cthia wrote:serpounce wrote:Congratulations on your purchase of a slightly used Indefatigable Flight I battlecruiser!
Again, the scenario has it handed to them.
Have you thought about how you'll crew it yet?
Since an Indefatigable and Sultan are in the same tonnage range (850K) and are from a comparable era, let's look up the Sultan's crew requirements:
2195 Total
– 190 Officers
– 1705 Enlisted
– 300 Marines
We can probably do without 200 of the 300 marines as we aren't planning on lots of combat. We can probably trim down 60 officers and a 500ish enlisted as we're pirates and presumably don't care about combat redundancy and some less vital functions. This leaves us a crew of ~1,400 to run a BC, roughly in line with what Honor got away with at Cerberus.
Where are you going to get over 1,000 naval-qualified rank and file pirates and over 100 trustworthy officer types? Presumably if they were competent spacers with average morality they would serve in an actual freighter, SDF, Frontier Fleet, etc. Even if you did find them, how would you go about collecting them? Is there some secret pirate recruiting agency that matches up henchmen with would be Blackbeards?
Then let's talk ship efficiency. Since pretty much every pirate our plucky band of heroes has run across has been scum-of-the-galaxy types in line with Steilman's gang from Wayfarer, how would you even begin to administer discipline aboard your BC? 1,000+ hard cases who got into piracy because they didn't want to do work and you're expecting them to perform basic maintenance and conduct drills? All without killing each other or accidentally blowing up the ship.
For the payout, yes.
Again, the benefactor rustled up the crew. I imagine a hidden third party in the crime underworld has access to many pirates. And I imagine that an Honorverse has many qualified applicants born of many reasons - they were unjustly beached, set up, drummed out of the navy, etc., etc. I imagine that there are no shortages of pirates, who on a Venn diagram, intersects with mercenary, ex-navy and pirate.
And this is before we start getting underway. Then we have even more complicated matters. How do you refuel and re-provision? What do you do when your Alpha nodes start to show signs of wear?
This BC has been procured for ONE, I repeat, ONE score. It is a disposable resource. Negligible to the score.
It is the same concept that is a cold slap in the face to the war on drugs here in America. Drug cartels have access to $5M submarines named "Bigfoot" and gunboats. These $5M submarines can transport $100M worth of cocaine. Losing one after even a single run is negligible.
Any pirate smart enough to solve these problems was probably smart enough to just invest in a fleet of FFs assuming they didn't cash out immediately and retire to some resort world. As others have pointed out: Why bother with one big ship when you can have 8 small ships picketing 8 different systems and presumably getting 8x the targets while diffusing the risk that your entire fleet gets wiped out.
A third party supplied the BC. And this third party is after something other than the score. He isn't in the piracy business. What he wants or gets out of the deal is irrelevant to the pirates.
As a final note, pirates that have taken the offer of "Here's a free Solarian pirate scholarship/BC/CA/entire fleet!" have been on the whole dumber than a bag of rocks. I'm not just talking about them getting blown up spectacularly by the RMN and/or SLN (even though yes, that was bad). Instead, i'm talking about the fact that they were too stupid to realize that they would not have been alive once they no more utility to their puppet master. A bunch of really stupid pirates in an ex-SLN warship is the biggest loose end you could have lying around.
TL:DR - the only pirates that would desire a BC are the ones too stupid to be able to operate one.
They are not going to be alive too long anyways in their lifestyle.
...
If a Third Party is providing the intel, the BC, the crew, and the buyer, you're not really a pirate any more. You're functionally an unlicensed mercenary hired to commit illegal activities.
And you certainly aren't operating as an independent or semi-independent pirate in that scenario. You're not operating for yourself, you're operating on behalf of the "Third Party" who has handed you intel, BC, crew, and buyer - you're an expendable, mostly deniable, agent.
One further reason for pirates to keep their ships small? Crew trust is important, and making sure you've got a sufficiently loyal and capable core is a lot easier for a smaller ship. Think about what happened to PNS
Saladin - no pirate wants that to happen to him.
You want to be able to have a ship you can manage with a small number of loyalists at need.
As for the "nothing left to loose, why not get a BC" premise ... if you're able to get a BC in that situation, you're in a position to retire, rather than run around in the BC.
Also, think about it - as has been said, a pirate's best defense is to not get caught, true. But it's a lot easier to not get caught if no navy is gunning for you in particular. Getting and using a BC automatically jumps you to the the top of the wanted list and has navies gunning for you personally. No pirate, with or without a BC can stand up to any naval force specifically hunting him, his only option would be to evade and not get caught, but better still to not make himself a specific hunted target.
It's not unlike the back wall of a shooting range. Sure, if you run along the backstop while people are using the range aiming at targets, you might get hit, but if the shooters are aiming specifically at you, you're a lot more likely to get hit.
Nearly any number of individually smaller scores performed by a pirate frigate, destroyer or even a light cruiser, will draw far less attention than a huge hit performed by a BC.
