Space pirates

[tmazanec1]

Does this old trope make any sense at all?

[Bakustra]

Yes, if the following conditions are true: a) interstellar travel is common enough, quick enough, and cheap enough to ensure a steady flow of trade between settled systems, b) it's possible and relatively easy for interstellar travelers to be intercepted by other travelers, c) the armed forces of the different systems/companies are relatively on par with the pirates, and d) there are sufficient areas where pirates are able to flourish. These areas can take the form of "free ports" willing to shelter pirates in exchange for the pirates' protection, planets/systems that endorse piracy, and/or starships being able to easily be repaired in situ by pirates, allowing them to use uninhabitable systems as bases. These were the conditions that existed during the Golden Age of Piracy here on Earth, where most space pirates are drawn from, and in areas such as Somalia where naval intervention is unable to dislodge pirates permanently, or indeed any of the areas where piracy has existed and continues to exist.

Whether these conditions hold true in sci-fi is up to the writer. Whether they could exist in plausible extrapolations of the future- probably not interstellarly, but in-system pirates may well be able to work.

[Sarevok]

Depends on the goods being traded between planets and stations. If it was merely refined ore or propellant no one would bother with stealing the cargo. They would just take the ship and possibly hold the crew hostage Somali style.

[Bakustra]

Depends on the goods being traded between planets and stations. If it was merely refined ore or propellant no one would bother with stealing the cargo. They would just take the ship and possibly hold the crew hostage Somali style.

Sarevok, you are aware that that is still considered piracy, right?

[Rossum]

Actually, I'm pretty sure that stealing other ships (even if they are cargo ships or whatever other utility ships they might be) would be one of the biggest things Space Pirates would try to do. Even if the ship is really crummy when compared to other ships one could acquire, you can always sell it or salvage parts from it to keep your better ships operational. Plus, if the cargo you find isn't something you want, you can probably find an uninhabited moon or asteroid somewhere to store the stuff for as long as you want.

Plus, pirates would likely be more interested in stuff like food, medicine, fuel, or other goods they need to keep their ship running then they would in acquiring a bunch of gold or whatnot. Getting supplies you can use is better than getting supplies you don't. Stealing fuel from other ships would probably be a good idea unless fuel is incredibly easy to come by otherwise.

And another thought is that since space is a vacuum then people might not need big expensive ships to move some types of cargo around. If they are moving raw ore, refined metal, or other things they could probably build some kind of catapult thing that just launches the material towards the destination and let the object float there on its own until the guys at the destination catch it (or have unmanned probes carry the stuff if automation is okay). Then its just a matter of somebody deciding that it would be cool to take their ship out where they can steal whatever is being sent from point A to point B.

Piracy is basically theft and theft is basically you taking something that somebody else thinks doesn't belong to you. As long as there is stuff in space that someone thinks they own, and another person decides to take it without asking, then that's the basic seed of space piracy right there.

If someone seeds an asteroid belt with Von Neuman self replicators to acquire refined material from it and someone else comes by to steal some of those replicating robots then that's theft. You could argue that stealing someones astrochickens or their dyson tree would be more like cattle rustling or poaching... but I'm sure the average space pirate would resort to that if they deemed it profitable.

[Traveller]

No space piracy does not make any sort of sense at all. Saying something like IF space travel is cheap and common, then yes, space piracy is likely to occur is little more than handwaveing. In fiction, where anything can be made possible simply writing words down on paper, then, I agree, space pirates are a trivial matter, then again, so is blowing up a star. In reality however, space travel is incredibly expensive, in monetary terms, in terms of personel, materials and skills, energy, everything. Space is also a very hostile enviroment to survive in. Somalia is no garden of eden, but liveing there compared to existing in space, where you would be flagged as an outlaw would be well impossible, even if we allowed the unlikely premise you could get access to ships,skill-sets, life-support and raw-materials necessary to survive between boardings. Even "wealthy" nation-states on our own balkanized world are finding the strain of maintaining manned space programs of extremely modest scope difficult to maintain. Space travel, and trade, will always be the domain of planetary scale efforts or those of the largest commerical corporations, even if signifigant cost reductions could be realized(questionable). Being a pirate on earth is easy, all you need is say, a dozen dirtbags(or less even), no real skills or education required, some assualt rifles($500-1000per) a crappy boat,(probably stolen itself), some gas(also probably stolen) and one person with some basic navigation skill. IE, can read a map or has access to the internet to check shipping routes etc. Bang your a pirate gang. Now, try to take that, and translate it into the vastly different enviroment of outer space. Good luck with that.

However, if we were to accept the dubious notion that space pirates could actually function in any meaningful way. We can see just how easy it would be to counter-act a "pirate" boarding in space. Lets assume for example, your cargo ship is being threatened by your local band of villanous space pirates. They clearly would need to capture the ship intact for it and its cargo to be of any value whatsoever. Depending on what kind of drive your target ship has, they can simply flip around and hose the incoming pirate ship with there drive exhaust. Problem solved. Or, if that is not practical, just start dumping whatever scrap metal you have lying around, cargo containers whatnot, one, impact, and again, you will no longer have a pirate problem. Assumeing they manage to survive even these simple counter-measures, captureing your valuable cargo of "I went to Uranus and All I got was this lousy T-shirt" you planned on selling on Mars, will no longer be at the top of there to-do list.

Space pirates, Not likely.

[Kingmaker]

Space pirates in fiction are plausible given the conditions that Bakustra already mentions; so long as it is feasible and profitable to earn a living through piracy, there will probably be some people who will partake in it. As an addendum to the conditions Bakustra mentioned, it helps to have a large population of unemployed ex-military personnel who are violently opposed to gainful employment from which the pirate crews may be drawn.

However, space pirates are probably not going to be using proper warships, as they do occasionally in some space operas. If they have warships at all, they will be small and poorly maintained. It is far more likely that pirates will be using civilian ships with some guns bolted on.

Lets assume for example, your cargo ship is being threatened by your local band of villanous space pirates. They clearly would need to capture the ship intact for it and its cargo to be of any value whatsoever.

Or they could match velocity with your cargo ship at standoff range, get a shooting solution with their space guns, and phone corporation space headquarters on Mars and say "Send us a million spacebucks in the next two hours, or else we blow the shit out of your 50 million spacebuck cargo ship and its 25 man crew."

[Sarevok]

Depends on the goods being traded between planets and stations. If it was merely refined ore or propellant no one would bother with stealing the cargo. They would just take the ship and possibly hold the crew hostage Somali style.

Sarevok, you are aware that that is still considered piracy, right?

Of course but that is not often seen in scifi. Consider a space trader game which often have detailed space economies and space pirates.

Say X3 or Freelancer for example. The pirate are after the cargo. They will happily blast a spaceship to bits if it means they can salvage at least some of what it was carrying.
They won't even try to just grab the ship instead. Even if said ship is a million credit freighter and hauling water ice they will just go after the H2O and blow up the ship to get it.

Of course I might be wrong and many written scifi do it differently. But most of my expouser to space piracy comes from visual media and there pirates are universally dumb. They go after worthless cargo even when going by in universe prices capturing the ship is lot more valuable.

[Sarevok]

However, space pirates are probably not going to be using proper warships, as they do occasionally in some space operas. If they have warships at all, they will be small and poorly maintained. It is far more likely that pirates will be using civilian ships with some guns bolted on.

The accessibility of FTL technology also has an impact on this. Suppose like the Battletech universe FTL drives are huge and can only be mounted on gargantuan capships and supertanker analogue vessels.

Thus pirates and their small craft will need carrier vessel to operate from. This vessel will be very expensive and irreplaceable. The Pirates will want to arm it to the teeth to protect it or preferably use a genuine warship instead as the carrier vessel.

[Bakustra]

I'm going to break your post down a little for clarity of response.

No space piracy does not make any sort of sense at all. Saying something like IF space travel is cheap and common, then yes, space piracy is likely to occur is little more than handwaveing. In fiction, where anything can be made possible simply writing words down on paper, then, I agree, space pirates are a trivial matter, then again, so is blowing up a star. In reality however, space travel is incredibly expensive, in monetary terms, in terms of personel, materials and skills, energy, everything. Space is also a very hostile enviroment to survive in. Somalia is no garden of eden, but liveing there compared to existing in space, where you would be flagged as an outlaw would be well impossible, even if we allowed the unlikely premise you could get access to ships,skill-sets, life-support and raw-materials necessary to survive between boardings. Even "wealthy" nation-states on our own balkanized world are finding the strain of maintaining manned space programs of extremely modest scope difficult to maintain. Space travel, and trade, will always be the domain of planetary scale efforts or those of the largest commerical corporations, even if signifigant cost reductions could be realized(questionable).

Okay, first of all, I'm pretty sure that nobody was suggesting that space pirates might pop up within the next twenty years or so. But what you're suggesting is that space travel will only ever be done with the full might of a planet, because NASA is the whipping boy for American budgets and Russia has not developed in the face of economic collapse and transition into a kleptocracy. I don't really think that you can extrapolate indefinitely from the current state of affairs to conclude that development of space or cheap space travel are impossible.

Being a pirate on earth is easy, all you need is say, a dozen dirtbags(or less even), no real skills or education required, some assualt rifles($500-1000per) a crappy boat,(probably stolen itself), some gas(also probably stolen) and one person with some basic navigation skill. IE, can read a map or has access to the internet to check shipping routes etc. Bang your a pirate gang. Now, try to take that, and translate it into the vastly different enviroment of outer space. Good luck with that.

Let's translate this into space, yes. There's no reason why there couldn't be cheap or stolen spaceships maintainable by an independent crew, as long as they had bases of support, and it's quite possible that in the far-off world of the future, there will be a number of people trained in spacecraft operation, as existed in the Golden Age of Piracy. Again, there are a number of ways to make things similar to the Golden Age of Piracy that most fiction draws upon, let alone the modern styles of piracy, or other historical methods.

However, if we were to accept the dubious notion that space pirates could actually function in any meaningful way. We can see just how easy it would be to counter-act a "pirate" boarding in space. Lets assume for example, your cargo ship is being threatened by your local band of villanous space pirates. They clearly would need to capture the ship intact for it and its cargo to be of any value whatsoever. Depending on what kind of drive your target ship has, they can simply flip around and hose the incoming pirate ship with there drive exhaust. Problem solved. Or, if that is not practical, just start dumping whatever scrap metal you have lying around, cargo containers whatnot, one, impact, and again, you will no longer have a pirate problem. Assumeing they manage to survive even these simple counter-measures, captureing your valuable cargo of "I went to Uranus and All I got was this lousy T-shirt" you planned on selling on Mars, will no longer be at the top of there to-do list.

Space pirates, Not likely.

Talking about how implausible pirates are and then ripping off a Larry Niven bit seems a bit inconsistent. You're proposing that pirates cannot deal with space debris, because you're thinking that the Space Shuttle is the pinnacle of human achievement for space travel. But at the same time, we either have drives powerful and focused enough to ensure the destruction of other spaceships at ranges of hundreds or thousands of kilometers, or we have a future where spaceships come within handshake distance regularly. Quite realistic either way.

Depends on the goods being traded between planets and stations. If it was merely refined ore or propellant no one would bother with stealing the cargo. They would just take the ship and possibly hold the crew hostage Somali style.

Sarevok, you are aware that that is still considered piracy, right?

Of course but that is not often seen in scifi. Consider a space trader game which often have detailed space economies and space pirates.

Say X3 or Freelancer for example. The pirate are after the cargo. They will happily blast a spaceship to bits if it means they can salvage at least some of what it was carrying.
They won't even try to just grab the ship instead. Even if said ship is a million credit freighter and hauling water ice they will just go after the H2O and blow up the ship to get it.

Of course I might be wrong and many written scifi do it differently. But most of my expouser to space piracy comes from visual media and there pirates are universally dumb. They go after worthless cargo even when going by in universe prices capturing the ship is lot more valuable.

Man! It's... it's almost as if the Caribbean style of piracy is romanticized and emplaced in popular culture, while other forms of piracy are less prominent! And since those pirates traditionally went after cargo, why, then, the writers make the pirates go after cargo, rather than developing an economy that makes sense!!

[Stofsk]

Weren't some of the most notable pirates actually privateers, with a letter of marque to prey on the ships of rival nations? Assuming you have a bunch of space nations and frequent trade between them, it seems plausible to me that you would have privateers engage in piracy in a (somewhat) deniable manner.

Another option is you'd have 'piracy' but it would come in the form of hijacks from passengers because the ship is more valuable than the cargo. I suppose it depends on your assumptions. A lot of sci-fi makes the analogy that spaceships are like an extension of the wet navy, so pirates would be more interested in cargo so on. What if it were more analogous to air travel? You'd see more hijacks instead. Or maybe some combo.

[Bakustra]

Weren't some of the most notable pirates actually privateers, with a letter of marque to prey on the ships of rival nations? Assuming you have a bunch of space nations and frequent trade between them, it seems plausible to me that you would have privateers engage in piracy in a (somewhat) deniable manner.

Another option is you'd have 'piracy' but it would come in the form of hijacks from passengers because the ship is more valuable than the cargo. I suppose it depends on your assumptions. A lot of sci-fi makes the analogy that spaceships are like an extension of the wet navy, so pirates would be more interested in cargo so on. What if it were more analogous to air travel? You'd see more hijacks instead. Or maybe some combo.

They did. The other major source of piracy came from shipwrecked sailors who'd try to lure ships in and then seize them when the crew landed- the famous buccaneers. The conditions of space make this a little less profitable, but imagine a desperate few, left without engine power on an asteroid or having made a crash landing on Mars or the Moon....

Keep in mind that historically, the most valuable cargo pirates usually had was ship parts- sails, rigging, pre-cut lumber. I can easily imagine spare parts being the most valuable cargo for space pirates too.

[Rossum]

Or, the cargo might be simply thrown out of one port in the direction of another, without having a ship at all, or, a minimal robot ship. In those cases, physically hitting it, attaching your own engine, or, cliched but might work, hacking in might redirect it to a place where you can pick it up later.

There's so many possibilities I could go on all day.)

Thats kind of what I thought. Due to the lack of gravity and air resistance in space it wouldn't be very hard to just launch an object towards its destination and just wait for inertia to take it there.

I once read a short story where two men in a cargo ship were on a month or so long journey when a meteor hit them and managed to take out the main oxygen reserve and back-up system. They found they had about a few weeks at most before they ran out of oxygen (or the filters ran out or whatever) and one character mused that there was literally no reason for them to worry about the cargo or the ship because even if the thing ran out of fuel or broke down then it would just continue on its trajectory forever. If they died and the company decided to forget the ship and cargo then the thing would just keep orbiting around the planets forever and future generations could set their watches to it (eventually one of the men had to sacrifice himself so that they other would have enough air to make it home, the two were in contact with the space port so they let people know of their plan before they did so).


So depending on the potential response time for authorities to respond to such attacks, pirates could attack a ship to disable its engines or life support and then just tow the thing towards wherever they want it to go. Or they could set up stuff like space mines or traps along possible trade routes, let the automated system disable their prey, then swoop in once they are sure there is something for them to grab. It would be alot like going through the wrecks of a space battle except they have a way to ensure there are some wrecks for them to salvage.

If there are robot space pirates then that opens up all sorts of possibilities. I imagine that space pirates who don't need life-support would have a much easier time attacking people and salvaging stuff from wrecks. This could be a good reason for ships to have self-destruct systems built into them... who wants to spend billions to make a huge warship only to have it disabled in battle, then a few decades later some robotic space pirates come by to fix the thing up and you've got a pirate run warship on your hands.

Or there could be some kind of rogue AI or Borg-like survivors who take over ships and assimilate their crew in order to propagate themselves. They lack the resources to turn into a major power but will do whatever it takes to keep from getting wiped out completely.

[someone_else]

Does this old trope make any sense at all?

Yes. But won't look anywhere like Pirates of Caribbean (the usual depiction of Space Pirates, so this answer can be interpreted as "No" as well, depending on what you meant for "old trope" above).

Cargo vessels aren't going to have any crew, since even modern computers can handle pretty much everything you ask from a space-based cargo vessel for a fraction of the price of a human crew (that requires heavy and complex life-support, rad protection and a way to not get mad on long voyages, also pays, insurances, and other annoying stuff).
With reaction engines and their rules, engines with an acceleration allowing space commerce at all are going to give off your position weeks before interception, and if you have acceleration measured in gees (earth gravities one gee=9.81 m/s) then they can see you from interplanetary distances just as well.
There is no way to jam the cargo ship's automated cry for help (it will see you far before you get in jamming range).
There is also no way to actually board the other vessel due to its exaust torching off anything so daring to get close (a few times, at least).
Being automated and all in a vacuum there is also very little to actually do after you boarded it other than hack the computer (if doable at all), but anyway.

They will know what ship you used (the cargo transmits them the sensor logs while you are closing) and what specs it has. If the engine tech allows high acceleration engines (one or more gees) they will also track you to your hideout from their own bases.

Space tech is generally much more expensive than the average sea vessel, and much more complex as well. You need a high-tech place to do any kind of servicing, and decently trained personnel to operate and service your stuff safely.
It is likely going to be roughly comparable to aircrafts as levels of complexity and skilled personnel required. There is little place for random fuckers with rifles, you need at least ex-military guys turned mercenaries to get the job done.

Also, you aren't going to steal an interplanetary spaecraft so easily. They have at least weeks to send another vessel with higher thrust to get on your ass faster than you can escape while your engine shines like a beacon in their sensors.
It's comparable to people on Earth trying to steal the average cargo ship. You're not going to run away with it, nor manage to hide it in open sea (hiding it in a bay is roughly equivalent to getting in another planet's orbit, and you don't have the time for that).
The tiny vessels used by pirates here on Earth are comparable to orbital tugs and shuttles (very low endurance crafts). You're not going to intercept anything serious with them (unless it is acting very very very very stupidly anyway).

Conventional Pirates will need a very wealthy patron to start up, and political connections able to shelter them, since their main weaknesses is the logistical support bases. Much much harder to keep secret than in the Caribbean days.

I mean, making wooden vessels wasn't a so complex issue requiring ludicrous precision and semiconductors made with rare earths. You cannot fabbricate all yourself unless you have a *big* base, the spare part traffic will give you away pretty fast if you're not very careful.

---------------------------------------

Now let's depart a little from the usual Pirates of the Caribbeans IN SPAAACE!!! theme and get into something slightly more likely to happen in space. Still relying on a few assumptions, but could theoretically happen.

Say, companies start to exploit space (first assumption). No nation gives a fuck about claiming things around as "his own" due to the outer space treaty or somesuch (second assumption).

Now they have cargo shipments from their fabs around the solar system, and some happen to be in competition (third assumption).

What will they do other than trying to undercut each other?
Trying to steal or redirect each other's shipments of course.
Why? Because telling "Company A is stealing my stuff" to authorities may not be possible (the pirate vessel doesn't come from Company A's bases, and isn't traceable back to Company A in any way), or not practical (none gives a fuck or can do a fuck about it, extraterriatorality and stuff) or may not be good PR.

So, they will send automated tugs to steal or slow down the competitor's shipping (or missiles to outright destroy them if it's too complex to do otherwise), while buffing their own shipment's defences. The answer is an arms race, until the amount of shippings lost to pirates is low enough (at an affordable cost) to be acceptable.

Still, it's mostly a Missile Duel, short, lethal, the side with decent numerical advantage wins 99% of the times.
And there is no guy onboard either vessel.

In short: a story about this will likely focus on the people deciding stuff at home, and not on the fights themselves (that are rather boring).

Say X3 or Freelancer for example. The pirate are after the cargo. They will happily blast a spaceship to bits if it means they can salvage at least some of what it was carrying.

Speaking for X3 (and X2 and X3 TC for that matter), that's just because they were very lazy in coding the Space Pirate AI (which is exactly the same as the "kill this ship" combat autopilot command). They don't even scoop stuff up afterwards (a neat opportunity for a player, camp close to a group of pirates while you are friendly with them with a cargo vessel running the command "scoop up stuff").
Players playing pirate usually go after the ship (who would have guessed? ).

Thats kind of what I thought. Due to the lack of gravity and air resistance in space it wouldn't be very hard to just launch an object towards its destination and just wait for inertia to take it there.

The main problem is that you need it to match the speed of the destination to have a cargo barge and not a kinetic impactor. Everything is orbiting the Sun one way or another.
You can do it with huge coilguns/railguns, but that tends to be very very slow and have very limited launch windows.
Assuming you have space engines that can do better than that (usually a given for the setting's existence, since it's not like you can build such huge coilguns out of thin air), you will have cheaper cargo barges that use crappier engines, and that can coast for a long time (even years if you don't give a fuck), but that's still a cheap robotic ship.

I once read a short story where two men in a cargo ship were on a month or so long journey when a meteor hit them and managed to take out the main oxygen reserve and back-up system. They found they had about a few weeks at most before they ran out of oxygen (or the filters ran out or whatever) and one character mused that there was literally no reason for them to worry about the cargo or the ship because even if the thing ran out of fuel or broke down then it would just continue on its trajectory forever.

They could have jettisoned the cargo and some fuel (the fuel needed to push the cargo is no more needed if you jettison it). If they could dump a significant mass (and the fuel usually has a significant mass on a spacecraft), their engine could have been be able to bring them to the destination in time.
They should have first tried if the trick could have worked on their navicomputer, of course.

The conditions of space make this a little less profitable, but imagine a desperate few, left without engine power on an asteroid or having made a crash landing on Mars or the Moon....

If your engine fails, 99.99% you slingshot in deep space. period. This makes such occurrences somewhat rare.

[Simon_Jester]

Thats kind of what I thought. Due to the lack of gravity and air resistance in space it wouldn't be very hard to just launch an object towards its destination and just wait for inertia to take it there.

The main problem is that you need it to match the speed of the destination to have a cargo barge and not a kinetic impactor. Everything is orbiting the Sun one way or another.
You can do it with huge coilguns/railguns, but that tends to be very very slow and have very limited launch windows.
Assuming you have space engines that can do better than that (usually a given for the setting's existence, since it's not like you can build such huge coilguns out of thin air), you will have cheaper cargo barges that use crappier engines, and that can coast for a long time (even years if you don't give a fuck), but that's still a cheap robotic ship.

An interplanetary robotic cargo ship might just be a big box for some cargo containers with a 0.01g ion engine bolted on; relatively easy to steal- but the problem of the thief being visible from several AU away is still there.

[Formless]

Actually, stealth for space pirates is comparatively easy to do; for starters, pirates need not do their business in deep space where every jackass with a telescope can see them. They might operate exclusively around planetary bodies where they can take advantage of sensor shadows to nab their targets at exactly the moment where the fewest authorities can see them (i.e. they hide behind the moon and wait for you to pass before grabbing your ship). Or they might operate in the ports themselves rather than stealing spacecraft mid-flight. If we go with the space hijacker idea, they obviously will have no ships of their own except perhaps as some kind of getaway vehicle; you would be more worried about passenger listings and spaceport security (oh god, that gives me an idea-- TSA IN SPAAAACE!!! you could go on and on about security theater and space terrorists and SHROOM SHROOM SHROOM. ).

If they do preform attacks during interplanetary flights, they might do so in areas with heavy traffic; meaning that you can see them but you can't predict who is flying a pirate ship and who is civilian and once the job is done they can disappear back into the crowd. Or they might operate in places and times where they expect few people to be watching-- it doesn't matter how easy it is to see you if no one is around to see it. Maybe the place is particularly dangerous, and the only reason traffic goes through there is necessity-- say there is a war going on, but shipping cannot be allowed to stop; so pirates, privateers, insurgents, and even political activists patrol the shipping lanes looking to capitalize on the security force having bigger things to worry about (like military stealth attacks a la u-boat warfare). And there is always the possibility of corruption-- an official that's been bribed is better than any cloaking device for a pirate. The space mafia might own the judges, the Space Robber Barons own the police, and ordinary people almost have to play the "protection money" game just to avoid getting into an "accident".

And then there is the political side with state sponsored privateers, terrorists, and scams. You might see an attack in progress, but the comm chatter seems to indicate you are dealing with a bounty hunter confiscating evidence on behalf of a national entity. It might be legit, it might be sanctioned but controversial, and it might even be a case of criminals impersonating the police. Do you (the guy watching the hypothetical sensor platform) intervene and risk an international incident? Or mind your own business and hope your superiors deal with it?

Edit: oh, and being able to see you does not necessarily mean everyone knows what you are up to. You might jam the target's communications with everyone but yourself, make your demands, then tell everyone they had reactor troubles and don't mind us we're just completing their flight for them.

[someone_else]

A space ship can be as simple as a blow up box. There's no reason they have to be expensive or intricate.

It all comes down to the performance you are looking for. If you can wait 5-10 years for your cargo from the inner system (and much more from the outer system), then what you say is correct.
If you want it delivered in a better timescale, you either start playing with nukes (to give it a single strong punch from a very compact package), or you put somewhat complex and expensive engines on it. To have any kind of performance, you're literally taming a tiny star or a nuke in your engine.

If you man-rate your vessel, it's going to become intricate, complex and expensive as hell. There is no escape, since pretty much any system on a spacecraft is necessary for the delivery of (living) human passengers.

If you rely on a huge laserstation pushing your stuff around, your "vessels" are little more than space-worthy shipping containers with a mirror or sail.
But a so powerful laser station can (among other things) incinerate any fucker in the inner system just as easily. Space Pirates will have to become much more vicious to survive in such environment.

An interplanetary robotic cargo ship might just be a big box for some cargo containers with a 0.01g ion engine bolted on

As above, just that ion drives won't get anywehre near that much thrust due to design limitations (you would need the Death Star's power generators to run them at such power levels).
Not even fusion concepts I've seen on papers (with some minor handwaving common to any fusion concept anyway) manage to get over 0.008 g. Not that it sucks, though. They say you can go to Pluto in a year (with enough fuel to come home too) with that.

If they do preform attacks during interplanetary flights, they might do so in areas with heavy traffic;

There is no such area in interplanetary flight proper (after you are clear of the orbital space). Too big distances involved, and each craft has a slightly different course. And slightly different specs.
Unless you are moving truly huge amounts of stuff (like bringing in atmosphere from the outer system to terraform Mars), that is.

Or they might operate in places and times where they expect few people to be watching

In the situation above, the only spotter needed is the cargo's own automated sensor suite (that is constantly looking around, tirelessly like all machines). After it detects a guy in an interception course (and it will see them coming between weeks and days before actual hull contact), it will tell what it sees to its owners while it is well beyond the pirate's jammers range. Not that the owners can do a shit about it, unless the cargo is armed and can fire salvoes of KKVs up your ass.
Although you can manage to have a planet/moon between it and its owners's comm systems, and negate its cry for help.
You need a suitable place and a suitable victim on a suitable orbit.

Apart from that, you give some pretty good ideas for would-be space pirates in your post.
More centered on smart thinking (and good old trickery) than on gimmicks to achieve actual stealth.

[Simon_Jester]

An interplanetary robotic cargo ship might just be a big box for some cargo containers with a 0.01g ion engine bolted on

As above, just that ion drives won't get anywehre near that much thrust due to design limitations (you would need the Death Star's power generators to run them at such power levels).

Oops.

OK, I didn't really work that one through; I just picked a "low acceleration" number and attached a known highly efficient "low acceleration" engine type. Sorry.

[someone_else]

Thrust != acceleration != usefulness.

Yeah, I sometimes exchange the first two. They are somewhat linked though (thrust is a force and F=m*a), so it's not totally wrong.
About usefullness, I'd like to point out that commercial use has different needs than scientific use.

While Isp tells you if your craft can do a route at all, Thrust tells you if it can be done affordably.

Scientific probes can do all kinds of ludicrously time-expensive routes (slingshotting around the solar system) since they aren't making money (directly, anyway). A cargo ship has to bring cash for your enterprise in a decent timescale.

Higher thrust (at the same Isp) means you can take a more direct route, and with wider launch windows. OR to take a crappy slow route with a BIG payload.

Technically, your fast couriers could have the same engines of your cargo barges (yay! mass-production!).
The only thing that will really make a difference will be if they are man-rated or not.

There's so many factors involved that you can't just say lol something won't happen.

It's a different environment damnit, what were you expecting? I'm just stating some obvious problems.

On the other hand, if your settlements are packed together, there's a lot more stuff going on and much shorter distances, so mixing in with a crowd and using simpler ships is much easier.

I was wondering, what if the crowd becomes the best defence? I mean, jamming communications gives away your position easily, and others will smell that you're doing bad things.
You also have much less time to do your businness before the orbital taxi/transport arrives to destination OR the Space Police (or a hero-wannabe) arrives.

[Formless]

There is no such area [with heavy traffic] in interplanetary flight proper (after you are clear of the orbital space). Too big distances involved, and each craft has a slightly different course. And slightly different specs.
Unless you are moving truly huge amounts of stuff (like bringing in atmosphere from the outer system to terraform Mars), that is.

Do you realize how slight those fight path differences are going to be? Plantary bodies move slowly enough that most flight paths are going to follow similar routs to take advantage of plantary gravity wells, unless you have torch drives that can go in straight lines between planets in which case you're assummptions are invalid. Also, the vast distances are an advantage of this strategy, because it means that the authorities watching for pirates have that much more space and ships to keep track of. If the authorities lose track of even a few ships per year, then there will be pirates who take those odds.

In the situation above, the only spotter needed is the cargo's own automated sensor suite (that is constantly looking around, tirelessly like all machines). After it detects a guy in an interception course (and it will see them coming between weeks and days before actual hull contact), it will tell what it sees to its owners while it is well beyond the pirate's jammers range. Not that the owners can do a shit about it, unless the cargo is armed and can fire salvoes of KKVs up your ass.
Although you can manage to have a planet/moon between it and its owners's comm systems, and negate its cry for help.
You need a suitable place and a suitable victim on a suitable orbit.

Its not the ship itself that you need to fool, because the ship itself has as much of a need to confirm that an intercept course means pirates and not, say, someone is having a malfunction or are legitimate authorites who have a search warrant to make sure the cargo isn't illicit weapons or something. On that note, cargo ships probably won't be carrying weapons unless they themselves are pirates. Its as much a problem that the insurance companies of the future may decide that handing over the goods is cheaper and less prone to lawsuits than getting into shootouts with criminals. Think like how bank tellers are trained to simply hand over their cash rather than fight.

For that matter, having someone to confirm that you saw something in the first place ensures that you don't fall prey to false alarms.

Plus, you can always combine strategies. You can combine this with electronic warfare, for example. Reprogram the cargo ship's sensors to ignore a specific part of the sky, shut down comms when the pirates give the command, report a malfunction on command, and so on and so on. Or you can actually cause a malfunction-- a pirate may arm his ship with a hypervelocity weapon that causes similar damage to a micrometeor strike. Shoot once, offer the damaged ship assistance, then raise the Jolly Roger comm ID once in range to block the target's communications. Or you can combine it with the bribery and impersonation tactics I already outlined. An inside job tends to be harder to stop than a brute force robbery.

Apart from that, you give some pretty good ideas for would-be space pirates in your post.
More centered on smart thinking (and good old trickery) than on gimmicks to achieve actual stealth.

Thank you. It helps to think about piracy as an extension of other crimes, particularly theft, and all the tricks that have been used over the centuries to deprive others of their property. I see space piracy as generally having more in common with bank heists and train robbery than with naval buccaneering, though that is not an absolute.

[DiscoRave]

Things like this will depend on how humans adapt to the situation.

Using an example, that some may not like, but demonstrates how humans look for the weak areas of a system.

I used to play EVE-Online which some of you may have heard of. It's a space based MMOG game allows you to do pretty much what you want. Now piracy is a important part of that.

As people have said how cheap/easy space travel is has had an impact on the way piracy works.

Travel is quick and while in transit (warp) you could not be touched. However there are important choke points in the game that pirates exploit. Examples are Jump Gates and Asteroid Belts. Jump gates are the way that you move from star system to star system. Therefore pirates would Blockade a stargate and demand money/cargo/detroy people when they warped into to travel through the gate. Obviously this meant that most battles took place at gates as people fought for control of the gate, or chased away pirates etc.

The other was Asteroid belts, people would have to travel to these to mine ore for the manufacture of ships/outfits etc. Therefore pirates would warp from belt to belt searching for miners. Once they found them they would attack, demand ransom etc. This led to people having protection ships when mining to fight off pirates.

I know its just a game but its demonstrating how the enviorment would determine how viable piracy would be in the future. Quick and easy travel, would still end up with choke points to exploit that if there were few police/military/government control would allow pirates to flourish.

In the same way that ships in the age of sail wold follow certain routes and need to come to port the same would be the same in space.

[someone_else]

Look at the real world. The entire solar system has been visited by chemical rockets, which don't have spectacular Isp.

The whole solar system has been visited by ballistic probes that used gravity slingshots all the time. The only thrust the rocket gave was the booster's upper stage sending them in the right course for the first slingshot (plus some maneuvering thrusters), but the majority of the delta-v came from gravity slingshots.

They all were one-way (there was a asteroid probe that returned a tiny sample, though) and they all carried tiny payloads (3 tons at most). Anything going farther from Earth than Mars required up to decades to reach the destination.

Low thrust rockets are often brought out to go faster than chemical rockets, like when talking about trips to Mars. Why?

VASIMR cheats on the power plant mass. Zubrin also supports the claim.

They are better than chemical rockets for probes (one-way, tiny payload), but not that much for serious shipping.

If you want them to carry a decent payload, they need multi-megawatt power plants (up to GW and beyond), which become a pain in the ass to design, build and maintain. Assuming you can have some lightweight enough to not overkill the engine's already pityful thrust at any size (that isn't a given).

The only way to have so high Isp without needing so huge power plants, it's using a self-powered engine using a more energetic fuel. That turns out to be either fusion or (high-end) fission.
Maybe electrostatic or magnetic sails can do it too, on the cheap, but it's too early to say it for sure.

Still, chemical rockets are more than enough to play within the cis-lunar space with decent timescales if you make fuel from the Moon.
And it isn't a small playground, mind me. It is all we need to start colonizing space.

It depends on the product, the market, and the competition. Bulk materials, for example, have pretty predictable demand on the whole. Yeah, there's variations, but odds are you can plan a few months ahead that iron and copper will still be marketable.

This raises an interesting question. What is worth mining or producing from another planet? The moon is going to be the main source of bulk materials for serious space-habitat construction, and much more importantly a fuel manufacturing facility in cis-lunar space.
But beyond? What do we need from say Venus, or Jupiter (not He3 that can be already bred from lithium with ease)?
Other than materials for making bases and colonies there I don't see what else could they be worth for.

You don't have to hurry up on the deliveries, and you don't need speedy changes to them either.

There is also the problem of setting up your fabs/mines. It is going to be quite expensive to do with the tiny payload chemical rockets can launch.
And the risk of something breaking is much more a problem, if the fab is on mars and you cannot get there in less than years. That adds mass for redundancy.

I don't understand why you'd say that here. It's no more correct to oversimplify space commerce as it is to do the same with Earth commerce.

Thought your sentence had a different meaning. Please disregard that answer then.

Plantary bodies move slowly enough that most flight paths are going to follow similar routs to take advantage of plantary gravity wells, unless you have torch drives that can go in straight lines between planets in which case you're assumptions are invalid.

Fun, I was assuming torch drives (although of the crappier, more realistic kind) in my posts above.
If you want pirates, then you need better spacecraft than "ballistic boxes" like we have now.
There is a maneuver similar in appearance to a slingshot, appalling for a realistic semi-torch drive, so that you still have a similar course useful for space pirates.Oberth effect

Its not the ship itself that you need to fool, because the ship itself has as much of a need to confirm that an intercept course means pirates and not, say, someone is having a malfunction or are legitimate authorites who have a search warrant to make sure the cargo isn't illicit weapons or something.

An intercept course in interplanetary space can only be deliberate (hey, the scales involved tell that even spacecraft with the same course will have around light-minutes of distance between them), and doing searches on cargo ships while on route is terribly delta-v intensive (read: possible only for torch drives).
It's far easier to keep all of them tracked with a couple telescopes (so that they don't try to do something different from their official flight plan, and in case their instruments fail you can tell them) and look at their contents when they have reached your destination, while they await in a guarded parking orbit.
Isn't what they do for aircraft too? Air Traffic Control IN SPAACE!!! You will likely need to place telescopes in different positions (i.e. not all on Earth, just like they do with traffic control radars if you want this to be effective.

Its as much a problem that the insurance companies of the future may decide that handing over the goods is cheaper and less prone to lawsuits than getting into shootouts with criminals.

It depends on how space is regulated by law. If you don't have a kind of torch drive, it is not possible to enforce any kind of space policy other than spanking the owners of the pirate craft in the nations you control (if you find them, which isn't a given, and if there are nations out of your control you either start a war over it or you accept their robberies).
In this case, I don't know if anyone wants to insure you against pirates, so making convoys with armed escorts may return cost-effective.

[Formless]

An intercept course in interplanetary space can only be deliberate (hey, the scales involved tell that even spacecraft with the same course will have around light-minutes of distance between them)

Wrong. I repeat: the ship could be experiencing a malfunction (edit: or miscalculation), especially if we are assuming ships accelerate a lot or use torch drives. For that matter, you are also disregarding coincidence-- a ship could very well have to make an orbital transfer that happens to come close to your own trajectory. Unless you know ahead of time what their flight plan was, you would be a complete idiot to assume hostility in such an environment. Even with torch drives, not every ship will be using them due to cost efficiency, and a pirate ship doesn't necessarily need to be manned as long as its armed, can communicate with its owners, and is capable of bringing back the stolen goods on a moments notice. It may even appear to be a "ballistic box" as you call it. A pirate gang might launch several such drones at the start of a year, keeping thrust to a minimum and otherwise mimicking whatever other kinds of vessels that don't require high thrust and short travel times. When these drones come in contact with potential targets, they make a course change, state if asked a false reason for the change, do their job, then hightail it back to its owners base of operations and/or mothership. Companies that fly spacecraft cannot afford to over react to every potentially hostile behavior, they must know the reason behind it just like in any other environment. This is both practical, and a liability to be taken advantage of.

and doing searches on cargo ships while on route is terribly delta-v intensive (read: possible only for torch drives).

Eh, that depends on how highly saturated with orbital habitats the setting is. Besides, there is no reason to reserve discussion to settings with one or another drive technology.

It's far easier to keep all of them tracked with a couple telescopes (so that they don't try to do something different from their official flight plan, and in case their instruments fail you can tell them) and look at their contents when they have reached your destination, while they await in a guarded parking orbit.

Smugglers are going to be using official ports now? Also, what about searches for weapons? Since they are going to be used during flight, it only makes sense that as soon as the authorities have evidence that a ship has hostile intentions they are going to try and intercept it before it can attack. And its precisely because of the threat of pirates, terrorists, and military operations that this approach has its limits.

Also, we're back to requiring a third party authority watching the skies and all the tricks I mentioned for evading their watch.

It depends on how space is regulated by law. If you don't have a kind of torch drive, it is not possible to enforce any kind of space policy other than spanking the owners of the pirate craft in the nations you control (if you find them, which isn't a given, and if there are nations out of your control you either start a war over it or you accept their robberies).
In this case, I don't know if anyone wants to insure you against pirates, so making convoys with armed escorts may return cost-effective.

Its not like shooting it out with the pirates is going to stop pirate attacks in such a scenario, and if there are military uses for space at all (and there will be) you can guarantee not just anyone will be allowed by the law to put guns on their spacecraft. Also, even without torch drives, the authorities can just use the same technique of seeding space with lots of drone vehicles that can be called into action that I described above. Remember, unlike aircraft spacecraft are up there as long as you need them to be.

[someone_else]

the ship could be experiencing a malfunction (edit: or miscalculation),

Even in the unlikely event that something like that occurs, a simple tiny thrust from your own engines (little more than a fart) is sufficient to have such "malfunctioning" craft miss you by tens of thousands of km.
If you see that it corrects the course to home on your ass, then you can start to power up weapons.

Unless you know ahead of time what their flight plan was, you would be a complete idiot to assume hostility in such an environment.

The decision to open fire depends on how much pirates already used this same modus operandi in the past, and on the Ground Control's answer (since they should know any flight plan for the sake of safety, just like with aircraft traffic control).
Of course, if it's the first time and Ground Control lies/is jammed/your comms are fucked, you may fall prey of such a scheme. After 10 or 100 times... not so much.

Even with torch drives, not every ship will be using them due to cost efficiency

You may be right. Just remember that a torch drive can push a small ship very fast, or a VERY BIG ship not so fast. Depending on the torch drive in question, may be worth it to use the same engine due to ludicrously huge payload you are moving.

A pirate gang might launch several such drones at the start of a year, keeping thrust to a minimum and otherwise mimicking whatever other kinds of vessels that don't require high thrust and short travel times. When these drones come in contact with potential targets

Dunno, I see it much more like Ocean's Eleven. Any space flight is going to be scheduled somehow (it's not like they will launch with a moment's notice, there are checks and stuff to do before). Knowing the mass of the vehicle and its performance a navigator with a navicomputer can give you its possible courses.
Given the relatively constrained launch windows, it's not a lot of courses. If you have torch drives, it's harder, but still doable.
So your pirate gang launches stuff specifically designed to intercept that specific cargo on specifically computed courses. Although your prey can easily "think like a pirate" and try to choose the courses with less possibilities of being pirated.
Having an insider tell you their flight plan makes this game slightly easier, so to speak.
It's a plan to get your hands on a specific cargo IN SPAACE!!!, not a "let's set up traps and hope a prey falls into them" kind of scenario.

Eh, that depends on how highly saturated with orbital habitats the setting is.

I thought you were talking of interplanetary space. Cis-lunar space is likely going to be thick as soup, and such things are going to be much more common (although still not overtly easy to pull off).

Smugglers are going to be using official ports now?

Spaceports aren't that easy to make. Unless you have rogue nations with pirate-friendly ports (almost a given unless you have planet-wide nations), they will have to use your ports.
And for "spaceport" I mean some kind of orbital station, that controls the traffic of its own landers that bring down/up your stuff. Or a space elevator for more advanced settings.
I tend to think that landing your main vessel to unload it has the same verisimilitude than pulling ashore a mid-sized oceanic vessel to unload it, due to various reasons.

Also, what about searches for weapons?

Depends on what weapons you want to stop. Technically, any craft can dump anything while at the max speed (depending on the course, it's more than 10 km/s usually), and those will impact (anything in orbit and then the planet, although the planet isn't going to feel them) at very high speed. To defend from any kind of such thrown crap (that can happen even accidentally, mind me), it's relatively cheaper to place sensor stations to detect the thrown crap and intercept it with anything else, to exploit its own kinetic energy to destroy it.
If you want to defend from bombs (with reasonable yelds), then you just have to keep them in a very high (guarded) orbit while you search them. Not even the best nukes can do anything at something more than 1000 km distant, in space. And 1000 km is pretty close to nothing in space.
Lasers aren't an issue. They are easy to defend against for the time needed to scramble swarms of kkvs on the shooter. Unless there is an entire battle-ready fleet, but it is going to be somewhat obvious.

Other weapons may change this scenario, but these are the only realistic threats I can think of.

Also, we're back to requiring a third party authority watching the skies and all the tricks I mentioned for evading their watch.

Yup. Most tricks of yours still work fine with minor modifications. It's just that I think it's very likely some kind of such authority will exist in a setting where spaceflight is consistent, so their presence has to be taken into consideration for would-be space pirates.

Its not like shooting it out with the pirates is going to stop pirate attacks in such a scenario

Of course not. It becomes an arms race. The cheaper pirates will have to either bail out or use more trickery. It becomes harder, but there is still cost-effectiveness in the equation. The bigger companies will likely prefer to lose more shipments to pirates than paying for more defenses on loads of shipments, if it proves economically advantageous to do so. Smaller companies get fucked as always.

you can guarantee not just anyone will be allowed by the law to put guns on their spacecraft.

Meh, as I said above, the entire spacecraft can become a kinetic weapon, or if we are talking of engines with any kind of performance, the engine itself can incinerate anything (although with a relatively short range).
Placing a few KKVs won't hurt anyone.
Anyway, I don't see why Security Firms, like Blackwater shouldn't be legally hired to defend the convoys. Hey, they are a fucking private military already.

Remember, unlike aircraft spacecraft are up there as long as you need them to be.

Mh, if you are talking of cis-lunar space that is more or less correct, with spacecraft in interplanetary space it becomes harder, since those drones will have a precise course. In Interplanetary space it would be more like a patrol: they get to a destination, they refuel, the get back home.
With torch drives this is much easier to pull off.

Please. Voyager didn't even take a full ten years to get all the way to Uranus, and that's taking the scenic route. Uphill.

My ass. Voyager wasn't designed to get in stable orbit of a damn thing, but just to slingshot in deep space after relatively quick flyby of various planets. If I may say, it is a route good for a kinetic impactor, not for a cargo ship.

Galileo is one you should be looking at. 3 tons and 6 or so years to get in Jupiter orbit.
MESSENGER is another, 7 years to get to a stable Mercury orbit (more or less anyway).
For our two most closes neighbors (Mars and Venus), Venera 7 the first Venus lander (it's from Soviet Russia, btw), took 3 months or so to deliver half a ton. And Viking 1 mars orbiter and lander, 10 months for slightly less than a ton of vehicle.

See? Rockets can bring us to Venus in no-time!!!!!! Let's hurry up or they will end the supply of green babes.
Mars is still doable for bots, anything farther than that isn't particularly cost-effective even for bots.

Let's consider a flat space trip, going 0.5 AU, no starting or stopping speed, no fancy effects. Call it an ideal Mars line.
Suppose we have an outrageously high performance rocket with 100 km/s delta v that has infinite thrust.

First, above I said "higher thrust with the same Isp", not just higher thrust. If you want to carry more at the same performance, you need higher thrust with the same Isp. You cannot just add more engines (doing that degrades your Isp), you need a more powerful engine design to do that.

Second, even 0.001 g is an outrageous acceleration for this fuel endurance, deign of being called "torch drive".
Of course you think higher thrust won't change a thing. You're already playing with an Orion (BOOM BOOM) Drive, what can do better than that?
It's very simple, really. And I'll show you.

I'll run the Atomic Rocket's, Thrust Power formula (total kinetic energy of the exhaust, scroll down a little from the link)
Fp = (F * Ve ) / 2.
F is thrust and Ve is exhaust velocity.

I need to get Ve and F, but both are more or less linked to the vehicle mass, so....
Let's assume that the craft masses 1000 tons and that 2/3 of it is fuel/propellant (an honest mass ratio of 3). This leaves us with 333 tons of dry vehicle, say half of that is structure and engine, and half is payload. A 150 ton payload. If you scale this up by say multiplying everything by 10, be sure to multiply the thrust power below for the same number.

Knowing the delta-v and the mass ratio, the exhaust speed is going to be at least: Ve=Delta_v/ln[mass_ratio] (by tweaking the delta-v formula).

So, we have a Ve of (100 km/s) / (ln[3]) = 91 km/s, plus some spare change.

Now we need to calculate the thrust of this baby.
By F=ma, we can say that:
1 gee (9.81 m/s) acceleration * 1'000'000kg of mass = 9'810'000 Newtons
0.01 gee = 98'100 Newtons
0.001 gee = 9'810 Newtons
0.000001 gee = 9.810 Newtons

We have all the data we need now, let's run the thrust power formula Fp = (F * Ve ) / 2. (F is thrust and Ve is exhaust velocity)
Remember, this is the minimum energy this engine must give to its exhaust to do its work. Since nothing is 100% efficient (and most isn't even 50'% efficient), your actual engine power levels will likely be more than that.

One gee = (9'810'000 newtons * 91000 m/s)/2 = 446'355'000'000 watts --> Around 450 GW <--- eeeeeeek!
0.01 gee = 4.5 GW <--- slightly less ludicrous
0.001 gee = 450 MW <--- more or less the thrust power and performance I saw around on fusion concepts
0.000001 gee = 450 KW <--- around twice the power sucked by a FX200 VASIMR engine. also comparable thrust to two such engines. (although their Ve is around half, so the delta-v will be less, and I'm assuming a 100% efficiency one, while they have only 70% or so)

Now, if your engine isn't self-powered (self-powered = the fuel contains enough energy to do accelerate itself), from where does all this energy come from?
The puniest one can be nuclear or solar-powered (wasting 70 tons or so for power plant and heat rejection mass), but the others require simply too much energy (and will have too much wasted heat) to be doable.

For comparison, one SSME (the rocket engine most close to the chemcal rocket maximum performance) gives 5 or so GW. Not that it means a damn thing anyway. Chemical rockets without staging reach 5 km/s of delta-v, and with staging can reach up to 20 km/s of delta-v (with a Saturn V's worth of staging) so the overall speed is much lower than these ballpark examples anyway (not that going to Mars requires so huge Delta-v budgets).

The puniest engine needs: 50000 m/s / 0.00000981 m/ss = 5096839959,22528 seconds = 161 years to reach the same speed of your example torchships. Big deal. That's where a higher thrust would have been better.

Now, let's calculate the actual transit times for 0.5 AU of distance if we don't try to make it reach a specific speed, T = 2 * sqrt[ D/A ]
* T = transit time (seconds)
* D = distance (meters)
* A = acceleration (m/s2)
* sqrt[x] = square root of x

0.5 AU is 74'799'000'000 meters.
0,00000981
so, 2*sqrt[ 74'799'000'000 meters/ 0.00000981 m/ss] = 174639865.3481139 seconds ---> 5.67 years. (vs a few months for Venus and a year or so for Mars)

Chemical rockets do much better for Mars and Venus. And don't need annoyingly huge power plants and waste rejection systems for the feat.

Let's try it for outer system, Jupiter, at a medium distance of 778 million km + spare change. 778'000'000'000 m

2*sqrt[ 778000000000 meters/ 0.00000981 m/ss] = 563229366.29954 seconds ---> 17.85 years. (vs 7 or so years for Galileo)

Ehm. I'm afraid it sucks balls for outer system too.

Also, the Sun's gravitational pull at Earth is 1.6 milligees, anything with double that acceleration can be safely called torch drive, since it can take brachistochrone courses (where the "flat space" approximation is pretty much close to reality). Anything less and you are stuck doing looooooong spirals to reach anywhere.

A chemical rocket can launch payloads of virtually any size, especially if it is orbit to orbit.

Sure, but it's going to become big-honking huge very fast.
Although with the moon producing the fuel, and in-orbit assembly the cost is surely going to become somewhat acceptable.
We are still talking of a Saturn V-sized thing in Earth orbit to carry 100 or so tons to Mars, to give an eyeballed size estimate.

[LaCroix]

Nitpick: It's only 16.1 years for the chemical drive, you added a 0.
Still, very interesting, I'll keep reading this...