There is an infamous 'undead thread' about the impossibility of piracy in Traveller. Instead of another regurgitation of the pros and cons, I thought about it from the other side: what technology would allow or even encourage piracy and raiding?
In both cases, I'm thinking about the Hollywood image: pirates of the carribean, boarding merchantmen, quaffing rum, and forcing prisoners to walk the plank; raiders as vikings in a longship, swilling beer, ravishing maidens, and torching farming villages, both translated into space. * I'm excluding military commerce raiders and letters or marque from consideration, since they are not free agents of mayhem. * It must be an universe where relatively small warships are feasible. It must be easy to refit unarmed merchanters into lightly armed merchanters, and a big, armed merchanter must have decent chances against a light warship. * For piracy, it must be possible to board a resisting starship. Either boarding can be done under power, or it must be possible to disable drives with precision shooting and not too much collateral damage. * Pirates need to sell their goods. Ports looking the other way are a social requirement, not a technical one, but limited communications might encourage them. * For raiders, the technology must encourage offense over defense, so that taking a world is much easier than holding it. That encourages a succession of warlords, one weaker than the next because each change of control destroys some industry. Until the barbarians from the fringes move in ... * Even if there are pirate-friendly ports, there won't be much in the way of pirate homeworlds. Raiders might have homewords, but again little heavy industry. So there must be a technology which allows starship construction and repair 'in the field'. Capturing educated technical workers may be a raider tactic, but it has obvious risks -- can they trust their life to an enslaved engineer? Mind control might be the answer, or all those lovely coercive gadgets from the new UT. But proper vikings build and maintain their own ships, which might well be one TL more advanced than their victims' defenses. * There must be lots of habitable worlds within flight range, both to encourage dispersed 'victim' settlements and hidden 'pirate/raider' settlements. Any comments? Additions? Corrections? _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
