets back to the powers that be, who'll eventually dispatch a police force. Isn't that exactly why Wayfarer was conceived? And Pirate's Bane?

Also, I was thinking that piracy will be on the uptick, since the League is splitting. Supposedly, it coalesced and formed the League as a result of a need for protection. Now that it's dissolving, I thought it would fall back into it's old habits. Out of vengeance and greed, if nothing else. And it'd be advantageous for the League to allow it to go on as their own revenge. "See, this wouldn't happen if we were in charge."

The same excuse the Peeps were trying to create at Basilisk.

TheInquisition wrote:Do I have some fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of hyperspace or should space piracy be wildly impractical? We are told that hyperspace is made of multiple bands, from the alpha band to at least the iota band, and at least it seems that a ship cannot see across one band into another as shown by the Artemis in Honor Among Enemies dropping down in hyper to hide from the oncoming PN ships. Given this, and that the PN ships didn't see some massive energy spike showing where the Artemis fled, shouldn't the interception of a ship in hyper be nearly impossible? Any ship in hyper that needed to hide from a ship chasing it could flee to any other band than the one it is currently in or clean into normal space. Since it is stated that sensors are scrambled when crossing a hyper wall it should be essentially impossible to find a ship that left your band of hyper into a random other band or normal space and then cut its drive to coast invisibly for a while before picking up on their journey after losing their attackers. Now I could see several counters to this strategy, namely having sufficient ships to be in each band where the fleeing ship would have to be assuming a known attacking time and place such as in a convoy raid. Alternatively you could have dedicated ships that carried essentially dispatch boats which are stated to be approximately the same size as a LAC, that could be dropped and sent to each band of hyper from a single ship to report back where the ship fled to its mothership.

Hi, I wanted to refresh my memory, so I went back and checked HAE, which is the first of the Honor Harrington novels where pirates are the main antagonists. Quoting from the novel,

"On the face of things, the possibility of piracy as a paying occupation shouldn't have existed. Even the hugest freighter was less than a dust mote on the scale of interstellar space, but like the ancient ocean-borne vessels of Old Earth, the ships which plied the stars followed predictable routes. They had to, for the grav waves which twisted through hyper-space dictated those routes much as Old Terra's prevailing winds had dictated the square-riggers'."

What this meant was that even in hyperspace, ships (especially multi-million-ton, slow-manoeuvring ones like merchant ships) were limited to travelling in narrow lanes whose end points had been mapped and were known to all interstellar spacefarers. Most piracy occurred in normal-space after the merchant ship had dropped out of hyper and was making its way insystem. Again, quoting from HAE,

"No pirate could predict exactly where any given starship would make her alpha translation back into n-space, but he knew the general volume in which all ships would do so. If he lurked long enough, some poor, unlucky son-of-a-bitch would sail right into his clutches"

AS far as interception at the edge of a star system, this should also be far more difficult than it is depicted. While it is stated that ships tend to translate in on the ecliptic for both easiest access to planets, and also lower maintenance on the ship's propulsion equipment. However, if you are going into a system such as any of the Silesian systems where piracy is rampant, simply come in even just 5-10 degrees off the ecliptic and the volume in which you are translating in at is vastly increased. Surely the maintenance on a ship needing to be redone a bit sooner is cheaper than the ship, its crew, and its cargo after all. Perhaps I've missed something in the books or there are other factors I have not considered, but it seems that space piracy and convoy raiding should be impossible without overwhelming numerical superiority or specialized ships.

As I believe Weber has shown, it wasn't a matter of maintenance on the ship's propulsion equipment but that the hyper-limit had a series of natural chokepoints for merchant ships which would restrict their translation vectors. The closest analogy I can come up with is one of ocean-sailing; ships would have to avoid reefs and undersea rocks while coming in to dock, which limits the routes they can take into the harbour. While Warshawski sails make it safer for ships to navigate hyperspace, they do not remove all the limitations faced by the vessels.

TheInquisition wrote:Do I have some fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of hyperspace or should space piracy be wildly impractical? We are told that hyperspace is made of multiple bands, from the alpha band to at least the iota band, and at least it seems that a ship cannot see across one band into another as shown by the Artemis in Honor Among Enemies dropping down in hyper to hide from the oncoming PN ships. Given this, and that the PN ships didn't see some massive energy spike showing where the Artemis fled, shouldn't the interception of a ship in hyper be nearly impossible? Any ship in hyper that needed to hide from a ship chasing it could flee to any other band than the one it is currently in or clean into normal space. Since it is stated that sensors are scrambled when crossing a hyper wall it should be essentially impossible to find a ship that left your band of hyper into a random other band or normal space and then cut its drive to coast invisibly for a while before picking up on their journey after losing their attackers.

Depends on how close the enemy ship(s) are to you when you translate. Also despite talking about "the alpha bands" it seems like there's no issue with a ship in the alpha bands seeing any other ship in the alpha bands as long as it's within few enough km. So for a merchant ship that disappears you only need to check 4 other bands for it. And I don't think your sensors get that scrambled crossing a wall - give it a few seconds and the pursuer will pick you up if you're still under power, or if you're just too close-by. So the target has to switch bands, generate as much vector change as they can before the pursuer follows, then shutdown their wedge and emulate a hole in space.
(Note also that grav waves often cover multiple bands - if you can't get out of the grav wave you can't turn off your highly visible sail - so depending on where you are the only useful evasion might be dropping entirely out of hyper)

Still, as others noted, pirates generally don't bother trying for the extremely unlikely hyperspace intercepts. That's usually the domain of well equipped naval commerce raiding squadrons.

And even then we've only seen it down twice.
The first in SVW where the RMN military convoy chose to fight it out in the grav wave since those conditions gave the best possible chance for the sacrifice of the light escorts to prevent the much heavier raiders from catching and killing the supplies and naval dependents they were protected. If they'd tried to hide and been found all the escorts and all the convoy would have been captured or destroyed.
The other in HAE where the Peeps set an ambush in a particular low velocity bottleneck rift in hyper. They weren't expected to have to chase anybody they thought they'd be able to punch out the escorts quickly before there was any chance for the freighters to scatter or hide. (Didn't work out that way, but that was their plan)

TheInquisition wrote:AS far as interception at the edge of a star system, this should also be far more difficult than it is depicted. While it is stated that ships tend to translate in on the ecliptic for both easiest access to planets, and also lower maintenance on the ship's propulsion equipment. However, if you are going into a system such as any of the Silesian systems where piracy is rampant, simply come in even just 5-10 degrees off the ecliptic and the volume in which you are translating in at is vastly increased.

Hmm, if we assume a 22 lm hyper limit, and +/- 10 degrees vertical that translates to roughly +/- 72 million km. Pirates tend to be smaller ships, but lets says the typical pirate has a safe accel of at least an old CA, ~400 g. The average freighter's safe accel is closer to 150-175 g. (And a classic LAC's safe accel is about 327 g; more sluggish than the pirate)


So if we're talking about a freighter coming into a G2 star system, with their destination planet orbiting at about a 150 million km radius, the freighter will at 10° off the elliptic be around 66 million km from it. That sounds like a long way, but the freighter will easily be within the pirate's sensor range and that's only 1.6 hours flight. (though the freighter isn't just going to hang around - they're going to be making for the planet they want to trade with -- and the pirate can run them down)

Assuming it's on the higher end with 175 g safe acceleration it'll take it about 3.2 hours to reach turn-over and 6.4 hours to the planet. The notional CA based pirate can reach that turn-over distance in just 2.1 hours - now they wouldn't go straight there - they'd probably angle to be able to cut off the freighter's shortest path back to the hyper limit.

The extra time the freighter gets for coming in somewhat less predictably might be enough to help if there are LACs (or better, a real warship) near the planet that can intervene. But if there isn't an armed response force then it doesn't really mater - the pirate would have the speed to chase down any freighter that getting near the planet, no matter where on the hyper limit they appeared.

TheInquisition wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:I don't believe you can translate to a random band. I see the bands more like walls that your hyper drive lets you hop over but you have to be near the wall to do that.

By a random band I didn’t mean that you press some button on your drive that sends you to a random band, rather that an attacking ship doesn’t know whether you went up or down or how far up or down so they can’t follow you.

What I'm saying is I think an observer knows whether you went up or down and can follow.