Oolite Bulletins

Stormrider wrote:

I think the only pirates who demand cargo should be those who are unsure of victory. Realistically pirates who are sure of victory won't stop for a few pods of worthless goods. They are cold, ruthless, professionals hardened by the endless emptiness of space.

Realistically, pirates are just as averse to getting killed as anyone else.. if they can steal cargo without having to risk their necks in combat, that would be their first choice.

Stormrider wrote:

They are cold, ruthless, professionals hardened by the endless emptiness of space.

Or, alternatively, they are mostly desperate individuals, driven to dangerous extremes through lack of any alternative, clinging on to existence by their fingernails (or species equivalent). Most of the planets in the Co-operative are, for most of the inhabitants, pretty rotten places to live. Slavery is rife, and life is cheap. If you're some bondsman, crewing a Python for the second son of Baron Hoosits, hauling cargo to dangerous places for his profit on a short ration of dried beans, might it not be a temptation just to quietly slit your captain's throat one witchspace night, tip the body out the airlock, and you and the rest of the crew hightail it off somewhere and see if you can't do better for yourselves on a freelance basis?

Diziet Sma wrote:

Stormrider wrote:

I think the only pirates who demand cargo should be those who are unsure of victory. Realistically pirates who are sure of victory won't stop for a few pods of worthless goods. They are cold, ruthless, professionals hardened by the endless emptiness of space.

Realistically, pirates are just as averse to getting killed as anyone else.. if they can steal cargo without having to risk their necks in combat, that would be their first choice.

Indeed. An opposition which knows you're going to either kill it or sell it into slavery - and has enough cargo to be worth stealing - probably has enough firepower to kill at least one of you before they all go down. If you can make the value of the cargo you steal from any individual less than the cost of a hardhead missile or the repair bill of a single ship system, you provide an incentive for them just to pay up.

If they know they're definitely going to die, they can easily force you to destroy their ship to stop them firing back - or just ram one of you - and you get a couple of alloy plates and a few random cargo pods that survive the explosion, which is probably less than sensible intimidation would grant.

If you're going to steal a few thousand credits of cargo from them (a player carrying a full hold of Computers might actually have that happen, but most NPCs carry far more mixed goods), then it's worth that Boa carrying a rack of five hardheads to make sure you don't. If you ask for only a few hundred worth, it's not actually cost-effective to fire that hardhead.

That's not to say that every pirate out there is acting with that level of economic rationality, but the ones who survive long enough to be more than sitting ducks for the first bounty hunter sweep through the system probably do...