Space pirates

[bz249]

It'd easily be able to stop if it was orbit to orbit, so it didn't have to pay the Earth launch penalty.

Sure it could not have been so hard... that's why it required a planetary alignment which would not occur for another 150 years. Anyway the delta v budget from LEO to Earth escape orbit is a measly 3.2 km/s. Not that much. And between the surface and LEO, well that might limit how big your spacecraft can be, but it is a completely separated transport system. The Voyagers themselves started from Earth orbit.

What does cost effective even mean?

Let's say our rocket needs a mass ratio of 20 to do the mission, whatever it is. If propellant is any less than 1/20 the price of the item we're selling, by mass, it's worth it.

Say you sell nutmeg. It's like $100 / pound today. Assuming the ship itself is a sunk cost, if rocket fuel is cheaper than $5 / pound, there's profit to be made shipping it.

Chemical rocket fuel is less than $1 / pound.

Well reality works somehow differently. Even if the rocket last forever (thus nothing more than fuel is required, and the capital investment can be divided into infinite years of operation) there is still the opportunity cost: what if I sell the rocket and put the money into the bank for 1%. Real profit is what lies above that,

[bz249]

In other news, water is wet.

Yes water is wet, the Voyagers started from orbit, and the basic rules are the same for interplanetary economy too. Good you agree with that.

[Connor MacLeod]

I don't even know what the hell is going on in this thread anymore.

Me either. I think this turned into one of those self defeating "WHAT IS REALISTIC FOR SCI FI" threads.

For me it pretty much was resolved when the "it depends on..." answer came up, because that's generally going to be the answer for all these sorts of things. I dont remember if you were the first to bring it up or not though.

[bz249]

It's all irrelevant too. Am I the only person on the planet who can actually keep some context in my brain? You guys shift constantly between the ridiculous and the obvious.

The key point to starting in space is having full tanks up there - space refueling can make huge differences.

Sound familiar? Yea, I said it on the last page too.


I don't even know what the hell is going on in this thread anymore.

The Voyager spacecraft had full tanks up there. It was put into orbit by a Titan IIIE rocket (read: another vehicle unrelated to the Voyager probe itself, which consumed no fuel during the launch). Yes there was a price in that, namely the probe's mass was limited to 700 kgs. But otherwise it was like any spacecraft you could build in orbit within the same mass budget. Now if you would say that a way better spacecraft would be possible with a higher start mass, then the answer is naturally yes. But all what Earth gravity is doing that it gives you a mass limit about how heavy your spacecraft in the orbit could be.

Of course with space refueling it is possible to decrease the useful mass/fuel ratio and with it increase the delta v budget (so yea a Voyager clone with huge attached fuel tanks could have made a Jupiter orbit insertion burn, but it has more to do with the mission planing than the Earth gravity).

[Formless]

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.

And for the same reason that defensive maneuver is going to cost you time and fuel because it will mean diverting from your planned flight path. Also you are still assuming civilians are going to be allowed to arm their spacecraft, which is not a given.

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.

What makes you say? Lasers (being lightspeed weapons) cannot be dodged like KKVs and bombs can, to say nothing of their usefulness in point defense against said weapons. In fact, they don't even need to be particularly powerful to be considered dangerous-- a pirate gang or political group might send one up to blind sensor platforms in preparation for future attacks or warfare. It need not be able to damage any other piece of equipment to be worth worrying about.

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.

So additonally, smugglers can't just make ballistic boxes that can be dropped off in orbit or outright survive re-entry and float in the oceans for pickup. Do you have any idea how smuggling works in the real world?

[Connor MacLeod]

One thing did occur to me. What if it's not a ship that becomes a pirate, but a habitat? I don't think it's unreasonable to assume a space habitat might have some form of propulsion system (to keep it from drifting, to start/stop rotation to generate gravity, possibly to move from place to place for whatever reason, etc.) even if it isn't a very powerful one. So what happens if you have say, a failed colony, or one whose government collapsed? You would still have people desperate for survival, but they may not have anything worthwhile to offer the larger community or to entice them to support it (or for someone to reinstall a new government.) Piracy might be their only option, and you might see them raiding other communities or ships, or whatever.

Which is why it's largely a "it depends" situation. not just on technology, but the economics and makeup of the universe, etc. I mean if you have a universe whose govenrments are all like the Conjoiners from Alistair reynolds novels, or have the hypothetical "post scarcity" utopia society, piracy would probably not be very likely. But if you had people outside such systems, they might become pirates to support themselves. (or for greed. One cannot discount greed or other similar motivations, if there is profit to be made.)

I'd also worry alot less about finagling over specific definitions, since what qualifies as a "pirate" could change quite easily over time or for other reasons.

[Connor MacLeod]

It doesn't even need propulsion! They could just steal from ships that stop in. It's like docking fees or import taxes, but not as official.

Why would someone stop in? Perhaps a little encouragement from the habitat's guns.

Good point. Maybe the habitat has some sort of drones or robots who have to go out do work (mine nearby asteroids, do repairs, etc.) They might modify or create unmanned drones that can tow/retrieve captured vehicles like that.

Alternately, I like your "Pitcher plant" approach, although I'd anticipate a more decentralized approach to that. Maybe controlling a whole area of space. They'd probably even rationalize it as some sort of "toll" or "protection" money. That would certainly be a form of piracy! Or maybe they hold it for ransom.

Here's where propulsion becomes useful though. Eventually they'd want to avoid that part of space, and that shouldn't be hard to do, space being big and all. So the hab might migrate around to keep with interesting commercial destinations. Close enough to get their pickings on regular traffic, but just far enough away that they are the only option to go to if you were to "accidentally" start leaking fuel.

Another possibility is that they just move from station to station sort of intergalactic hermit crab. They might have their own (short range) transport for that, or maybe they borrow a ship they hijacked for that purpose.

Kinda amazing how many possibilities you can come up with depending on the circumstances, isnt it?

Another one is that you have some planet or installation that basically fails, and the military/police/space forces that are there decide to go rogue or go warlord. You might have a whole horde of pirates that crop up from that situation.

Edit: Supply for pirates might become an issue, but this is where economics becomes a factor. They may not need a base of operations or neccesarily some "pirate's haven" to function per se, they would just need someone neutral who is willing to supply them what they need secretly, assuming the prices aren't exhorbitant. Economics can be funny that way.

[Connor MacLeod]

Interesting idea. I've been banding about some ideas of my own:

First off, would you need a human crew neccesarily to do in-system shipping iwth the kinds of performances we seem to be talking about? It probably would even be far less efficient. It need not even be a sophisticated computer, I bet. Such a target could be easy to capture and plunder (zero resistance quite possibly.) Perhaps even hacking the computer.

Or like you said, they could operate remotely. either by wireless hacking/infiltration, or by deploying their own robotic/remote controlled drones to intercept and capture/plunder the cargo.

It might even depend on the kind of propulsion. What if they use solar sails or some sort of laser-assisted reaction drive? Maybe the pirates use lasers of their own to divert or capture the cargo ship. (which could also double as defenses.)

An even wilder idea - why even use ships at all? If they can build some sort of EM propulsion system, I imagine they could just sling cargo containers from one part of the system to another. That would be even easier to plunder (if you could find them.)

Perhaps your pirates are mutineers or rogue military (say some habitat's government collapsed like I hinted earlier.) In the setting perhaps all warships use some powerful (nuclear powered) type drive, whilst commercial ones use chemical or ion engines. I even had this wild idea that piracy is more along the lines of privateering. You have lots of governments and corporations using mercenary privateers to conduct warfare. There could be an entire economy based around that that would allow "piracy" to flourish (if there is a legal side, you can bt there will be an illegal side.)

Or what about Organized crime?

Oh yes, as far as the "tracking them back to their base" sort of thing, alot of that depends on how much of an information trail they leave or how easily they are tracked. I don't think you need to kill witnesses to prevent them from knowing much about you or your destinatio, you just have to keep them away from navigation data, windows, and keep your space suits on. I imagine there would be ways to knock them out or otherwise render them unconscious as well.

[someone_else]

Nitpick: It's only 16.1 years for the chemical drive, you added a 0.

That's a VASIMR-like plasma drive, not a chemical rocket.
Good catch though. Thankfully it is a minor mistake.

It'd easily be able to stop if it was orbit to orbit, so it didn't have to pay the Earth launch penalty.

I linked other probes whose course was designed to do just that without requiring engines but just aerobrakings. Voyager's course was designed to launch it in deep space. Period.
If it wanted to brake once at Neptune, it had to be carrying a decent engine and 17 km/s of delta-v (more or less a Saturn V worth of fuel). It's already a few billion dollars wasted just to make the braking stage.

Earth departure Delta-v is 3.22 km/s, so that would have needed a orbit departure stage massing... ummmm that's a 3000 ton payload.... let's assume 3 SSME engines... say 4000 tons?

It's going to be easy with chemical rockets. Sure.

Assuming the ship itself is a sunk cost, if rocket fuel is cheaper than $5 / pound, there's profit to be made shipping it.

Yeah, let's also assume also that Santa Claus payed the development cost for all your equipment, that you found the money to invest in your enterprise under a tree, that there are no insurances for anything, no payer wages for the people checking your craft between each voyage (critical for reliability), no cost overruns due to random problems, and that your spacecraft isn't a chemical rocket that must discard stages to go anywhere (forcing you to pay again for a new vehicle for each new voyage).
I think you're handwaving a little too much.

Chemical rocket fuel is less than $1 / pound.

On Earth. In orbit, without any other fuel supply, it is worth a few millions per ton. (proton rocket, cost 85 millions, payload 22 tons to LEO --> 85/22 = 3.8 million dollars per ton). It is a payload just like any other.
And frankly, assuming fuel coming from the moon will be as cheap as the one produced on Earth is... very optimistic. (although it's likely to be still cheaper than lifted fuel from Earth)

Seriously, what's your point?

You said that thrust is irrelevant, then pulled out of your ass some numbers to demonstrate it.
I showed that what you say is true, but only for engines that are already torches, like the ones with acceleration and fuel endurance in your example.
While for realistic engines with manageable power levels, thrust is an important factor in overall performance. Like I said.

And for the same reason that defensive maneuver is going to cost you time and fuel because it will mean diverting from your planned flight path.

Nah, that's a tiny difference, barely noticeable, and the fuel needed is tiny, since you just have to give a tiny kick when you spot the guy homing on you. When you spot him it's going to be days before it actually reaches point-blank. In a day you're making a lot of space with inertia alone.

Even if you expend a puny 10 m/s of delta-v, after a day you made 864'000 meters.

Also you are still assuming civilians are going to be allowed to arm their spacecraft, which is not a given.

It may not be a given, but I don't see why a "Space Safety Solutions" section of Blackwater cannot be hired to provide protection with its space escorts (that are basically cargo ships loaded with KKVs), if pirates become a problem.

Lasers (being lightspeed weapons) cannot be dodged

Lasers have a limited penetration, since they are cones of (phased) light focused on a spot to vaporize material, not flashy beams doing BZZZZ in a vacuum.
For modern laser cutters that's 50:1, hole_depth:spot_size. For weapon-grade lasers, that don't cut stuff so close to their focusing array that ratio becomes around 20:1. Any laser with half-realistic power levels is going to have spot sizes between millimeters and centimeters.
Place a whipple shield more than half a meter "thick" and they have to waste hours to bypass it.

a pirate gang or political group might send one up to blind sensor platforms in preparation for future attacks or warfare

Sensors can be made with relatively dispersed arrays of mirrors pointing on the actual detector, it is relatively easy to make one with enough space between the mirrors so that any wide-spot laser cone passing by doesn't transfer enough energy in the the detector to blind it.
If you are shooting a small-spot laser cone to actually destroy the satellite, it will take a while since you will have to kill each single mirror, while the detector or its actual power source can be armored. This buys it enough time to return fire before you kill it.

Frankly, it's much more effective to crash your vessel on it than trying to destroy it with a laser.

So additonally, smugglers can't just make ballistic boxes that can be dropped off in orbit or outright survive re-entry and float in the oceans for pickup.

Depends from the procedures. If all incoming cargo traffic is forced to stay in a high orbit, where it will be guarded, the first isn't an option.
The second... reentring things tend to be obvious on any scanner on the same hemisphere, and an orgy for heat seekers.

As a general rule, any interplanetary vessel with a decent performance has either a nuclear reactor or has a radioactive engine (even fusion ones, although it's a radioactivity that dies off within a couple centuries). Also, they have dangerous exhaust, and unshielded reactors (the rad shield protects only the ship, for mass-saving reasons). They aren't going to dock with anything else than shielded (or robotic) cargo handlers and people ferries anyway, and nuclear-phobes will also scream if they get too close.


Anyway, please note that I'm not saying IT WON'T HAPPEN NEVER NEVER NEVER.
I'm just saying that if there are reasons to do so, most holes can be plugged without ludicrous expenses. So after the first pirates make money, their job will become more and more difficult.

What if it's not a ship that becomes a pirate, but a habitat?

Given the habitat minimum size (a few hundred people?), it's needs will be relatively big. This will very likely prompt other neighboring habitats to give it substantial aid like Europe does with its own component nations at risk of toppling (to keep it from becoming pirate), an evacuation, its destruction after they annoyed everyone.

It's not particularly complex to "accidentally" slam on them with a couple second-hand space transports full of (relatively cheap but not so suspicios) lunar fuel, since the damn thing cannot out maneuver even a comm satellite.

Its engines are unable to carry it anywhere out of Earth Orbit, if they were designed only for reboosting.

Another one is that you have some planet or installation that basically fails, and the military/police/space forces that are there decide to go rogue or go warlord. You might have a whole horde of pirates that crop up from that situation.

This makes more sense. Although most military installations aren't going to be full of people. Most stuff is going to be robotic, especially the "warships".

First off, would you need a human crew neccesarily to do in-system shipping iwth the kinds of performances we seem to be talking about?

No. Modern computers are more than up to the task for any kind of engine performance. (I thought I said it in the first post above)

What if they use solar sails or some sort of laser-assisted reaction drive? Maybe the pirates use lasers of their own to divert or capture the cargo ship.

Such engines require very big laser installations to work. If your pirates have the money to make one, then they probably don't need pirating to live. It can be fun if 2-3 of these laser installations are owned by different nations, that happen to be in war....

I don't think you need to kill witnesses to prevent them from knowing much about you or your destinatio,

If they had sensor logs of you getting close, they know how much delta-v you have in your tanks. If your engines are more or less realistic, this is enough to weed down the possible routes to a handful. If you have torch drives, not so much (although then it becomes complex to hide your exhaust from Space Traffic Control telescopes).

[Whiskey144]

In such a setting, care to guess what I find the most likely fighter to be? ....space fighters.

TBH, I actually agree with your assessment.

What said space fighter would look like, that's where I'd guess we may or may not agree. IMO, a space fighter would be a somewhat large craft (compared to, say, an air-fighter), but would also have a small crew quarters. No more than two or three people; maybe a week's endurance at most.

[Formless]

Nah, that's a tiny difference, barely noticeable, and the fuel needed is tiny, since you just have to give a tiny kick when you spot the guy homing on you. When you spot him it's going to be days before it actually reaches point-blank. In a day you're making a lot of space with inertia alone.

Even if you expend a puny 10 m/s of delta-v, after a day you made 864'000 meters.

Setting aside that this is all coming from your own say so, then its bloody pointless; the pirates will just feign a more major malfunction and force you to make course corrections you cannot so easily afford. What part of this is so hard for you to understand? That pirates aren't going to be bloody idiots? I'm guessing that's it, considering your implied assumption that pirates need to get within point blank range to do their job.

It may not be a given, but I don't see why a "Space Safety Solutions" section of Blackwater cannot be hired to provide protection with its space escorts (that are basically cargo ships loaded with KKVs), if pirates become a problem.

Hey, fuckhead, that does not address my argument. Instead of having to justify civilian corporations arming their own spacecraft, now you have to justify that mercenaries security companies can fly armed escorts for civilian corporations. The basic issue has not changed one iota; nations have a vested interest in maintaining a monopoly on force, and therefor the right to fly around with armed spacecraft.

Lasers have a limited penetration, since they are cones of (phased) light focused on a spot to vaporize material, not flashy beams doing BZZZZ in a vacuum.
For modern laser cutters that's 50:1, hole_depth:spot_size. For weapon-grade lasers, that don't cut stuff so close to their focusing array that ratio becomes around 20:1. Any laser with half-realistic power levels is going to have spot sizes between millimeters and centimeters.
Place a whipple shield more than half a meter "thick" and they have to waste hours to bypass it.

You are really starting to try my patience.

1) you assume that "realistic" lasers will never exceed the limitations of current technology even though there is no theoretical limit to how much energy you can pack into a laser, thus reducing this argument to "because I say so!"

2) you keep treating all spacecraft like they are going to be built for war, ignoring the costs (especially mass penalties) associated with putting armor onto a ship.

3) I do believe most laser weapon proposals out there advocate pulsed lasers for this exact fucking reason.

Sensors can be made with relatively dispersed arrays of mirrors pointing on the actual detector, it is relatively easy to make one with enough space between the mirrors so that any wide-spot laser cone passing by doesn't transfer enough energy in the the detector to blind it.
If you are shooting a small-spot laser cone to actually destroy the satellite, it will take a while since you will have to kill each single mirror, while the detector or its actual power source can be armored. This buys it enough time to return fire before you kill it.

Frankly, it's much more effective to crash your vessel on it than trying to destroy it with a laser.

Nice try, but using mirrors doesn't change a goddamn thing. As long as you can get light of a high enough intensity into the detector, you can fry it. And guess what? Mirrors do exactly that-- reflect light into the detector! Moron.

And hey, I bet those mirrors are going to be pretty fragile. I wonder what happens when you start blowing goddamn holes in them.

Depends from the procedures. If all incoming cargo traffic is forced to stay in a high orbit, where it will be guarded, the first isn't an option.
The second... reentring things tend to be obvious on any scanner on the same hemisphere, and an orgy for heat seekers.

Because smugglers always stick to procedure. Right.

Down here on Earth, you know how drug runners like to get stuff past the coast guard? With speed boats. No subtlety about it, they just race their illicit cargo from point a to point b as quickly as they can, completely bypassing port security in the process. Future smugglers in space are almost certainly going to use similar tactics. And of course, there is always those who take a different approach and stuff drugs up their own body cavities so they can slip it past airport security and onto commercial flights. Whatever it is that is both illegal and profitable enough to smuggle through space is generally not going to be the kind of thing you need big ass freighters to carry. The only exception I can think of off the top of my head is weapons, and even there you might try smuggling blueprints or something.

As a general rule, any interplanetary vessel with a decent performance has either a nuclear reactor or has a radioactive engine (even fusion ones, although it's a radioactivity that dies off within a couple centuries). Also, they have dangerous exhaust, and unshielded reactors (the rad shield protects only the ship, for mass-saving reasons). They aren't going to dock with anything else than shielded (or robotic) cargo handlers and people ferries anyway, and nuclear-phobes will also scream if they get too close.

Because (once again) you say so, everyone is going to use torch drives for everything, etc. etc. etc. Stop wasting my time with bullshit.

[Connor MacLeod]

Yea, it might be. It might also be pretty traditional - it all depends on the setting. In a packed cluster like my habitat cones, distances don't really matter since they'll all pretty short. Tangential velocity launching off a hab's hull can get you from anywhere to anywhere in a matter of hours!

I went through a phase for a while where I was all no no no about things. Pirates? Absurd, never gonna happen. Space fighters? Pointless, never gonna happen.

You mean that phase where you are largely influenced by what other, more smarter people say and you decide that's the absolute be-all, end all of what sci fi is and should always be? yeah I've gone through similar stages myself. I think it comes down to initially being uncomfortable with having that sort of ambiguity in the topic, so you want things to be simple, straightforward, and laid out. As you learn more, you start to be more comfortable with flexible thinking on the issue, and you're alot less "hardcore" about what should and shouldn't be.

(Fun fact: I often learned those "smart" people I listened to were people who figured this out before me. Key lesson: Never assume you know everything, unless you like looking silly. Learn from me kids!)

There's still a part of that in me, but I now try to treat hard science in a soft story - so instead of saying hard science goes from A to B so C is silly, I'm now trying to say: given an idea (C), what do we need in the setting to be like (X) so hard science still leads there; in other words, how can we make it work with hard science?

Personally, I still like the a->b approach, but there's so much fun to be had in the x->c approach that it now irks me when I see it excluded. This applies as much to big subjects: pirates, fighters, etc., as to small subjects: engines, weapons. (this is also why I almost always use words like "may" and sometimes "probably", but very rarely "will".)

I distrusted the "hard" stuff because it felt too restrictive. At the same time I also liked a certain "framekwork" of plausibility to prevent soft sci fi from becoming cartoonish. That can be tricky, since its far easier to screw up logic in soft than in hard sci fi (but that can also be an interesting challenge to address as well.) People will always vary in what is "reasonable" to them, and you have to be flexible precisely because of that.

In retrospect, I think I tended to react poorly to the hard sci fi fans more than to the actual concept itself. Sometimes it's hard to divorce the concept from its fandom unless you make a real effort at it. (although one should. Bias is also a bad thing to tolerate.)

As for a fun idea: You might have a setting where some form of FTL is possible, but not common (say wormholes. Such travel may connect some planets but not others, and they may have to be artificially constructed.), so most civilizations might still be isolated to specific star systems. Such a setting could allow for varying degrees of "hardness" or "softness" depending on how you set things up. I always thought it would be interesting to have "soft" sci fi type concepts on one scale, but on a smaller, more locale one you adopt more purely "hard" concepts.

Hard science imposes limits, yes (and that's a good thing), but it's not a bloody straitjacket.

Heh I like that description. Very apt. Less "Is this idea realistic" and more "how can I make this idea fit plausibily?"

[Swindle1984]

Couldn't you just prevent pirates from docking with your ship by randomly changing your acceleration and rotating on your axis? They'd never be able to match your speed and rotation before it became too expensive (fuel and time) to be worth it. The best they could do is launch some guys in spacesuits to try to grapple onto your hull and force their way into the ship, which is going to vent at least part of the ship into space. And again, if you're rotating and changing the speed and direction of rotation at random while speeding up and slowing down, the chances of losing boarders to the void of space when they bounce off the hull, miss entirely, or get flung off the ship have gone up dramatically.

Pirates aren't going to board a ship that is active. They HAVE to either shut down the target or otherwise disable it, such as threatening to blow it up or put a laser through the cockpit.

[someone_else]

Ships actually have landed on outer system bodies before. It's clearly possible, even with today's restrictions.

I just said that it cannot be done affordably. Ok, you can pay, but it's still a lot of time to wait.
Cassini is at Saturn, and took 7 or so years, They say that you need 13 years to get to Uranus, and neptune could be reached within 8-12 years.

These are sunk costs. In economic theory, sunk costs have a negligble impact on the marginal cost. Mass production and competition trend it in that direction.
In practice, it never goes all the way. Hence, what I've been saying over and over again - there's so many factors involved that you can't dismiss things so easily.

No, wait a sec, you're talking to yourself now. It's you that dismiss the economic part by handwaving stuff, not me.

You have no idea how significant that will be on the end cost. If one hundred human inspectors can check one ship a month and a ship carries 1000 tons a year, and let's say these guys bills $100k, they are about $1000 / ton. Less than a dollar a pound. Add it to fuel and it's still less than half the price you sell the stuff for, hence, profit.

This still doesn't explain why in the hell do I need to export 1000 tons of nutmeg to Mars per year, but you seem to be right nontheless.

In a cone with a base diameter of 1000 km and a length of 400 km, you can comfortably fit almost 3 billion people, with unlimited energy and low density population for all. Transit from any part to any other part requires a whopping delta-v of.... 0 m/s. Though you might want some flexibility, so accounting for worst case scenario, and you need ~400 m/s.

Crashes must be a pain in the ass with stuff so close. You risk a crash to escalate and fuck up your entire structure.

In such a setting, care to guess what I find the most likely fighter to be?

KKVs. Just like any other space setting. Space fighters make little sense due to computers being able to do anything a human pilot can, better, faster and in a much cheaper and smaller package.

the pirates will just feign a more major malfunction and force you to make course corrections you cannot so easily afford.

The only way is pointing at me when we are very close and make a strong burn. I maybe won't be able to evade, but that's going to be a rather obvious attempt to bite my ass.

pirates need to get within point blank range to do their job.

How else can they reach the cargo? If they had half a brain they would have hacked the cargo ship in port to do a different course, not done this idiotic, easy to fool, expensive and obvious maneuver.

now you have to justify that mercenaries security companies can fly armed escorts for civilian corporations.

Isn't that already legal here on Earth? (doesn't Blackwater already sell its services for money even if it is well-armed?)

you assume that "realistic" lasers will never exceed the limitations of current technology

No. Just that lasers above certain power levels are slightly unlikely to find a portable power source, only that.

There can be interplanetary x-ray lasers focused by km-wide "lenses" (work differently from lenses but do the same job) that rape anything in a few AU of range (yes, they experience some lag), but those kill the fun (and any ship or habitat) very quickly.

Also laser-boosted swarms of relativistic sails impacting on your ass.

you keep treating all spacecraft like they are going to be built for war

All ones expected to survive fire will have to, if pirates usually exploit their weaknesses. Whipple shields have been invented to give the finger to meteoroids and such hazards, so they are not going to be so uncommon.

most laser weapon proposals out there advocate pulsed lasers for this exact fucking reason.

This is already how pulsed lasers work. You can have "heat rays" instead that dump a load of energy on the target and vapourize a tiny depth of stuff to cause a not-so-powerful shockwave, but that sucks unless you have truly huge power sources or you are shooting on soft targets.

Nice try, but using mirrors doesn't change a goddamn thing. As long as you can get light of a high enough intensity into the detector, you can fry it.

The most usual way to kill sensors is use the lasers as a wide spotlight, since that allows the laser to shoot much farther than its "drilling" range. depth of field
If you have mirrors dispersed on a very big area, very little of the laser's energy can reach the detector. Photonic laser thrusters allow the creation of very big such structures.
Then of course, if you get too close (laser-drilling range), it will have to move away the detector form the mirror's focus point.

Those aren't overtly practical for cargo ships, but military and traffic control telescopes will likely make use of them.

And hey, I bet those mirrors are going to be pretty fragile. I wonder what happens when you start blowing goddamn holes in them.

You degrade it a little. But as I said, killing each mirror is time-consuming, and exposes you to return fire.
If the thing cannot return fire, then making it so damage-resistant is pointless.

Down here on Earth, you know how drug runners like to get stuff past the coast guard? With speed boats.

The speed boats are used to keep the time they are exposed as small as possible, exploiting the fact that it's complex to detect them over a so huge sea border (there aren't enough coast guards to do it). Once they have an helicopter looking at them from above, they are pretty much fucked regardless of their speed.
Since there is very little way to hide an interplanetary vessel entering high orbit, this tactic is nonsense. They already know where you are, and likely have very high thrust vehicles on hand in case you try to run for it (if someone tried the trick before and they learned from their mistakes).

And of course, there is always those who take a different approach

This approach works as normal. It doesn't rely on stuff that changes in space.

Couldn't you just prevent pirates from docking with your ship by randomly changing your acceleration and rotating on your axis?

Another very good reason to have pirates like Somali ones or hijacker teams already on board disguised as passengers.
To board the enemy you have to kill its engine or convince him that it's a better idea to let you do so.

[someone_else]

Never assume you know everything, unless you like looking silly.

Or do it intentionally, if you don't mind looking silly, to harvest information.

Most will try to correct you, thus giving you much more detailed answers that you would get if you asked politely.

[Formless]

How else can they reach the cargo?

Duhhhh, I don't know, threaten to blow the ship to kingdom come if they don't comply? Ransom the crew, if it has any? You know, like people have suggested... how many times in this thread by now?

Isn't that already legal here on Earth? (doesn't Blackwater already sell its services for money even if it is well-armed?)

And they've already had their fair share of controversy from people who think they blurr the line with mercenary work. But for the record, this has got to be the most pea brained argument you've made yet. For all the wanking off to KKVs you've done, you would think the difference in magnitude between space based weaponry and personal firearms (which is the most Blackwater is allowed to carry) would be something you understand. But clearly you don't, which suggests you are either too stupid to put one and one together or dishonest enough to "forget" your own arguments when they come back to bite you on the ass. Personally, I'm betting on the former. You don't seem smart enough to assemble a lie even with a kit and a "dishonesty for dummies" book.

The most usual way to kill sensors is use the lasers as a wide spotlight, since that allows the laser to shoot much farther than its "drilling" range. depth of field
If you have mirrors dispersed on a very big area, very little of the laser's energy can reach the detector. Photonic laser thrusters allow the creation of very big such structures.

Or, you know what you could do? Sweep the laser across the ship until one of the mirrors bounces the laser light into the optics (which is what the mirrors are supposed to do). It is not so much the energy that blinds a sensor as it is the intensity of the light that causes the optics to overload or outright fry. Widening the depth of field makes it more likely some light will get into the sensor, but at a cost to the intensity. There is more than one way to skin a cat.

You degrade it a little. But as I said, killing each mirror is time-consuming, and exposes you to return fire.
If the thing cannot return fire, then making it so damage-resistant is pointless.

1) nice no-numbers argument. If you degrade it by, say, 50% in the area of the sky you intend to do your dirty work I'd say your job is done.

2) building off that, you don't have to destroy every single mirror to mission kill the sensor platform. Plus the effects of shrapnel will intensify the damage that one laser strike can cause. Arguably, you've only made the sensor platform more vulnerable to attack, not less.

3) who arms a sensor platform? The damn things aren't particularly robust, you might as well mass manufacture them and spam them throughout space. In fact, most arguments against traditional stealth assume the people trying to catch you have done exactly that, usually as part of an arms race. While I think its the single weakest assumption anti-stealth in space arguments make, you could at least acknowledge it.

The speed boats are used to keep the time they are exposed as small as possible, exploiting the fact that it's complex to detect them over a so huge sea border (there aren't enough coast guards to do it). Once they have an helicopter looking at them from above, they are pretty much fucked regardless of their speed.
Since there is very little way to hide an interplanetary vessel entering high orbit, this tactic is nonsense. They already know where you are, and likely have very high thrust vehicles on hand in case you try to run for it (if someone tried the trick before and they learned from their mistakes).

See, here we see you once again forget the ramifications of your own arguments when they are inconvenient to you. The distances of space means your sensor's depth of field and the number of objects you need to track increase enormously. There is no real comparison between this and a smuggler trying to evade a helicopter except in your thick stubborn skull. Among other things, helicopters can give chase and are never so far away from their target they need advanced optics to identify them. Not to mention that your argument is inapplicable to this strategy in large part because we're no longer dealing with an interplanetary environment-- we're dealing with an orbital and atmospheric one. Learn to keep track of context.

[Simon_Jester]

As for a fun idea: You might have a setting where some form of FTL is possible, but not common (say wormholes. Such travel may connect some planets but not others, and they may have to be artificially constructed.), so most civilizations might still be isolated to specific star systems. Such a setting could allow for varying degrees of "hardness" or "softness" depending on how you set things up. I always thought it would be interesting to have "soft" sci fi type concepts on one scale, but on a smaller, more locale one you adopt more purely "hard" concepts.

I'm reminded of Jerry Pournelle's Co-Dominium universe: FTL travel is possible only between "jump points" in the outer star system; there is no guarantee that a given system will have jump points leading to its immediate neighbors, let alone anywhere else, and the vast majority of a starship's time is spent on long sublight cruises between jump points.

Mitigated, of course, by the use of nigh-technomagical torch drives to generate continuous 1g or higher accelerations, and by the role of the Alderson Field as a form of shielding in space and ground combat... but to a large extent yes, on the micro scale it is a "hard" setting or could easily be reimagined as one.

[someone_else]

Duhhhh, I don't know, threaten to blow the ship to kingdom come if they don't comply?

That's a threat only if there is a human crew.

For all the wanking off to KKVs you've done, you would think the difference in magnitude between space based weaponry and personal firearms

Any damned thing with an engine and a guidance computer in space is a KKV. Any spacecraft is a goddamn weapon. Try to remember this concept.
Actual KKVs are too small to damage anything else than space vehicles, and to the contrary of space vehicles they can be successfully stopped by using other KKVs agains them (kamikaze spacecraft are just reduced to debris on the same course, so they are more dangerous than the weapons that they can carry). Reentry-capable ones have a different design, and can be restricted (although aren't overtly complex to do for spacefaring civilizations anyway).

Sweep the laser across the ship until one of the mirrors bounces the laser light into the optics

You ignored this twice, bit I'll state it again: If you get so close, the detector will be placed in a safe position. "Out of the mirror focus" I used above means that it will be in a position where even a laser bouncing off mirrors won't get at the detector. Then something will neutralize the threat (if it opens fire) or waits the faulty vessel to get out of dangerous range.

It's not overtly complex to eyeball the max dangerous range for lasers, given the max size of the optics you know that can be built.

nice no-numbers argument. If you degrade it by, say, 50% in the area of the sky you intend to do your dirty work I'd say your job is done.

Ehm. Have you looked at the link? Mirrors are on different spacecraft flying in formation, kept together by the photonic laser thruster with an accuracy compatible with sensor optics. They can be rearranged to cover holes, and in the end you degrade the sensor overall.
I'm sorry if I cannot give you any number, but the specifics will vary depending on what the hell the sensor is designed to do.
Which is setting-dependent. Also over my pay grade.

Plus the effects of shrapnel will intensify the damage that one laser strike can cause.

Shrapnel from what? you are drilling holes, not blowing stuff up.

who arms a sensor platform?

Someone that thinks it is valuable defending it for some reason (expensive sensor?). If they have already spammed known space with such platforms, then you have to waste loads of money with multiple missions and risk somene figures out your plan while you are busy killing zillions of different sensor platforms.

The distances of space means your sensor's depth of field and the number of objects you need to track increase enormously.

You just have to look closely at incoming traffic and place it in a very high orbit, or even in a lunar orbit, where you can guard them until you finish the inspections. Sounds stupid to have ships enter the thicher areas of your space without giving them a good look first, if you can. And you can.

we're no longer dealing with an interplanetary environment-- we're dealing with an orbital and atmospheric one.

Orbital space is pretty huge, you don't have to worry about atmospheric traffic unless you get very low.

[Connor MacLeod]

The spice must flow!

Really, who knows what it'd be. It was just one example of an expensive substance that came to mind. Prices would change interplanetary too - maybe something dirt cheap on Earth is expensive on Mars just due to the rarity in different locations.

Who knows though, I think this is another place that can go any way you want it to go.

To add to what you said, alot of what determines "value" in real life is pretty arbitrary and nonsensical anyhow, because it's humans determining value. Because it's rare, because we're addicted to it, because it's part of some new and exciting fad, etc. Your "spice" example could simply be attributed to a fad, or greed (maybe spices taste better on mars or something!) Maybe there is some cultural or religious significance that arose on mars for whatever reason. Maybe it became traditional because spices were so rare in the early days of colonization and now its considered a sign of status to import it at cost from Earth.

Wow. KKVs are shit in most space settings. I'd take a good laser over them any day of the week. Distances aren't nice to kinetic impactors. Though distance isn't an issue here, there's other factors at work.

What you say is true, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility that space warfare will go through some period of trial and error akin to what planet based forces have gone through, especially given that technological progression won't stop once we get into space. And whilst I am sure that teh technology we do have can help GREATLY in reducing the trial and error (modelling and suchnot) I don't think we've progressed to the point where we can use prediction and modelling and all that to completely eliminate the need to test and experiment things to make sure they DO work as we predict.

Under that sort of context, you could allow for the usage of KKVs to be used, at least until progress overrules it and lasers become common And of course irrational "human" factors (like tradition, culture, or maybe "rules of war") could impact that as well.

These space fighters are actually aero-space fighters! Their mission objective probably isn't in space itself. The real targets are probably inside a habitat. You might be able to hit it from the outside, or you might not, or you might also care about collateral damage and prefer to hit it from the inside anyway. You don't want to be the guy on the evening news defending the space strike that killed a hundred innocent civilians, do you?

It's fair to point out that what we might call a "fighter" in sci fi doesn't have to have any bearing to what a fighter is in real life. At least not 100%. Classification systems in wet navies and air forces can be kind of arbitrary and prone to change over time, so I coudl see it happening again. A "fighter" in space might be equivalent to a WW1 torpedo boat, for example.

Or maybe your fighter is actually a missile, it just fires its warheads at the target, and is recovered after battle in some fashion. One thing a fighter has over a missile is that a missile tends to be.. wasteful of materials, and one thing that has irked me in some sci fi is the automatic assumption that conservation of resources is no longer important. It may be plentiful, but resources in a solar system are still finite and at some point people have to worry about that. (Thats one reason why I've grown to hate HH-verse type missile swarms as a "good idea" - its INCREDIBLY wasteful for little gain unless you have a very contrived setting.)

Never assume you know everything, unless you like looking silly.

Or do it intentionally, if you don't mind looking silly, to harvest information.

Most will try to correct you, thus giving you much more detailed answers that you would get if you asked politely.

did you just claim that you were deliberately trying to argue with and otherwise antagonize people just as a "fact finding" exercise? How is this better than just asking questions, and why is it not trolling, exactly?

[Stofsk]

As for a fun idea: You might have a setting where some form of FTL is possible, but not common (say wormholes. Such travel may connect some planets but not others, and they may have to be artificially constructed.), so most civilizations might still be isolated to specific star systems. Such a setting could allow for varying degrees of "hardness" or "softness" depending on how you set things up. I always thought it would be interesting to have "soft" sci fi type concepts on one scale, but on a smaller, more locale one you adopt more purely "hard" concepts.

I'm reminded of Jerry Pournelle's Co-Dominium universe: FTL travel is possible only between "jump points" in the outer star system; there is no guarantee that a given system will have jump points leading to its immediate neighbors, let alone anywhere else, and the vast majority of a starship's time is spent on long sublight cruises between jump points.

It's in the suns actually. That's where the jump points form. IIRC it's why the langston field was developed, because you need the langston field active to get close the jump point and then engage the Alderson drive. I recall it being a plot point in one of the Mote books, although it has been many years since I read those books so perhaps I am misremembering it.

[Bakustra]

That was only in the case of the Mote- the points are formed by [TECH] involving stars, and in this case the red giant and the yellow dwarf were close enough that the only point connecting the Mote to the outside galaxy was inside the red giant. Most of the time they appear to form on the outskirts of systems for whatever reason (more [TECH]).

[Stofsk]

Oh. Well, I guess my post can be disregarded then.

[someone_else]

Ok, you can pay, but it's still a lot of time to wait.

That's not uncommon. It takes several years for new oil refineries, power plants, and factories to come online too, but people still build them.

Travel times add time on top of to that. I frankly don't see a lot that makes sense economically with so long waiting times and what we have already on Earth.

I imagine space ships can be the same way - if an old design goes into mass production and is commonly available, the ship itself may be quite cheap, since it doesn't need any special development. It's all off the shelf parts.

There are surely limits on that, although I'm not able to give even eyeballed estimates. I'm pestering anyone that seems to know a little more about that to get more info.

Crashes aren't much of a problem either. Consider that the habs are millions of times more massive than ships.

I was thinking about stuff hitting structural beams and such. Since habs are spinning to generate gravity (are they?), that may cause fuckups, depending on the habitat design. And some moron using the wole fuel supply of the ship, not just 400 m/s.

With so fucking close distances (relatively speaking), playing with rockets is plain absurd. Why don't place cables and use cable-climber vehicles? Safer, and much much much more efficient.

Wow. KKVs are shit in most space settings.

This means what exactly? If most have bullshittium as main armor material, that routinely ignores anything less than a nuke (or blatantly overpowered energy weapons) does that mean anything in real life?

It just means that the writer chose to make a good story since he is writing a book that wants to sell.
KKV battles are cruise missile duels IN SPACE!!!!!
Boring, fast, deadly, humans are at home pressing buttons.
KKVs can be handled as the nukes in a Cold-War-ish scenario, but not much more.

Distances aren't nice to kinetic impactors.

Let me clarify: KKV= Kinetic Kill Vehicle.
It's not an unguided slug (you're right, those suck balls in the accuracy department).

So, it's quite the opposite. Lasers have a maximum range (determined by the size of their focusing optics and the kind of radiation you are shooting, usually less than a light-minute since otherwise there is no fucking way to hit a goddamn thing due to light lag giving it time to evade), but KKVs (as any space vehicle anyway) have a delta-v, an "endurance".
This delta-v is used only to correct their course to home on target, while the main punch is given by a booster stage or a cannon. They can cruise for decades on their course. This is what probes built 20 or more years ago did for decades, it isn't hard to do.

If the homing delta-v is higher than the delta-v that the target can expend before impact (say, you are shooting at an average-sized habitat on Mars from Earth with KKVs with 4 km/s of homing delta-v). The target is totally fucked (unless it launches KKVs to intercept your own KKVs). Impact will happen in a second or in an year but there is no escape from it (if the kkv can expend more delta-v than the target, of course).

Their mission objective probably isn't in space itself. The real targets are probably inside a habitat.

You are wasting so much space in an habitat to allow fucking aircraft in them? Why? You don't need deliriously huge heights to have a nice fun park with trees to play in.
Also, they need an airlock big enough for an aircraft.

Which is, of course, why we use computers exclusively today!

If you are talking of space things, then I'm pretty much right. All brains are at Ground Control. You don't necessarily need guys bunny-hopping on the Moon.

They might also want to keep humans in the loop for less rational reasons (or not, depends on how you look at it). Is that truck the enemy or a civilian in the wrong place at the wrong time? Is that a school house or a guerilla headquarters?

That work is called "intelligence" and involves looking at stuff, placing spies, making recon work. It is hard as hell and takes weeks.
Then you decide who deserves a bomb up his ass, and call the bomb-deliverers.

Yes, since the aircraft pilot or ship crews or tank/artillery crew's work is just to deliver the payload (bomb, missile, whatever) to a target they barely see, because someone with higher rank told them to do so. In space the bomb-delivery part can be handled by a computer, since even here on Earth unmanned flying drones are being fitted to do it.

It's US military that sometimes tends to skip on the "intelligence" part and leave the bomb-deliverer the choice on who to kill, but it isn't how it is supposed to be (and partly explains why "intelligent bombs" still kill significant amount of civilians).
Most movies don't help either.

It may be plentiful, but resources in a solar system are still finite and at some point people have to worry about that.

A good reason to not do war (if we didn't have enough already). But anyway, this argument makes sense as much as if you were saying "we should not shoot because if we do we will exaust the mines of lead".
Is that a good reason to die or suffer? I don't think it is.

Because it's rare, because we're addicted to it, because it's part of some new and exciting fad, etc.

Fun, this reminds me of a guy talking about going on mars to make Martian Wine. I still think it's one of the few things that can pay for themselves if done correctly. It is also totally ludicrous, and would make Zubrin go mad.

did you just claim that you were deliberately trying to argue with and otherwise antagonize people just as a "fact finding" exercise?

No, I'm just saying that if you state what you know with some superiority, you are going to attract the attention of those that like to think they are more right than you (which is pretty much anyone else with enough time to type).
It's fun for both sides (I like debating, and the other doesn't debate if he does not like debating), and in the end is a win-win for me. I either prove I'm right or I learn something new.

Sometimes backfires and I'm stuck debating with morons that keep repeating the same shit all over again, but on this forum it works like a charm (must be that the discussion rules are slightly stricter and such morons get banned ).

How is this better than just asking questions

I don't know why, but it seems to be so from direct experience. Must be that nitpicking is fun, or that winning a debate is fun for people.

and why is it not trolling, exactly?

Trolling is causing an emotional response for fuck's sake going off-topic, but what I say usually springs a discussion on in-topic matters (it's what I want).

[Swindle1984]

Duhhhh, I don't know, threaten to blow the ship to kingdom come if they don't comply?

That's a threat only if there is a human crew.

Or if the cargo is more valuable than the ransom.

[someone_else]

They are trivially easy to dodge or destroy unless they have bullshittium as missile drive technology

Well, I'd say it is the opposite, they are easy to dodge only if the target has a truly overpowered torch drive (and this is another very common occurrence in most modern science fiction). Otherwise there is very little to do (you accelerate at 10, 100 milligees, and the thing has a chemical rocket that can thrust at gees or more).

I could throw a coke can in it's path and let it's own speed kill it.

The countermissile has to be guided too, otherwise it won't hit a damn thing beyond a few km, and a few km for a thing doing 3-4 km/s is a second or less.
Also, the KKV swarm can contain tiny counter-counter-KKVs if the commander so wishes.
There is hopefully a lower limit on their sizes since they have to be guided.

I could possibly laser it and let its own debris throw it off course.

Killing them usually means it can no more compensate your burns and then even a fart is enough to evade it. Blowing it up with a laser is a much more time-consuming thing to do.

What a laser can reliably do, is fry their sensor optics (that must point at the target) at truly stupendous ranges. Lasers excel at eyeball-frying operations. A countermeasure is placing a laser receiver on them and remote-guide them with your sensors (that are designed to be harder to kill this way as described in my answers to Formless above).
Their operational range gets shorter (less than a few light-seconds) due to light lag now.
If you make them work as a collective swarm (again, by placing mirrors and detectors on some of them and linking them up with a photonic laser thruster, like what I said to Formless above), then they cost more but don't need a sheperd spacecraft.

So you can have "short-range" kinds and "cruise missile" kinds with (very) different prices. One-size-fits-all it's still nonsense.

If it burns just to keep up with me, that's that much less it has to hurt me or to cross the distance

The fuel is only used for homing (something else gave it the punch, either a rocket bus or a cannon). It will have some kind of "kinetic warhead" that is a solid slug of dense matter (like this), and the expected damage will have to be calculated without the fuel's mass, for obvious reasons.
That kinetic warhead also doubles as "laser armor", since the laser has to drill through it to kill the vehicle.

How sophisticated is it's rocket too? Can it start and stop over and over again?

Most rocket engines can stop and reactivate easily (the ones used on RCS, and actual modern KKVs). Only the big brawny ones have problems in doing it (since there was no reason to design them to do so), also realistic fusion torches do have some kind of problems in shutting down and reactivating on short timescales.

Cannons to push it off don't help much either.

For "cannon" I meant something like railguns or coilguns, capable of sending stuff to higher speeds. We agree on how those are either horribly hot with waste heat or horribly huge (although very very efficient), respectively.
The usual way would be another rocket stage, that boosts them to speed and then it's discarded. The average chemical rocket (in a vacuum) can give it 3-4 km/s of speed on a nearly instantaneous timescale (less than a minute) then detach.

LOL. Businesses can't plan predictable deliveries ahead of time, but militaries can?

Whut? I only said business won't make a profit on chemical rocket timescales. Planning a route is just (complex) math.

Anyway, how mobile are your settlements? More often than not, they cannot leave orbit (they can change their orbit, but that's no big deal). That's enough for overkilling them with a rain of KKVs. Although structures like dyson spheres (the swarm-of-stations kind, not the shell kind that makes no sense) and your cones would require a prohibitive amount of KKVs.

Why wouldn't you? (allowing aircrafts into habitats)

Maybe it's just because it's useless, all this air makes airborne hazards much more complex to stop (it is going to be recycled much more slowly, so airborne stuff will linger for a longer time), and you also have the problem that stuff closer to the axis has far higher tangential velocity than the stuff on its "ground". That's gonna cause some interesting phenomenon in such air.

Also, because in most habitat designs, aircraft can be hit from anywhere on its surface (the hab has air in the middle and surface on all the sides, there is no horizon to hide the aircraft and you can shoot at it from "above" so flying low is pointless.). Wheel-shaped ones don't have this problem, but flying in a bycicle wheel has its limits.

Moreover, the open spaces provide buffer, so if the planners are imperfect, no big deal. There's extra air, extra water, etc. It lets nature take its course.

Compressed air seems to need less space (duh!). This means that I can have much more redundancy with much less space.

Open spaces with ceilings higher than 50 meters make very little sense unless you have very big trees. And that's pretty low for an aircraft.

Blow something open in the middle of nowhere to minimize collateral damage and fly right in.

yeah, let's depressurize the park for fuck's sake. There is no way to stop the depressurization other than bringing with you a big badass patch.

Or if the cargo is more valuable than the ransom.

That is going to be always the case if there is no crew. Otherwise it won't make any fucking sense to pay the ransom.
If you refuse to pay the ransom, then the pirate just acquired your cargo, but that doesn't mean he just made a profit.
If you were shipping say 1000 tons of nutmeg, those aren't going to be easy to sell for him.
Piracy makes sense if you are carrying valuables like gold bars, that are easily sold.

Also, unless piracy is running wild, there will likely be insurances to cover such loss.