• Nobles of Null is a forum based roleplay site where sci-fi and magic collide. Here, Earth remains fractured and divided despite humanity reaching out to the stars. Worse still, the trans-human slaves of one major power have escaped, only to establish their own Empire, seething with resentment at abuses of the past. Even the discovery of aliens, though medieval in development, has failed to rally these squabbling children of Earth together with its far darker implications. Worse still, is the discovery of the impossible - magic. Practiced by the alien locals, nearly depleted and therefore rare, its reality warping abilities remains abstract and distant to the general populace. All the while, unseen in the darkness of space, forces from without threaten to press in. For those with eyes opened by insight, it is clear that an era is about to end, and that a new age will dawn.

Space Piracy

Ray of Meep

Administrator
Wiki Moderator

Tldr, piracy in the conventional, maritime sense is incredibly difficult to pull off. Long gone are the days when a plucky captain and his small crew can raid a large cargo ship without every eyeball and gun trained on them within hours or minutes. Space piracy with meatbags will be expensive, high risk, and require incredible planning. This doesn't bode well for piracy plots.

However, one passage comes to attention:

There is also a type of pirate that is a criminal, but has nothing to fear from the authorities: the corporate raider.

The East India Company practically had its own military, and its rule was law.
Corporation in space will compete at every level for control of the markets. This competition can spill over into illegal activities, such as attacking competitors' spaceships and raiding their commerce to ruin reputations or steal sensitive information. Between the enormity of space and the amount of money corporations have on hand to spend on bribes, a lot of these illegal activities can be hidden.

In short, these corporations can hire off-the-book crews to acts as pirates that attack only the spaceships of their competitors. They will be protected from the consequences if they follow these rules, but left to the authorities if they breach the terms of their contract.

A competitor might be frustrated by police and military inaction, and might decide to take matters in its own hands by hiring its own pirates and pirate-hunters. There is even less of a chance that military forces intervene in 'red on red' conflict, even if it escalates into corporate warfare.
The main difference between corporate warfare and true piracy is that the corporate pirates are unlikely to gain any money by ransoming their victims, as the corporations have nothing to lose from writing off their responsibilities, and are unlikely to target major settlements by using spaceships as WMDs, as this will draw in attention from the authorities that cannot be bribed away.

As with many things in our lives, operations now have hundreds and thousands of people cooperating with each other, unwittingly behind the scenes. I see space pirates unofficially incorporated as just another cog in the machine for interplanetary/interstellar corporations, tools to use against their competition.

Different governments will handle the situation differently. As documented in Grau Lancers, the GDW supposedly takes a hard stance against piracy, period, perhaps due to the collateral damage it might cause to its many space colonies, nationalizing much of its merchant fleet. The results end up mixed, ever really taking out the root problem: corporate sponsorship.

Shen Zhou of the HFR likely takes a similar stance, especially against Daqin sponsored pirates. Li Ming on the other hand sees things differently. They'll take a soft stance towards piracy, deeming the cost of anti-piracy efforts higher than the cost of piracy itself, so long as said piracy remains only as inter-corperate competition, and if excessive casualties don't occur. How this policy interacts with those of other nations is a question.

... Now that I think about it, it'll be necessary to come up with a unified, international treatment of piracy, at least enforced on paper to allow for confident international commerse.
 

Uso

Administrator
Staff member
Wiki Moderator
It does seem like Piracy could flourish in areas where the local government has been paid to look the other way.

We also do have lots of smaller human 'colonies' in the hundreds of systems without an easily habitable planet. These colonies would have have either died our, or struggled to built out a life in space-colonies. They are largely made up of people who just bailed on earth during the early SLE / interstellar exploration craze so they'd be prime targets for pirates provided they can get in and out of those star systems (and steal enough to make it worth it)
 
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