[Axem]

I would think piracy in the GTVA would have evolved into a big crime ring instead of keeping with the traditional "Yarrr! Prepare to boarded" pirates. So you'd have things like starship thieves steal or hijack ships, bring it to a location where they can offload or hold the people for ransom. More covert and quieter than big guns shooting.

[Mustang19]

Yes, hostage-taking too. It isn't common any more in developed countries, given the skill of first-world hostage rescue teams, but if we assume that the "fringes" of the GTVA are in third-world poverty (which I doubt) then they may not have the forces to resolve a hostage situation so easily.

[Axem]

I would expect every system to have, more or less, the same conditions, including things like hostage rescue. But whats different from now is that you have a lot of "dead space" you can hide in and its easy to get to and easy to change your position in just a few minutes to avoid any position/vector tracing.

[karajorma]

The GTVA has more than enough destroyers to stick one in every system. And even if they don't want to do that you simply have to send a destroyer into any system the second you get a report of piracy to end all possible piracy in that system.

And I don't buy this fringe system stuff either. Luyten went from newly discovered to regional powerhouse in a few years. I also find it hard to believe in fringe planets when everything on the map is at most 2-3 hours from a well established system. Fringe systems only exist if they are difficult to get to. Nothing in FS2 is.

[Topgun]

Where's the love for ninjas?

Dang! how did you know I had that idea! I was making afew missions too!

[NGTM-1R]

I tend to agree. Personally I tend to feel that as long as the GTVA is stable piracy is basically impossible in a universe with near-instantaneous travel and instantaneous FTL comms.


As soon as pirates appeared they'd have maybe 2 minutes before ships from the nearest GTVA destroyer responded and kicked the **** out of them.

Depends on if the comms are jammable, and the GTVA has kinda had the **** kicked out of it post-Capella, so there may not even be a destroyer for every system. (Probably isn't, in fact.) The GTVA likely has nearly nothing left to work with and even simple policing may be difficult for them. At least, for a time, piracy in the traditional sense is a real possiblity.

[karajorma]

Jamming is easily worked around. You know pirates are in the area you simply send a signal back to the base every 30 seconds. If the signal goes missing help comes a-running.

Secondly pirates on Earth work in the rough unpatrolled areas of space but why would their be any need for merchant ships and the like to cross such areas? Ships without jump drives can't be common except as planet to orbit ferries (like the Satis freighters in the first FS2 mission). At the top speeds of FS2 ships it would take forever to ship cargo with them. So ships are mostly going to be simply jumping from one heavy traffic area to another. They simply don't spend time in the wide open beyond where pirates like to attack.

Thirdly I simply don't believe that the GTVA took quite as heavy a kicking as you suggest. I'm sure they got beaten up pretty badly but I doubt it was to the degree you talk about. If things were that bad I doubt Admiral Petrach's monologue at the end of FS2 would be talking about building a Terran Knossos. The GTVA would have much bigger problems to attend to.

[NGTM-1R]

He held out the possiblity of a Terran Knossos, he didn't actually say they would build one, only that they could at some unspecified point in the future. My memory is a little fuzzy, but possibly not even that; simply that they knew how to build one, not even that they had the capablity to.

To the second point must come the obvious answer; most of the battles in FS1 and FS2 take place in areas where the ships had no purpose being. So there are clearly some kind of restrictions on subspace drives that we don't know of or understand. We almost never see a ship make a direct node-to-node transit through a system for that matter; that only happened in one mission of FS1 (which had an admittedly odd setup on having three subspace nodes within a 60km radius).

[Mustang19]

Well, the ships have to be somewhere, they can't just hang around the jump nodes all the time.

[karajorma]

Yeah but the somewhere would be somewhere with lots of armed GTVA ships around is my point. If commercial traffic stuck to planets and nodes only then pirates would be **** out of luck.

As for ships not sticking to those two places in FS2, well in that case we were dealing with an ongoing war. We only see things from a military perspective there. I find it very hard to believe that there is another strange unknown subspace problem that prevents direct ship to node jumps.

[freespacegundam]

The obvious solution to make pirates more than just filler enemies is simple.  First, give the chosen pirate band a remote and very inaccessible base, i.e. a nebula.  Sure, the GTVA might have the manpower to station a destroyer in the nebula, but if it plays havoc with sensors and comms, freighters are pretty helpless when traveling through without an escort.

Next, make the pirates a bit more intelligent.  If we're to believe that some of these folks are ex military, they're not going to blindly attack anything that moves.  They'll pick and choose their targets, striking low priority or unescorted transports rather than attacking huge convoys.  Granted, they'll attack them if they feel they have the element of surprise. 

And finally, give the poor guys a backstory for pete's sake.  As we can plainly see, piracy isn't all that easy, so why do they choose to do it?  Maybe they're fed up with trying to make an honest living and are going for the quick and easy route.  Maybe they're bitter at society.  Who knows, but at least mention something about it.