Could space pirates exist in a future space faring society

Could space pirates exist in a future space faring society.

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Space travel is pretty long distance, and it would be hard to board a spacecraft to get cargo. It sounds pretty unrealistic and difficult. They would have to hang out on the outskirts of planets and ambush traders.

Who was in the wrong?

Not without massive improvements to propulsion technology and FTL ability allowing a society to be spread across a large number of star systems.

The first problem is Delta-V. To pirate a ship, you need to intercept it, take it, and then move its cargo to a destination where it can be sold.

With any current realistic idea for an engine, this would be insanely difficult to do in any way that would turn a profit.

And anyone could see you. The space shuttle main engine burn has a thermal signature visible from the orbit of Pluto, and a drive with the performance you'd need would be even brighter. Pair that with the impossible-to-high heat signature of a ship during normal operations, and the only way to get away with piracy is to do it in an uninhabited or ambivalent system.

My thought is in the future we could have fusion rockets for fast interplanetary travel and something like an alcubierre drive or a wormhole for relatively fast interstellar travel.

>They would have to hang out on the outskirts of planets and ambush traders.
So pretty much exactly how they've always worked, up to the present day? You know they didn't just float around the Mediterranean hoping to run into merchants, right? They deliberately targeted settlements and shipping lanes.

Yeah, but the distance will be much greater. Also, the biggest challenge is being able to board/disable the other ship without blowing it up.

Piracy and general thievery will always exist as long as humans do, so yes.

The distance is irrelevant, the trayectories are defined by efficiency concerns, very precise equations, and intercepting it at a certain point only requires to solve a simple ordinary diferencial equation once you know the rout the "freighter" would take.
The boarding thing is understandable, however it might be possible to coherce a crew to change course to a nearby (and obbviously illegal) port or shipyard.

Depends on the speeds achievable. If the top speeds for cargo ships would be around 0.3c you could just park your ship along some trading route and just literally nuke the cargo ship within EMP distance.

If the speed are FTL you'd just need a faster ship and overtake. This would be tricky and expensive though.

If cargo ships go at 0.99c and there's no way to go FTL I'd imagine it'd be extremely rare.

if you aint studying STEM, kys. were gonna make mars great, believe me folks.

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it's possible when we have a huge space faring development stage for several centuries and in the end goes into total war, which after it is over can turn into lots of piracy.

We kinda stil have a long way to go to reach anything sci-fi related that we see in the movies.

WHY THE FUCK IS MY IP / COUNTRY BANNED?
> today is first time on /pol in 7days
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FUCKING JEW KIKE BOARD - I'LL FUCKING SHOW YOU WHAT ABUSE IS YOU RETARDED SPASTIC AMERICUNTS!!!!!!!

If it came to a point that hanging out in near orbit waiting to attack shipments was relatively inexpensive and/or very lucrative then sure.

The daily Aussie shitpost

What in Davy Jones’ locker did ye just bark at me, ye scurvy bilgerat? I’ll have ye know I be the meanest cutthroat on the this side of galaxy and I’ve led numerous raids on mining colonies, and raped over 300 ayy lmaos. I be trained in hit-and-run pillaging and be the deadliest with a blaster of all the captains on the milky way. Ye be nothing to me but another source o’ swag. I’ll have yer guts for garters and keel haul ye like never been done before, hear me true. You think ye can hide behind your pathetic old pc? Think twice on that, scallywag. As we parley I be contacting my secret network o’ pirates across the space and yer planet is being tracked right now so ye better prepare for the typhoon, weevil. The kind o’ monsoon that’ll wipe ye off the map. You’re sarlakhkbait, fool. I can fly anywhere, in any space, and can kill ye in o’er seven hundred ways, and that be just with me hook and fist. Not only do I be top o’ the line with a power sword, but I have an entire pirate fleet at my beck and call and I’ll damned sure use it all to wipe yer arse off o’ the world, ye dog. If only ye had had the foresight to know what devilish wrath your jibe was about to incur, ye might have belayed the comment. But ye couldn’t, ye didn’t, and now ye’ll pay the ultimate toll, you buffoon. I’ll shit fury all over ye and ye’ll drown in the depths o’ it. You’re alien food now.

If the value of the cargo would justify vast space travel it'd almost certainly be worth it to idle about for some time waiting for a juicy tanker to come by.

F

Not unless society becomes a lot more conservative and restrictive on sexual behavior again.

There's really no such thing as piracy. Being a pirate was just a code for being a homosexual back in the day, where you couldn't blow a dude's dick without getting punished by society. So what are gays supposed to do during these days? They pool money, buy a boat and fuck each other in open waters.

Of course that would start to raise some questions, like: "Hey what are you guys doing out there?" So you'd have to come up with a believeable story, preferably one that prevents people from asking too many questions. And so the idea of the pirate was born, and in some cases sea-faring faggots actually resorted to crime. In some cases to keep up appearances, in some cases simply because they needed the money. Running a homosexual love-boat is not exactly cheap.

tl;dr: There won't be any space pirates, because homosexuality is widely accepted in western countries.

>germanposting
take your cancerous liberalism elsewhere you faggot

Hilario-----

Oh shit I mean trumplarious

Bretty good.

Fusion rockets sure but even if you can get your spacecraft moving that fast you need to deal with the fuel and intertia issues, alcubierre drives or wormhole travel is just fantasy

Wormhole travel is not fantasy, it is possible within the realm of physics, we just don't know how it could occur.

>magic is not fantasy, it is possible within the realm of physics, we just don't know how it could occur
stupid scientists cannot work fast enougj

>not knowing how orbital mechanics work
>not realizing you're always moving
>not realizing that docking takes more coordination than cutting an ants dick off.

>docking takes more coordination than cutting an ants dick off
That's when you're trying not to break anything. I suppose a specialized pirate ship would have something to pierce the hull and a passage inside.

Ignoring interstellar travel for a moment, any interplanetary trading system in our own solar system is going to have well-defined shipping lanes and ports.

The exact routes will change slightly with planetary configuration in order to accommodate different injection and escape trajectories to travel between planets, moons, refueling stations, etc, but will be largely predictable since vehicles will, naturally, have to minimize fuel consumption and travel time.

Space pirates will probably stakeout these shipping lanes, waiting to chase after cargo ships.

fpbp

>I'll never be a space pirate

On a practical level, you'd need a glut of spacecraft first. So many spacecraft around that some can end up in desperate hands.

Of course, but it'd be on a much larger, and much more bureaucratic sense. With no actual combat.

We're talking theft of deeds and property rights on a planet while the people manning the ships get repo'd and stranded.

Most attacks by pirates didn't end with the ship being destroyed or the crew executed.

In the majority of cases the pirates would come alongside, take a few warning shots to let them know they mean business, and basically compel the cargo ship to surrender and turn over some of its cargo.


All you'd really need in this case is some kind of grappler or clamp that could keep you attached to whatever cargo ship you're going after... or hell, if the cargo is attached externally you just need something to disconnect it and scoop up the goods. It'd be like robbing a cargo ship with a helicopter... there's basically fuck all they could do to stop you.