First type of ship will, obviously, be transport ships to bring in valuable materials.
Nope. This space, vacuum, the big black nothingness. If want to "ship" something in space you can just lob it onto an appropriate trajectory and let mass carry it to its destination. Even you need to say keep it warm and humid you can just place into appropriate cargo containters and possibly attach ion engines. At most you need cargo containers with solar sails, ion engines, or something else efficient, for many things you can just let gravity do the work for you.
So, the second type of ship will, doubtlessly, be some sort of interceptor that PIRATES will use to intercept the merchandise!
Also doubtful. I predict that internal tracking will be cheap enough that each sample can be tagged with a tracking system (either a solar version of GPS or internial trajectory monitoring). Once you say start to move say a few tons of platinum out of its predefined trajectory the container would sense it is being accelerated off its trajectory and send out a distress call (or wire it up deadman). At which point some type of defensive measure is going to be taken, long before a minimally powered cargo container can be hijacked. The only things that might really need a ship are those that cannot have a long time of flight (people, animals, medicines, etc.).
Far more likely than priracy would be some form of privateer paid, equipped, and supplied by a clandestinely warring government.
The third type of ship would be a first generation escort ship to protect the cargo hauler from pirates.
The first type of ship will be military, most likely something to seize space supremacy, this will begin once space supremacy cannot be acheived from the ground as it currently is today.
The second type of ship would be some type of escort to protect the cargo from meteor impacts, missile attacks, etc. Once economic warfare is adopted by some entity in space then these ships will be uparmed to fight privateers and legitimate commerce raiders.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression that ancient boats were all tranport boats, and the notion of sea combat appeared when pirates got to intercepting trade routes.
Sea combat has been known in the earliest histories of warfare. Piracy likely didn't spark naval conflict as the first target would have been to sink the boats of rival fishermen to starve them in some prehistoric conflict.
As for weapons.... What about Railguns of sorts? Given that there is no air resistance in space, a super-accelerated piece of metal would be terrbily damaging (I recall a picture of a hole made on a metal plate by a super-accelerated speck of DUST). Also, firing slugs of metal would be cheap enough not to worry too much about precision. Hey, you could even try and calculate the orbit of your projectiles around a planet to hit ships not in your line of sight! (Wacky, I know)
Sensor technology will work at c. Given the ranges at which detection occur long before you have short enough ToF for an unguided munition, a long range
course correcting missile will be able home in on your ass. Let's say all space ships are spheres 1 km in diameter. You have to weight until your gun has the enemy bracketed into +/- 500 meters, including evasion while the projectile is flight. A guided missile can do much better if it is fired twice as far away with +/- 1 km it can vector in and keep decreasing its error bars. It is entirely possible for missiles to have stupendously greater effective ranges than even lasers, let alone massive projectiles.
In any realistic future space society, it can be demonstrated that the cargoes a ship would carry will be significantly less valuable than the ships themselves. The ships will be enormously expensive, require expensive maintenance, and require highly-trained crews with college degrees and technical certifications sticking out of every bodily orifice.
That assumes that modern attitudes about slavery don't change. It is quite likely that the crew and passengers of a cargo ship would be more valueable than the ship.
Likewise you are also assuming that extortionary 'piracy' and simply capturing the prize ship itself are not viable.
Yes there is a very narrow range of viable piracy options in the future that only occur under special circumstances; much of this will due to the fact that stellar shipping itself sucks.
Any real criminal space pirates will likely be small-time operators working at the places where the cargo is recieved and disposed of. They'll probably be white-collar criminals, cooking the books to skim off inflated profits, or buying up and reselling space cargoes as a way of laundering money made in more traditional criminal activities.
Extortion would still be a good living. A commericial vessel is not going to have much chance of surviving a run in with combat vessel, even a converted privateer. Some mutinious crew could make a decent living merely by lining ships up in the missile sights and then extorting negotiables (money, stock, or whatever) from the passengers and crew for the privilege of not dying. All that would require is some place where the pirates could bank.
Although I must digress with your assertion. I think the premise of establishing trade routes or passenger transport implies that the technology is commonplace and attainable for non-government agencies and individuals. Take spaceflight today as an example, since it is high tech, it is prohibitely costly to ride a rocket up to space, and so far only a couple gazillionaires have managed to do it.
Space doesn't require ships to move goods. Throw a cargo container into spiralling trajectory and it will make it to the destination with minimal thrust. Only a very small subset of what is transported via ships today will require ships to transport it then. Extortion, slaving, and prize nabbing are all possibilities, stealing the cargo seems unlikely unless there is a reason why real warships can't be on patrol.
There will be no amateur and hobbyist space pilots.
No those will exist. Once you get into space it is ludicriously cheap to "pilot" around. The caveat is that thou shalt not move significantly up a gravity well for cheap. If you have a moderately affordable transport between Luna and Titan there will be some idiot who builds his own little box equipped with an ion engine and life support who opts to ride down the gravity well. Such amateurs obviously can't sustain economic activity, but they will exist as a snob hobby among the ludicriously rich (much how certain billionaires fly disarmed fighter jets).
A better example is this. Right now, Piracy does not exist in any form greater than a bunch of indonisian speedboats with Uzis. It's not like back in the day, where an occasional privateer/pirate could have a military type ship. Right now, no criminal can possibly have a Destroyer or missile cruiser. Or even a frigate or the like.
Why would that change, when having modern fighting ships gets even more expensive?
The reason piracy doesn't exist today is because the USN, and to a lesser extent the RN, French Navy, JSDF, etc. have many extremely powerful warships that trump anything pirate can bring to bear. However these ships do not exist solely to beat the crap out of pirates who would be stupid enough to up arm their ships. Anti-piracy is something modern navies do when they aren't off fighting wars, training to fight wars, or dealing with disasters.
The last time privateers/pirates were successful was backed before the world had a naval superpower with an inordinately large warfleet with nothing to do in peacetime. In space extortionary piracy will be viable when such a fleet doesn't exist (because it hasn't been cost effective to build yet), or when it is off doing something else (like say pounding the crap out of Ceres colony). The most likely return of privateers would come when some power wanted to commence commerce raiding, but with plausible deniability.
Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes.
