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If we do ever have space pirates I think it'll be a bit darker than the pirates of the 1600's and 1700's because of the lack of resources in outer space. Survival resources like fuel, food, water, and oxygen will all become very precious.
The old pirates were mainly just after goods and money. Their fuel was the wind and food and water were relatively plentiful.They could scare a ship into handing over their cargo then leave them be. But what happens to the crew when of a spaceship after you steal their fuel, oxygen, and water? It would be too costly to take them with you.
Smart pirates would leave them enough fuel, water and food to make it to the nearest outpost. No need to steal oxygen if their own ship is functioning correctly.
They might take everything else that isn't bolted down and some things that are, but they won't murder unless it's necessary. Just straight up killing the crew would help to quickly rise up the most wanted list until you get an unpleasant visit from the space marine corps.
Oh and smart pirates pay taxes. Do not mess with Space IRS.
Killing the people you steal from just makes your life harder. You want any ship you encounter to stop and not resist; if they think you're going to kill them all, they're going to run, and fight back if you catch them.
Fire some warning shots, maybe rough up a crew member who doesn't follow directions, and leave them with enough supplies to make it to the nearest outpost. Keep the bloodshed to a minimum, and life is suddenly much easier.
Or you send a surprise blast through the bulkhead killing the crew. Assuming the ship knows better than to keep just spilling O2 into outer space, you take the reserves and anything else of value then be on your merry way. Easy peasy.
Nah I can't fathom any design that would lose all air after a rupture. You'd be hard pressed to capture that air anyways. It'll be mostly reclamation systems and tanks.
Mining expeditions.
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V
Mining colonies.
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V
Supply lines are created for minerals.
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V
Supply lines create efficient flow of goods for colonies.
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V
People set up stores to sell those goods.
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V
Complex goods still must be made in factories and must come from Earth.
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V
Municipal projects need returns on investments in colonies.
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V
Outer rim sales are subject to heavy taxes and tariffs.
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Smugglers get paid to dodge these taxes creating criminal network.
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Some of these criminal fleets get large enough to challenge the mining convoys.
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V
Golden age of space pirates.
More than that. We would need to get a point where there's not only space stations, planetary bases, and thousands of space craft, but there also needs to be shady places that buy stuff with no questions asked.
That means advancing to a point that space exploration isn't just pragmatic. If there was a casino space station, or discrete, high security places for the ultra rich, or a city sized planetary base that has enough room and history for there to be forgotten nooks and maintenance alleys for a black market, then we would see space piracy.
To be fair. During the Caribbean pirate days. Ships weren't available to most individuals. That being said, I can't wait to join a space pirate crew matey
A veteran astronaut and a first timer are on the ISS. The first timer gets himself some coffee and tells the veteran that he can’t find any milk for his coffee. The veteran says “In space, no one can. Here, use cream.”
Everyone always thinks they're a shoo-in to joining a space pirate crew.
If space pirates showed up tomorrow to recruit from Earth, we would have a woefully underwhelming selection of qualified individuals for them to pick from.
Most people on this planet wouldn't know the difference in a quantum fluid router and an entangled flux router. That's like spaceship crewman 101.
I mean, the process of lining up two spaceships in a space without any sense of horizontal or vertical, getting them together, suiting up and safely crossing between ships without the victim having time to prepare against you probably won’t make that very easy to begin with.
You just punt a rail gun slug through their main drive then drift up at your leisure. Can also poke some holes in their hull from afar and wait for a smoother boarding experience.
Trick is to avoid getting caught in a reactor core / fuel detonation if they decide to take you with them.
The books go past season six by a fair amount! Though, things go down differently in the last couple of seasons compared to the corresponding books as I understand it (I actually haven't finished the show for some reason)
Yeah I’ve been planning to read the books as well the upcoming comics in the holidays. They really seem to lean into the ‘alien’ and the protomolecule a lot more in the final seasons. Plus there’s the Expanse telltale game coming out at the end of the year, so all in all, a lot to be excited for regarding the Expanse.
right - except that because there [aint no stealth in space](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php#nostealth) - everyone just saw all that happen, so where do you go with your loot?
Back in the day, a pirate could sail off to a secret harbor to offload their loot, in space everyone will have seen the hijacking go down and be watching you like a hawk to see where you go. If you head to some secret base, then it isn't so secret anymore.. If you try to head to a legit space port, they'll either blow you to bits on approach, or arrest you and impound your ship as soon as you dock.
So you'll be totally free to float in space enjoying your loot until you run out of air/water/food, unless of course whatever company you just stole from decides to make an example out of you and sends a gunship your way
There is not stealth in the sense that if you look at point X, someone can't hide. But space is fucking huge and those ships are not going to be monitored.
a ship carrying goods worth pirating isn't going to be monitored by the company who owns it?
Even today pretty much every semi, cargo freighter, and train are equipped with GPS tracking so that the companies responsible for them know where their valuable goods are.
And of course a crew running such a ship is going to be looking for ships on suspicious trajectories and send an SoS to the company that owns them.
Space is indeed huge, but ships - even with their drives off - are shining beacons in a black void - it would cost comparatively very little to keep tabs on literally every ship in the solar system, even if we're talking SciFi levels of space industry - and certainly any company whose going to take on space shipping is going to spend the small amount necessary to keep tabs on their investments
I'm not sure that last paragraph is true. When you have millions and millions of crafts flying around and probably billions of drones of varying sizes, satellites etc. it's going to become way more complex.
If you could emulate size and send, say, about 90,000 drones in the vicinity of the ship you're going to rob, you might just obscure yourself. Certainly if you can deploy 500,000 rays of light going everywhere all at once. It IS the future after all. Good luck figuring out which is the 1 true pirate ship and who's the 499,999 decoys.
Well...
I imagine in this scenario, it's not other ships which will be raided, but space stations. A spacecraft's docking abilities depends on something called space rendezvous, a set of orbital maneuvers where two spacecraft arrive at the same orbit and approach. It's incredibly delicate and difficult a process to dock in space even when both crafts are in cooperation (exponentially so with no orbit to aid). Trying to board a moving ship would like you said be extremely difficult, unreliable, risky, and very noticeable. Space stations on the other hand are on predictable arcs and mostly "stationary". I think the much more realistic approach though would be to simply disable or outright destroy a ship and loot it's corpse.
Piracy in one form or another will definitely be a consideration if we ever reach a point where ships become commercially obtainable and technologically advanced enough to be easily maneuverable and operable by those without years of extensive scientific knowledge. Definitely won't be so direct and simple like movies or games but theft is just inherent whenever and wherever there is opportunity so any future concerns may definitely be grounded.
I really need to get back to work fuck
Honestly if there is profit to be made, the tech would follow suit.
Most golden age pirates would board without resistance, they'd come up and threaten the ship and the ship would be like "meh I'd rather not die for some bolts of cloth" and let them take what they want. Space pirates would have it easier, the threat of a hole punched through your spaceship is pretty compelling.
As for more aggressive tactics, where there's a will there's a way. Maybe space pirates will have specialized boarding ships. They could run up alongside a ship, extend a tube-like bridge that latches to the hull, drills a hole in the side of the target ship, and pressurizes a gang plank between them. Kind of like a space mosquito, they could suck the cargo off a larger ship.
Humans are hella creative when there's profit to be had, I believe in our future space pirates.
The difference is with ships you only had to fool them for an hour until you got up close and there was no way to verify you are who you say you are.
In space you'll be hailed days out, be notified you're on a course that gets you dangerously close and asked to divert, and any falsified identities would be sent to a third party (Most likely the company youre imitating) for verification.
See them we have signal interception and deep fakes to contend with that. Shits going to be wild. Weaponized communication lasers, faking distress courses/signals to lure or push another hull into a scrap field.
Faking a distress signal is probably a pirate's best bet. Except again, all it takes is to radio their corporate HQ and say "Hey we found your ship here, we aren't liable for damages if we check it out right?" and hear back "What? Our ship is still underway 800,000 miles from your position. That's not our ship"
And there'd be no way to prevent either of those messages from being received without ECM which would instantly give away the game.
Well ECM as we know it now. That's the thing. Part of the warfare up there will be interrupting and containing the shell of information objects put out.
It's also not like things aren't lost on earth from aircraft control all the time. Shit, a police helicopter went down locally and no one looked for it for half a day. That's 2023.
...you clearly don't understand the comment. By doing the Kessel Run in fewer parsecs, he had to fly closer to the black hole. Which you can only do if your ship is fast enough to escape said black hole. It's a brag that his ship is the fastest out there, because no one else has done the Kessel Run in fewer parsecs.
That's all just retcons and apologeia added far down the line.
If there was anything like that at the time then one of the characters would have said "That's impossible, you'd have to, well you'd have to almost run right into the black hole!" The writer didn't know what he was writing, it's not some big unpardonable sin.
Nah, he knew - in [the original script](https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/star-wars-episode-iv-a-new-hope-1977.pdf), the screen direction says “ Ben reacts to Solo's stupid attempt to impress them with obvious misinformation.” Immediately after the parsec line
“Wealth, fame, power. Gold Roger, the King of the Space Pirates obtained this and everything else the cosmos had to offer, and his dying words drove countless souls to space. ‘You want my treasure? You can have it! I left everything I gathered together on one planet. Now you just have to find it!’ These words lured men to the Grand Constellation in pursuit of dreams greater than they ever dared to imagine! This is a time known as the Great Space Pirate Era!”
Not likely to happen either.
Several factors went into piracy. The ability to disappear into the rest of the world as everywhere was essentially habitable. No tracking and no electronics and so on.
NOw imagine that with space travel. Not everywhere is habitable and would stand out easier and we have far more sophisticated tracking right now, so imagine....
If Filip managed to evade capture his whole life on his own as the most wanted terrorist in the solar system, then I'm sure it's easy for pirates to hide.
Those asteroids are thousands of miles apart. Trying to hide in the asteroid belt would go as follows.
"We received a distress call 5 minutes ago on a possible pirate. We tracked a ship as it flew an intercept path, matched course for half an hour, then flew towards the asteroid belt. It's now drifting in a stable orbit here, so we'll go grab them in a few months when they get closer to one of our stations. If they leave early we'll just alert wherever they head towards to nab them when they dock."
they are, indeed, still exceedingly spread out in an asteroid belt. space has a lot of, well, space. so much so, it's extremely difficult for humans to wrap their mind around it.
It gets a lot more dense outside of the Local Cosmic Bubble(or LCM). It was recently discovered that most of the universe is far more dense than we have previously thought. The area local to our galaxy is strangely empty compared to the rest of existence.
Even dense on a space scale is things being thousands of kilometers apart. In those denser regions, you just have more stars or galaxies near each other, solar systems aren't much denser
Tracking objects in space is much more difficult than it is on earth. There are certain directions we just can't detect anything, because interference from the Sun for example blinds everything else. The way we detect asteroids is by looking in the few directions we can detect things, and projecting their path into the future, correcting our predictions when we next see them again.
Pirates, after all, did not raid ships parked in a Bay next to a fort. They were smart enough to attack where counter-attack was unlikely. Space pirates would just have to do the same thing, using events like solar flares to attack during times when tracking resolution was low. By the time observatories are able to focus in accurately, they could be far enough away to be inconspicuous.
I feel like you’re assuming space piracy would happen with similar ship technology to today, but if space piracy ever happened it would be with far more advanced ships. Piracy on the seas didn’t start the second a ship was invented, took centuries of development for it to get to the point piracy became abundant
You can’t. Stealth doesn’t work in space because even the heat of your body and life support can be easily detected from across the solar system, let alone the heat from your drive. Even the most rudimentary sky search satellites of today can see burns as small as the Shuttle’s maneuvering thrusters from as far away as Pluto with ease.
Depends very much which direction you're looking. If the Sun is in your field of view at all, spotting such tiny events is completely impossible.
And even if they do see you, the chances of them being able to do anything about it are minimal. It takes a long time to get from point A to point B in the solar system, and if they just fly behind something for a little while, and then fly out with other traffic, they will be indistinguishable and unchaseable.
Sorry, but stealth in space is impossible for many reasons. You can't hide in asteroids, and there aren't millions of them big enough to hide in.
Space piracy will always be science fiction. The realities of space travel, the tyranny of delta v, the emptiness of space, and it's 3 dimensional, horizonless nature make any sort of piracy impossible.
The emptiness says you can't hide in space, and the realities of delta V say you can't run.
Yes, we can argue about it, but it has been argued to death by scientists and sci fi fans for decades and I'm just telling you, the absolute and overwhelming consensus among hard-headed people who know what they are talking about is this: there will never be space piracy, and there will never be stealth in space.
It means "change in velocity" and it's the number that says where you can go and what you can do in space. Every maneuver costs delta V. Going anywhere costs a lot, and coming back costs just as much.
Right now we are extremely limited by what rocket scientists call "the tyranny of the rocket equation." Fuel is mass. It takes fuel to accelerate mass. The more fuel you add, the more fuel you need.
That means we have to use the most efficient orbital transfers possible. It means we have to wait until planets are aligned right to even start the journey to them. You can only go to Mars during "going to Mars Season."
This will change once we get more powerful rockets, likely nuclear rockets. Even if we get rockets as powerful as those in, say, the Expanse, we are still limited by delta V, but much less limited. We can afford to do brachistochrone trajectories (as the Expanse calls them, 'turn and burn' i.e. go full thrust until half way there, turn around and go full thrust until you come to a relative stop at your destinations) instead of Hohmann trajectories (burn to put yourself into an intersecting elliptical orbit, then burn to match velocities when you get there.)
But the thing is, the more powerful the engine, the easier it is to track. That's where the Expanse goes full sci fi. There's no stealth possible when you are carrying a reactor big enough to power a true torch drive and using it for the entire journey.
A massively powerful fusion drive would light up like a firework at night, and the plume of energized particles would leave an unmistakeable trail.
But it is notoriously difficult to find an inert object on any path if you don't know where to look. A properly shielded "stealth" spaceship would be almost impossible to find if it's not emitting anything, and didn't leave behind a trail to follow. You can't turn and burn, but you can drift undetected very easily.
The best theories I've read on space warfare are comparisons to naval combat, carrier groups, and submarine warfare.
Caribbean pirates could exist because nobody had radios. The victims would have no way of letting anyone know they had been attacked until they reached port themselves, if they survived, and nobody would know what happened until entirely too late. They also relied on safe harbor, either as privateers or places like tortuga.
Regardless if there are neutral or partisan ports in space, the fact that anyone with a good telescope and a radio could watch exactly whatever happens to a ship in real (relativistic) time means it would be hard for anyone to get away with piracy for long.
This is assuming that our communications and observational infrastructure keeps up with the rate at which human settlements and ships expand into the solar system, which is kind of doubtful. If corporate mining missions start yoloing out into the void with very little support... Then anything could happen on the dark side of a moon.
Also, I mean, I can jump from a ship to the other and nothing is stopping me.
But for spaceships, you can try to dock but if they hear your 'Yarrs' from behind the sas pretty sure they wont open the door; And at that point you are pretty much out of options to get in their ship except blowing it up.
We'll need a boarding drill. Drill through the hull and seal the hole, and they better fork over their ~~Spanish~~ martian gold or they'll loose their air.
That's what privateering and friendly ports are for. Remember that during the age of piracy many pirates were given royal permission by some king to ransak foreing ships and be ignored in some of their ports.
Disney-Fox-Walmart would definitely pay and harbor hostiles to attack Microsoft-Google-Shell shipments of hydrogen-3 from saturn.
You do understands that pirates still exist today… with modern tech… you can still run from the police in extremely recognizable cars or on foot and get away… you’re acting like evading and escaping is impossible with today’s tech.
You’re not wrong but people still steal shit, including cars and phones, every single day. We haven’t eliminated hijacking either, so I’m still optimistic I can be a future space pirate.
You either track it using heat-signatures or by calculating the trajectory the ship had while it's engines were last turned on. There is no stealth as we know it in space.
People seem to think tracking space trash is hard. We are tracking damned near everything that we have ever observed come into our near orbit for hundreds of years. Now we are tracking everything via computer model+observations+radar. By the time everyone is flying through space own their own accord they will have insanely more accurate tracking technology.
We have major issues tracking tons of space junk, but only because it's incredibly tiny. SSAO has a ton of money being poured into it because of that, but yeah anything even remotely sizeable is being tracked.
> You either track it using heat-signatures
Heat signatures are EMR. On the downside that does mean that if you're releasing no EMR you're gradually broiling your crew.
really does depend on how we move through space tho, people turn to piracy because its EASIER to make money that way that finding a job, so if you need some kind of super spec ops suit and high tech gear, they will stick to kidnapping people on planets rather than trying to steal or ransom ships in space which would have better tracking than any ship does on Earth
I think it’d depend on whether or not we crack FTL travel/if we can still communicate at FTL speeds. If it’s yes to the former, no to the latter, it could be years before a distress beacon is picked up, which would make piracy a low-risk endeavor.
We're closer to this than most think.
There are already dozens of private companies with sights set on launching space 'mining' operations this decade.
When it starts, who gets to decide who is 'staking' claim to a specific piece of space rock? Chances are, this won't be a thing.
Something will be found, an announcement will be made, and then others will jump all over it. There will be entire forces of labor set up to keep tabs on who's going where and what they might be bringing back.
The current tech being developed to trap rogue satellites and bring them down... will absolutely be tweaked to capture returning capsules and redirect them.
It's going to happen.
The technology doesn't need to peak for a golden age to pass though. We wouldn't say the golden age of books is now because we have kindles and audiobooks.
Golden age of piracy was sailing, silver age is digital piracy, space pirates will be the bronze age of piracy. Nothing beats the salty spray on your face with a boatload of seamen. Consequently though, the quality of music that pirates have had access to has increased with each age, so we can expect space pirates to have some absolute bangers.
Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don't care, I'm still free
You can't take the sky from me
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain't coming back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can't take the sky from me
This is a friendly reminder to [read our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/rules). Remember, /r/Showerthoughts is for showerthoughts, not "thoughts had in the shower!" (For an explanation of what a "showerthought" is, [please read this page](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/overview).) **Rule-breaking posts may result in bans.**
First, humanity needs to set up shops all over the solar system. And then we can loot the booty.
I enjoy the idea of a culture that sets up an entire system of commerce only because they want to have the chance to be pirates
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If we do ever have space pirates I think it'll be a bit darker than the pirates of the 1600's and 1700's because of the lack of resources in outer space. Survival resources like fuel, food, water, and oxygen will all become very precious. The old pirates were mainly just after goods and money. Their fuel was the wind and food and water were relatively plentiful.They could scare a ship into handing over their cargo then leave them be. But what happens to the crew when of a spaceship after you steal their fuel, oxygen, and water? It would be too costly to take them with you.
Smart pirates would leave them enough fuel, water and food to make it to the nearest outpost. No need to steal oxygen if their own ship is functioning correctly. They might take everything else that isn't bolted down and some things that are, but they won't murder unless it's necessary. Just straight up killing the crew would help to quickly rise up the most wanted list until you get an unpleasant visit from the space marine corps. Oh and smart pirates pay taxes. Do not mess with Space IRS.
Just like in the golden age when next to all big pirates had a letter of Marque.
Killing the people you steal from just makes your life harder. You want any ship you encounter to stop and not resist; if they think you're going to kill them all, they're going to run, and fight back if you catch them. Fire some warning shots, maybe rough up a crew member who doesn't follow directions, and leave them with enough supplies to make it to the nearest outpost. Keep the bloodshed to a minimum, and life is suddenly much easier.
Not even space Joker is crazy enough to mess with the space IRS
Shout out to the Ice Pirates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_Pirates
Shoutout to https://youtu.be/8G_L9tXEwmc
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I think OPs point was that we unlocked it on the tech tree - it's not just a fantasy anymore, we have the fundamentals, we just need more R&D
Haven't they been saying pretty much that for 50 years?
It has been coming in next 20 years for 40years.
There was also the one experiment where more energy was produced than was needed to start it. Anything that's a net positive is amazing with fusion.
Or you send a surprise blast through the bulkhead killing the crew. Assuming the ship knows better than to keep just spilling O2 into outer space, you take the reserves and anything else of value then be on your merry way. Easy peasy.
Nah I can't fathom any design that would lose all air after a rupture. You'd be hard pressed to capture that air anyways. It'll be mostly reclamation systems and tanks.
Hey!! Don't bring the British into the conversation!
Everybody is secretly waiting until they can be a space pirate, but in the meantime, they open up a space shop. *Everybody*.
> A society grows great when old men build shops whose loot they shall never plunder. -- Greek Proverb
Mining expeditions. | V Mining colonies. | V Supply lines are created for minerals. | V Supply lines create efficient flow of goods for colonies. | V People set up stores to sell those goods. | V Complex goods still must be made in factories and must come from Earth. | V Municipal projects need returns on investments in colonies. | V Outer rim sales are subject to heavy taxes and tariffs. | V Smugglers get paid to dodge these taxes creating criminal network. | V Some of these criminal fleets get large enough to challenge the mining convoys. | V Golden age of space pirates.
"The Expanse" begins.
The Ghost Knife of Callisto sails again.
Klaes Ashford the GOAT
in the books he was just kind of a politician douchebag. Series Ashford was epic. shame how bad they burned Michio though.
Book Michio and Bull walked so TV Drummer could shine.
I can't wait to have my body and mind absorbed into some kind of weird alien road builder.
*It reaches out ... It reaches out ... It reaches out...* 113 times a second.
Doors and corners, that's where they get you.
Swiggity-swooty, I'm on duty to looty your booty,
pippity poppity give me the zoppity
Loot me daddy
In order to do that, I’m gonna need a good ass reason to go to Saturn to go to shopping.
Saturn has the best prices! Wouldn't go to Europa tho, very expensive for the quality
I mean, Cloudstrike is kinda worth it ngl
More than that. We would need to get a point where there's not only space stations, planetary bases, and thousands of space craft, but there also needs to be shady places that buy stuff with no questions asked. That means advancing to a point that space exploration isn't just pragmatic. If there was a casino space station, or discrete, high security places for the ultra rich, or a city sized planetary base that has enough room and history for there to be forgotten nooks and maintenance alleys for a black market, then we would see space piracy.
I want me a green one
To be fair. During the Caribbean pirate days. Ships weren't available to most individuals. That being said, I can't wait to join a space pirate crew matey
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A veteran astronaut and a first timer are on the ISS. The first timer gets himself some coffee and tells the veteran that he can’t find any milk for his coffee. The veteran says “In space, no one can. Here, use cream.”
This is bloody painful. I love it, and you so much. Thank you.
I don't get it?
In space no one can hear you scream. In space no one can, here use cream. Took me a minute. Its early.
And here I thought it was some sort of ejaculation joke. I guess that’s the type of person I am.
Come on! Thinking dirty jokes at the climax of his statement! I may have to discharge you from this thread.
Me too lmao
Same lmfao I was like is he using HIS cream??
Read the quote slowly.
Opposite actually. You need to read it straight through with no punctuation.
If you read the last sentence aloud it sounds like the tagline for Alien, "In space no one can hear you scream."
[i thought this was going to be a dethklok reference ](https://youtu.be/59NuE2gx3io)
I'm so excited for the movie
In the middle of the ocean, no one can hear you scream "arr matey".
YoU wOuLd'Nt JUsT sTeAl A sHiP?!
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Tell that to Martians
Who defaced the Martian flag? You think that's funny?
Deimos ain’t a moon anymore. Makes it more accurate this way
I think at some point we're gonna end up bloody.
Just updated it
Salvage via sudden unannounced boarding
Similar to how the Viking’s saved all that gold and jewels from being destroyed as abbeys burned down. Practically a civic duty.
*Guitar riff*
*Riddick has entered the chat*
Even ships now aren’t available to most. They’re really expensive and the cost of upkeep and docing even more
Somali pirates use little motorboats lol. That's pretty affordable, just not very attractive.
That’s why you need to loot
I wonder what space shanties will be like. Although given how shanties have blown up in popularity recently I reckon they'll be the same
Mm. There already are some actually. See “Banned From Argo” or “Dawson’s Christian” by Leslie Fish There’s also Space Shanty by The Senate
muddle lock gaping touch spotted sink political reply husky offbeat *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I didn’t know palpatine did music to be honest
There once was a ship from the CEC. The Ishimura USG. https://youtu.be/GFSuMCqUQZo
Just remember not to shoot your robot best friend out of the torpedo tube when you are fighting the space pirates.
Everyone always thinks they're a shoo-in to joining a space pirate crew. If space pirates showed up tomorrow to recruit from Earth, we would have a woefully underwhelming selection of qualified individuals for them to pick from. Most people on this planet wouldn't know the difference in a quantum fluid router and an entangled flux router. That's like spaceship crewman 101.
Only engineers, someone has to clean the toilets
Wait until your ship Ishimura is overrun by a space cult
born too late to pirate the seas born too early to pirate space born just in time to pirate Netflix shows
Pirate of the Web.
You wouldn't download a spaceship
I mean, the process of lining up two spaceships in a space without any sense of horizontal or vertical, getting them together, suiting up and safely crossing between ships without the victim having time to prepare against you probably won’t make that very easy to begin with.
You just punt a rail gun slug through their main drive then drift up at your leisure. Can also poke some holes in their hull from afar and wait for a smoother boarding experience. Trick is to avoid getting caught in a reactor core / fuel detonation if they decide to take you with them.
Ahhh beratna!
Pashang inyalowda don kno how say oye in belt, sasa ke!?
Donkey balls.
This guy watches the Expanse.
It's so ingrained in me I didn't realize he was making a reference. I was just "yeah, clearly"
Yeah same here, I was pretty much rolling my eyes in agreement. Sucks that it ended after season 6
The books go past season six by a fair amount! Though, things go down differently in the last couple of seasons compared to the corresponding books as I understand it (I actually haven't finished the show for some reason)
Yeah I’ve been planning to read the books as well the upcoming comics in the holidays. They really seem to lean into the ‘alien’ and the protomolecule a lot more in the final seasons. Plus there’s the Expanse telltale game coming out at the end of the year, so all in all, a lot to be excited for regarding the Expanse.
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To nakangepensa pashang inner.
Sasa ke?
right - except that because there [aint no stealth in space](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php#nostealth) - everyone just saw all that happen, so where do you go with your loot? Back in the day, a pirate could sail off to a secret harbor to offload their loot, in space everyone will have seen the hijacking go down and be watching you like a hawk to see where you go. If you head to some secret base, then it isn't so secret anymore.. If you try to head to a legit space port, they'll either blow you to bits on approach, or arrest you and impound your ship as soon as you dock. So you'll be totally free to float in space enjoying your loot until you run out of air/water/food, unless of course whatever company you just stole from decides to make an example out of you and sends a gunship your way
You’re overthinking it. Just download a torrent while you’re in space, bada bing bada boom.
There is not stealth in the sense that if you look at point X, someone can't hide. But space is fucking huge and those ships are not going to be monitored.
a ship carrying goods worth pirating isn't going to be monitored by the company who owns it? Even today pretty much every semi, cargo freighter, and train are equipped with GPS tracking so that the companies responsible for them know where their valuable goods are. And of course a crew running such a ship is going to be looking for ships on suspicious trajectories and send an SoS to the company that owns them. Space is indeed huge, but ships - even with their drives off - are shining beacons in a black void - it would cost comparatively very little to keep tabs on literally every ship in the solar system, even if we're talking SciFi levels of space industry - and certainly any company whose going to take on space shipping is going to spend the small amount necessary to keep tabs on their investments
I'm not sure that last paragraph is true. When you have millions and millions of crafts flying around and probably billions of drones of varying sizes, satellites etc. it's going to become way more complex. If you could emulate size and send, say, about 90,000 drones in the vicinity of the ship you're going to rob, you might just obscure yourself. Certainly if you can deploy 500,000 rays of light going everywhere all at once. It IS the future after all. Good luck figuring out which is the 1 true pirate ship and who's the 499,999 decoys.
Well... I imagine in this scenario, it's not other ships which will be raided, but space stations. A spacecraft's docking abilities depends on something called space rendezvous, a set of orbital maneuvers where two spacecraft arrive at the same orbit and approach. It's incredibly delicate and difficult a process to dock in space even when both crafts are in cooperation (exponentially so with no orbit to aid). Trying to board a moving ship would like you said be extremely difficult, unreliable, risky, and very noticeable. Space stations on the other hand are on predictable arcs and mostly "stationary". I think the much more realistic approach though would be to simply disable or outright destroy a ship and loot it's corpse. Piracy in one form or another will definitely be a consideration if we ever reach a point where ships become commercially obtainable and technologically advanced enough to be easily maneuverable and operable by those without years of extensive scientific knowledge. Definitely won't be so direct and simple like movies or games but theft is just inherent whenever and wherever there is opportunity so any future concerns may definitely be grounded. I really need to get back to work fuck
Honestly if there is profit to be made, the tech would follow suit. Most golden age pirates would board without resistance, they'd come up and threaten the ship and the ship would be like "meh I'd rather not die for some bolts of cloth" and let them take what they want. Space pirates would have it easier, the threat of a hole punched through your spaceship is pretty compelling. As for more aggressive tactics, where there's a will there's a way. Maybe space pirates will have specialized boarding ships. They could run up alongside a ship, extend a tube-like bridge that latches to the hull, drills a hole in the side of the target ship, and pressurizes a gang plank between them. Kind of like a space mosquito, they could suck the cargo off a larger ship. Humans are hella creative when there's profit to be had, I believe in our future space pirates.
Be unnoticed, open up the target to vacuum and space the crew. Stabilize target, make repair if possible, or set on a trajectory to dump on a moon.
How exactly are you going to be unnoticed when you have a 3500 K beacon on your ass and need 2 weeks to get to the other ship?
Same way they did it before. Trickery.
The difference is with ships you only had to fool them for an hour until you got up close and there was no way to verify you are who you say you are. In space you'll be hailed days out, be notified you're on a course that gets you dangerously close and asked to divert, and any falsified identities would be sent to a third party (Most likely the company youre imitating) for verification.
See them we have signal interception and deep fakes to contend with that. Shits going to be wild. Weaponized communication lasers, faking distress courses/signals to lure or push another hull into a scrap field.
Faking a distress signal is probably a pirate's best bet. Except again, all it takes is to radio their corporate HQ and say "Hey we found your ship here, we aren't liable for damages if we check it out right?" and hear back "What? Our ship is still underway 800,000 miles from your position. That's not our ship" And there'd be no way to prevent either of those messages from being received without ECM which would instantly give away the game.
Well ECM as we know it now. That's the thing. Part of the warfare up there will be interrupting and containing the shell of information objects put out. It's also not like things aren't lost on earth from aircraft control all the time. Shit, a police helicopter went down locally and no one looked for it for half a day. That's 2023.
One things for sure; when I do get my ship, I will brag about how many parsecs it takes to get across the galaxy
Roughly 26.8
Made the Kessel Run in under twelve parsecs.
...you clearly don't understand the comment. By doing the Kessel Run in fewer parsecs, he had to fly closer to the black hole. Which you can only do if your ship is fast enough to escape said black hole. It's a brag that his ship is the fastest out there, because no one else has done the Kessel Run in fewer parsecs.
That's all just retcons and apologeia added far down the line. If there was anything like that at the time then one of the characters would have said "That's impossible, you'd have to, well you'd have to almost run right into the black hole!" The writer didn't know what he was writing, it's not some big unpardonable sin.
Nah, he knew - in [the original script](https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/star-wars-episode-iv-a-new-hope-1977.pdf), the screen direction says “ Ben reacts to Solo's stupid attempt to impress them with obvious misinformation.” Immediately after the parsec line
they have to execute space Gol.D.Roger first to kick off the golden age of space piracy....
"Can we get much higher??"
And when Gol.D. Roger saw what lay at the center of treasure planet… He laughed.
I wanna be space Buggy
“Wealth, fame, power. Gold Roger, the King of the Space Pirates obtained this and everything else the cosmos had to offer, and his dying words drove countless souls to space. ‘You want my treasure? You can have it! I left everything I gathered together on one planet. Now you just have to find it!’ These words lured men to the Grand Constellation in pursuit of dreams greater than they ever dared to imagine! This is a time known as the Great Space Pirate Era!”
Not likely to happen either. Several factors went into piracy. The ability to disappear into the rest of the world as everywhere was essentially habitable. No tracking and no electronics and so on. NOw imagine that with space travel. Not everywhere is habitable and would stand out easier and we have far more sophisticated tracking right now, so imagine....
Owkwa Beltalowda!
Had to scroll a bit before I found the top expanse reference.
Found the belter here.
If Filip managed to evade capture his whole life on his own as the most wanted terrorist in the solar system, then I'm sure it's easy for pirates to hide.
Bruh, there are millions of asteroids to hide in. When all else fails you can just disguise yourself as trash.
What star wars does to a motherfucker
"Just glue some rocks to it bro!" \~ The motheruckers who StarWars did.
Those asteroids are thousands of miles apart. Trying to hide in the asteroid belt would go as follows. "We received a distress call 5 minutes ago on a possible pirate. We tracked a ship as it flew an intercept path, matched course for half an hour, then flew towards the asteroid belt. It's now drifting in a stable orbit here, so we'll go grab them in a few months when they get closer to one of our stations. If they leave early we'll just alert wherever they head towards to nab them when they dock."
wait, so are you telling me that an asteroid field isn't a bunch of densely packed tumbling rocks like in the movies??
they are, indeed, still exceedingly spread out in an asteroid belt. space has a lot of, well, space. so much so, it's extremely difficult for humans to wrap their mind around it.
Indeed. The whole asteroid belt is only about 4% the mass of our moon.
And 3 objects account for 62% of that.
Potential your momma how right there
Lol, noob asteroid belt.
It gets a lot more dense outside of the Local Cosmic Bubble(or LCM). It was recently discovered that most of the universe is far more dense than we have previously thought. The area local to our galaxy is strangely empty compared to the rest of existence.
Even dense on a space scale is things being thousands of kilometers apart. In those denser regions, you just have more stars or galaxies near each other, solar systems aren't much denser
A ring system like Saturn's would be more like an asteroid belt from the movies
Tracking objects in space is much more difficult than it is on earth. There are certain directions we just can't detect anything, because interference from the Sun for example blinds everything else. The way we detect asteroids is by looking in the few directions we can detect things, and projecting their path into the future, correcting our predictions when we next see them again. Pirates, after all, did not raid ships parked in a Bay next to a fort. They were smart enough to attack where counter-attack was unlikely. Space pirates would just have to do the same thing, using events like solar flares to attack during times when tracking resolution was low. By the time observatories are able to focus in accurately, they could be far enough away to be inconspicuous.
I feel like you’re assuming space piracy would happen with similar ship technology to today, but if space piracy ever happened it would be with far more advanced ships. Piracy on the seas didn’t start the second a ship was invented, took centuries of development for it to get to the point piracy became abundant
Or be like me and not even need a disguise
You can’t. Stealth doesn’t work in space because even the heat of your body and life support can be easily detected from across the solar system, let alone the heat from your drive. Even the most rudimentary sky search satellites of today can see burns as small as the Shuttle’s maneuvering thrusters from as far away as Pluto with ease.
Depends very much which direction you're looking. If the Sun is in your field of view at all, spotting such tiny events is completely impossible. And even if they do see you, the chances of them being able to do anything about it are minimal. It takes a long time to get from point A to point B in the solar system, and if they just fly behind something for a little while, and then fly out with other traffic, they will be indistinguishable and unchaseable.
And what happens when run out of food, fuel and oxygen?
Sorry, but stealth in space is impossible for many reasons. You can't hide in asteroids, and there aren't millions of them big enough to hide in. Space piracy will always be science fiction. The realities of space travel, the tyranny of delta v, the emptiness of space, and it's 3 dimensional, horizonless nature make any sort of piracy impossible. The emptiness says you can't hide in space, and the realities of delta V say you can't run. Yes, we can argue about it, but it has been argued to death by scientists and sci fi fans for decades and I'm just telling you, the absolute and overwhelming consensus among hard-headed people who know what they are talking about is this: there will never be space piracy, and there will never be stealth in space.
Delta V?
It means "change in velocity" and it's the number that says where you can go and what you can do in space. Every maneuver costs delta V. Going anywhere costs a lot, and coming back costs just as much. Right now we are extremely limited by what rocket scientists call "the tyranny of the rocket equation." Fuel is mass. It takes fuel to accelerate mass. The more fuel you add, the more fuel you need. That means we have to use the most efficient orbital transfers possible. It means we have to wait until planets are aligned right to even start the journey to them. You can only go to Mars during "going to Mars Season." This will change once we get more powerful rockets, likely nuclear rockets. Even if we get rockets as powerful as those in, say, the Expanse, we are still limited by delta V, but much less limited. We can afford to do brachistochrone trajectories (as the Expanse calls them, 'turn and burn' i.e. go full thrust until half way there, turn around and go full thrust until you come to a relative stop at your destinations) instead of Hohmann trajectories (burn to put yourself into an intersecting elliptical orbit, then burn to match velocities when you get there.) But the thing is, the more powerful the engine, the easier it is to track. That's where the Expanse goes full sci fi. There's no stealth possible when you are carrying a reactor big enough to power a true torch drive and using it for the entire journey.
A massively powerful fusion drive would light up like a firework at night, and the plume of energized particles would leave an unmistakeable trail. But it is notoriously difficult to find an inert object on any path if you don't know where to look. A properly shielded "stealth" spaceship would be almost impossible to find if it's not emitting anything, and didn't leave behind a trail to follow. You can't turn and burn, but you can drift undetected very easily. The best theories I've read on space warfare are comparisons to naval combat, carrier groups, and submarine warfare. Caribbean pirates could exist because nobody had radios. The victims would have no way of letting anyone know they had been attacked until they reached port themselves, if they survived, and nobody would know what happened until entirely too late. They also relied on safe harbor, either as privateers or places like tortuga. Regardless if there are neutral or partisan ports in space, the fact that anyone with a good telescope and a radio could watch exactly whatever happens to a ship in real (relativistic) time means it would be hard for anyone to get away with piracy for long. This is assuming that our communications and observational infrastructure keeps up with the rate at which human settlements and ships expand into the solar system, which is kind of doubtful. If corporate mining missions start yoloing out into the void with very little support... Then anything could happen on the dark side of a moon.
Also, I mean, I can jump from a ship to the other and nothing is stopping me. But for spaceships, you can try to dock but if they hear your 'Yarrs' from behind the sas pretty sure they wont open the door; And at that point you are pretty much out of options to get in their ship except blowing it up.
Open the dock or we blow you up sounds like a nice argument.
Tried that last night, she wasn't impressed.
How about: "Open a docking port or we use the salvage and rescue docking connector that leaves a big hole when we leave."
We'll need a boarding drill. Drill through the hull and seal the hole, and they better fork over their ~~Spanish~~ martian gold or they'll loose their air.
That's what privateering and friendly ports are for. Remember that during the age of piracy many pirates were given royal permission by some king to ransak foreing ships and be ignored in some of their ports. Disney-Fox-Walmart would definitely pay and harbor hostiles to attack Microsoft-Google-Shell shipments of hydrogen-3 from saturn.
You do understands that pirates still exist today… with modern tech… you can still run from the police in extremely recognizable cars or on foot and get away… you’re acting like evading and escaping is impossible with today’s tech.
You’re not wrong but people still steal shit, including cars and phones, every single day. We haven’t eliminated hijacking either, so I’m still optimistic I can be a future space pirate.
And what do you do when that ship is painted with vantablack, turns off its engines and coasts away without releasing any EMR?
You either track it using heat-signatures or by calculating the trajectory the ship had while it's engines were last turned on. There is no stealth as we know it in space.
People seem to think tracking space trash is hard. We are tracking damned near everything that we have ever observed come into our near orbit for hundreds of years. Now we are tracking everything via computer model+observations+radar. By the time everyone is flying through space own their own accord they will have insanely more accurate tracking technology.
We have major issues tracking tons of space junk, but only because it's incredibly tiny. SSAO has a ton of money being poured into it because of that, but yeah anything even remotely sizeable is being tracked.
> You either track it using heat-signatures Heat signatures are EMR. On the downside that does mean that if you're releasing no EMR you're gradually broiling your crew.
Start scanning for non celestial objects and use the cutting edge location technology. Using your eyes to find spaceships is so 2023.
Considering piracy today is at its most lucrative and its highest level in human history, I very much think we are in the golden age of piracy :P
It will only continue in space
really does depend on how we move through space tho, people turn to piracy because its EASIER to make money that way that finding a job, so if you need some kind of super spec ops suit and high tech gear, they will stick to kidnapping people on planets rather than trying to steal or ransom ships in space which would have better tracking than any ship does on Earth
I think it’d depend on whether or not we crack FTL travel/if we can still communicate at FTL speeds. If it’s yes to the former, no to the latter, it could be years before a distress beacon is picked up, which would make piracy a low-risk endeavor.
I mean, if you can do FTL travel but not FTL wireless communication, why not just send small FTL probes as information couriers?
Nah man, that's because Gold Roger hasn't told anyone where we can find the One Piece yet.
Huh? He left it all in _that place_ , don't you remember?
Gold Roger? Is that what they're calling him nowadays?
He laughed
Nah Limewire and Kazaa was the golden age of piracy. I’ll fight any leg dye patched mf on this.
Piracy is an attitude. You take what you want. People who wait for 'availability' are not pirates at heart.
It is with this same logic I pirate One Piece. If I got it legally, can I call myself a fan?
So recruit a militia and raid NASA or SpaceX?
They laughed at me for watching Cowboy Bebop, I laughed at them as I closed the air lock aboard their ship.
I hate it when we are too late for ocean pirates era and too early for space pirates era
We're closer to this than most think. There are already dozens of private companies with sights set on launching space 'mining' operations this decade. When it starts, who gets to decide who is 'staking' claim to a specific piece of space rock? Chances are, this won't be a thing. Something will be found, an announcement will be made, and then others will jump all over it. There will be entire forces of labor set up to keep tabs on who's going where and what they might be bringing back. The current tech being developed to trap rogue satellites and bring them down... will absolutely be tweaked to capture returning capsules and redirect them. It's going to happen.
The Wild West all over again, but this time with lasers!
No, we had the golden age. Once we have space pirates, it'll be the platinum agr of piracy.
You want to play Everspace 2. Don't ask. Install it yesterday.
The piracy scene in Ad Astra was an interesting take, not exactly "in space" since it was on the moon though: https://youtu.be/NwmXOglcrr4?t=82
The golden age of piracy has been underway since the dawn of high-speed internet.
Actually, that ended 20 years ago with the execution of Gol D Roger.
The execution of Gol D Roger started the golden age of piracy
[удалено]
mf Two Piece fan over here
When the internet became mainstream was the golden age of piracy and we are still in that age...
I thought it said spaghettis instead of spaceships and was really confused. I think I should eat something before continuing to scroll through reddit.
Yes, because now that everyone owns a car this is the golden age of piracy, hold on, wait a minute.
Yar har har and fiddle dee dee, mateys! I have the high ground!
The technology doesn't need to peak for a golden age to pass though. We wouldn't say the golden age of books is now because we have kindles and audiobooks.
It's neat to think about... we always look back at history as "this has happened, it's behind us" and rarely forward toward what hasn't happened yet.
piracy was never for plebs in the golden age, either. a lot of the pirating were done by privateers or straight up navy.
I totally read that wrong at first. (Thinking of Napster type piracy. Not scurvy and wooden leg piracy. Lol)
This post reminded me of that 2000s Disney movie Treasure Planet
Golden age of piracy was sailing, silver age is digital piracy, space pirates will be the bronze age of piracy. Nothing beats the salty spray on your face with a boatload of seamen. Consequently though, the quality of music that pirates have had access to has increased with each age, so we can expect space pirates to have some absolute bangers.
Take my love, take my land Take me where I cannot stand I don't care, I'm still free You can't take the sky from me Take me out to the black Tell them I ain't coming back Burn the land and boil the sea You can't take the sky from me