The Economics of Piracy

cthia wrote:

You never paid much attention to my original post. I envisioned that a "hidden entity on high," supplied a select group of pirates with inside intel and funding. Same difference as textev's scenario. (A third party.)

You just didn't pay much attention to my concept before you drew and fired. I think you were facing the sun in the shootout.

Then why stop at BC's? Why not SD's? If you have an honest to god nation supporting you the sky is the limit and btw that's not piracy it is commerce raiding it might not be as clear cut as Mesa using its own ships but at the end of the day it is basically the same thing.

Sigs wrote:So now your pirate has the backing of a nation or at least a major corporation? The situation might change a little if say Mesa offered a pirate a lot of money and ships to attack say Manticore's shipping but that is a far cry from a pirate assembling the resources on his or her own and committing the attack.

Mesa giving a pirate a semi-modern BC and the munitions to go with it not to mention money to hire a crew is ever so slightly different from a pirate who has to find and buy a BC, find and buy weapons and find and train a crew for a once in a millennium target that probably has a heavy escort.

That outside funding make them more commerce raiders than pirates.

If they could capture and sell ships to offset expenses, then well and good.

But Manpower, and the Silesian Government (at least the parts that were complicit) didn't care if those "pirates" made money or not. They were supporting them for the long game, to cause Manticore to steer clear so that genetic slavery could remain legal in Silesia. They were willing to roll the dice on an almost certain short term loss (the pirate fleet costing more to provide and operate than it could plausibly hope to bring in) in order to avoid outside interference in their long term economic prospect.

(Don't care if I lose $0.5B outfitting the "pirates" if they drive off Manticore and thus keep my $50M/year payoff money rolling in)


And even then Manpower itself didn't really care if the costs of keeping Silesia open to genetic slaves generated ever generated a long term profit because they had the MAlign's onion pulling their strings; driven by non-profit motives



In other words yes you can point to the "pirates" Saganami fought as a fairly extreme example of what a multi-stellar or government could fund. But you can't point to them as proof the economics work because nobody involved much cared whether they made or lost money (and I pretty much guarantee they lost money even before they provoked Manticore into bringing the sledgehammer down on them)

Can someone fund such a fleet to give cthia his "super pirate" and his BC? Yes.
Are they doing it because they expect the pirates themselves to efficiently turn a profit for them? No.

cthia wrote:Yet, at Trautman's Star, it wasn't a cakewalk for the Manties either!
It also goes toward evidence that all pirates are not mindless simpletons that don't know their way around ships. There are pirates who can fight ships. In a Venn diagram, there are pirates who intersect with both pirate and mercenary, and vice versa.

You don’t seem to grasp a simple concept, whether or not it was a cakewalk for the navy in question is irrelevant because that is exactly what their one true purpose is, fight and if necessary die. If you notice the RMN has repair capabilities both mobile and fixed so do most other navies whereas pirates don’t generally have such ready access to the repair facilities in question.

What is the purpose of a pirate? To loot. To steal etc… it boils down to getting money and staying out of range of anyone who can fight back.


As for your hidden entity aka third party I took it to mean the financial backer a successful pirate or former pirate. So if the third party is in fact a nation it does make it commerce raiding and the goal of the attack would be to take the resources from the target nation rather than the monetary benefit. The pirates might make a buck from that but the third party would likely not care about that as the goals would be ideological or political.

One of my friends suggested that we simply cannot profess to fathom the art of fencing in all the many worlds on stage in an Honorverse.

I suspect he has a point.

Sigs wrote:

cthia wrote:Yet, at Trautman's Star, it wasn't a cakewalk for the Manties either!
It also goes toward evidence that all pirates are not mindless simpletons that don't know their way around ships. There are pirates who can fight ships. In a Venn diagram, there are pirates who intersect with both pirate and mercenary, and vice versa.

You don’t seem to grasp a simple concept, whether or not it was a cakewalk for the navy in question is irrelevant because that is exactly what their one true purpose is, fight and if necessary die. If you notice the RMN has repair capabilities both mobile and fixed so do most other navies whereas pirates don’t generally have such ready access to the repair facilities in question.

What is the purpose of a pirate? To loot. To steal etc… it boils down to getting money and staying out of range of anyone who can fight back.


As for your hidden entity aka third party I took it to mean the financial backer a successful pirate or former pirate. So if the third party is in fact a nation it does make it commerce raiding and the goal of the attack would be to take the resources from the target nation rather than the monetary benefit. The pirates might make a buck from that but the third party would likely not care about that as the goals would be ideological or political.

I never dealt with the prequel to that initial post. I didn't think it was necessary. Some "entity" or third party provided a BC, funding and intel to a bunch of pirates. Do you think that I think that the entity ultimately gave a schit about the pirates? Or that the pirates would give a schit about the possible personal or political goals of some entity they couldn't see? What the pirates would care about is the score. So what, if some hidden entity has ulterior motives other than the score! Who cares? The point is, I thought, still think, that if a band of pirates could get their hands on a BC they would not hesitate to utilize that BC for a particular score, especially if that score is a cargo hold full of rare "unobtanium." They'll just take the booty to a smelter and extract the "unob" from the "tanium."

Just because the financial source technically changes the classification of the act from piracy to commerce raiding is irrelevant. Textev called them pirates. Pirates were the patsies. I would imagine that many "third parties" use pirates for their dirty work.

Shakespeare's "What's in a name" and a thorny red rose comes to mind.

What is the purpose of a pirate? To loot. To steal etc… it boils down to getting money and staying out of range of anyone who can fight back.

Herein is a big difference in opinion.

It boils down to quickly getting enough money to retire undead! Piracy isn't a career people. It is the classical, arguably elusive, get rich quick scheme. I don't personally think a pirate strikes out to pirate for a lifetime. He has visions of getting rich. Harrington is biting at their ankles - longevity isn't an option.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Sigs wrote:So now your pirate has the backing of a nation or at least a major corporation? The situation might change a little if say Mesa offered a pirate a lot of money and ships to attack say Manticore's shipping but that is a far cry from a pirate assembling the resources on his or her own and committing the attack.

Mesa giving a pirate a semi-modern BC and the munitions to go with it not to mention money to hire a crew is ever so slightly different from a pirate who has to find and buy a BC, find and buy weapons and find and train a crew for a once in a millennium target that probably has a heavy escort.

That outside funding make them more commerce raiders than pirates.

If they could capture and sell ships to offset expenses, then well and good.

But Manpower, and the Silesian Government (at least the parts that were complicit) didn't care if those "pirates" made money or not. They were supporting them for the long game, to cause Manticore to steer clear so that genetic slavery could remain legal in Silesia. They were willing to roll the dice on an almost certain short term loss (the pirate fleet costing more to provide and operate than it could plausibly hope to bring in) in order to avoid outside interference in their long term economic prospect.

(Don't care if I lose $0.5B outfitting the "pirates" if they drive off Manticore and thus keep my $50M/year payoff money rolling in)


And even then Manpower itself didn't really care if the costs of keeping Silesia open to genetic slaves generated ever generated a long term profit because they had the MAlign's onion pulling their strings; driven by non-profit motives



In other words yes you can point to the "pirates" Saganami fought as a fairly extreme example of what a multi-stellar or government could fund. But you can't point to them as proof the economics work because nobody involved much cared whether they made or lost money (and I pretty much guarantee they lost money even before they provoked Manticore into bringing the sledgehammer down on them)

Can someone fund such a fleet to give cthia his "super pirate" and his BC? Yes.
Are they doing it because they expect the pirates themselves to efficiently turn a profit for them? No.

Again, my entire exercise was not about the "source of funding." It was about the pirate.

"Hey mate. We're gong to go and take that rare shipment of unobtanium. You want in?"

"We need a BC for that!"

"We got one. Some snowflake is giving us one!"

"What's he get out of it?"

"Do you really care?"

cthia wrote:Again, my entire exercise was not about the "source of funding." It was about the pirate.

"Hey mate. We're gong to go and take that rare shipment of unobtanium. You want in?"

"We need a BC for that!"

"We got one. Some snowflake is giving us one!"

"What's he get out of it?"

"Do you really care?"

But this doesn't make sense after a certain financial point. If you are going to require a 2 billion dollar ship and a billion dollars worth of ammo to pull this one off, wouldn't it be just be easier just to pawn the ship and run off with the 3 billion dollars, before you hired a crew and had to share it with them?

Theemile wrote:If you are going to require a 2 billion dollar ship and a billion dollars worth of ammo to pull this one off, wouldn't it be just be easier just to pawn the ship and run off with the 3 billion dollars, before you hired a crew and had to share it with them?

That doesn't seem very ethical, and pirates are all about ethical behavior.

kzt wrote:

Theemile wrote:If you are going to require a 2 billion dollar ship and a billion dollars worth of ammo to pull this one off, wouldn't it be just be easier just to pawn the ship and run off with the 3 billion dollars, before you hired a crew and had to share it with them?

That doesn't seem very ethical, and pirates are all about ethical behavior.

What would pirates care about the cost of a ship and munitions that they didn't purchase, hmm?

Besides, we were considering a ship load of unobtanium, where several billion dollars is a drop in the bucket. *Crying like a bunch of babies over a several billion dollar expenditure that they didn't foot, to acquire a trillion dollar return??? I don't know about ethical, but I do know that pirates aren't chatroom stupid.

Reminds me of something my grandfather taught me at a snotty nosed age...

Son, you know why many poor people can't get rich? It is because they are afraid to spend real money. You need to spend real money to make real money.

And if they get rich, somehow they are suddenly broke. Because they need to spend money (investments) to protect their money. And they are afraid to invest, because that is spending. So they are content to watch their nest of eggs implode - taxes, necessities and more taxes.

--cthia's grandfather

* My grandfather taught me that because he, along with my parents, wanted me to invest a quarter of a million dollars of the money I had earned before graduating high school and I was crying like a little baby. Yet, I eventually saw an almost ten times return on that money.

Though I was crying like a little beotch too, I was only a baby pirate then.

kzt wrote:

Theemile wrote:If you are going to require a 2 billion dollar ship and a billion dollars worth of ammo to pull this one off, wouldn't it be just be easier just to pawn the ship and run off with the 3 billion dollars, before you hired a crew and had to share it with them?

That doesn't seem very ethical, and pirates are all about ethical behavior.

What would pirates care about the cost of a ship and munitions that they didn't purchase, hmm?

Besides, we were considering a ship load of unobtanium, where several billion dollars is a drop in the bucket. *Crying like a bunch of babies over a several billion dollar expenditure that they didn't foot, to acquire a trillion dollar return??? I don't know about ethical, but I do know that pirates aren't chatroom stupid.

** Reminds me of something my grandfather taught me at a snotty nosed age...

Son, you know why many poor people can't get rich? It is because they are afraid to spend real money. You need to spend real money to make real money.

And if they get rich, somehow they are suddenly broke. Because they need to spend money (investments) to protect their money. And they are afraid to invest, because that is spending. So they are content to watch their nest of eggs implode - taxes, necessities and more taxes.

--cthia's grandfather

cthia wrote:* My grandfather taught me that because he, along with my parents, wanted me to invest a quarter of a million dollars of the money I had earned before graduating high school and I was crying like a little baby. Yet, I eventually saw an almost ten times return on that money.

Though I was crying like a little beotch too, I was only a baby pirate then.

** Also reminds me of "don't look a gift horse in the mouth." ...

Which seems to have evolved, in some social circles, into "don't look a million dollars in the face" - to be more specific.