How would space piracy even work if ships have FTL capabilities...

Lots of FTL systems can't enter/exit FTL in a gravity well. So that leaves a volume of space where FTL doesn't work, forcing ships to travel at STL where they can be caught. For 40k that volume is most of the star system. For Star Wars it's around the planet.

The planets that don't have enough surface to orbit weapons to drive away pirates are still going to be on trade routes.

Then there are FTL systems like Star Trek where combat at FTL is possible.

If you can board other ships that are also moving FTL, what's the issue?

I had an idea for a short game for a Star Wars system with this idea. An ion storm has kicked up in a system at a vital jump point, meaning the PCs and a bunch of NPCs are trapped in-system for a matter of days to months until it becomes safe enough to travel that lane.

Most people can put their business on hold or take the long way around, which might take just as long as the ion storm lasts. But a few people just can't wait. There's a jump point known to be a pirate stronghold that can bypass the ion storm system completely in a few jumps, and an NPC contacts the PCs about joining up to run the pirate route. Introduce a small cast of potentially recurring characters and contacts for the party; a smuggler, an alliance captain running urgent medical supplies, a merchant with a freighter of perishables and a debt to get out of, a bounty hunter, maybe even an arms dealer on the system's space station who can sell them some weapons to help them punch through.

Then they all jump together, and they run into some snags against the pirates which decide whether or not the PCs cut their losses and use the group as bait to make a clean getaway, or keep the ships together and weather the pirates as one; an opportunity to have the survivors come back as scorned enemies, or new buddies and contacts to call on or run into.

The issue is that if you aren't moving FTL in the same direction then you'r going to have a bad time.

this

Things happen at close ranges because ships in EvE are actually pretty slow (a fast frigate or interceptor can hit 4-8km/s unless it's a super gimmick fit, and relative to IRL that's not that fast) outside of FTL, and they all can equip modules that allow them to catch other ships and shut down their warp drives or put them in a stasis bubble.

Generally this occurs near stargates or stations, where you can predict where your target is going to be with a fair amount of accuracy.

tl;dr chokepoints and warp scramblers

Yes, but..

There are places where lots of ships pass by. Places like several islands in the Caribbean where current, wind and deep enough water conspires to confine ships to narrow 'lanes', the English channel, much of the Mediterranean and lots of the east China sea and the strait of Singapore.

If you want to get autismal levels of realistic, space piracy doesn't work WITHOUT FTL simply because space. You actually NEED FTL for space piracy to even be a thing.

projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/misconceptions.php
projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/pirate.php

Atomic Rockets is a great website for hard scifi.

All of those places got a reputation for being infested with pirates because of a mix of lots of high value trading passing by and scattershot or shit law enforcement, often because the powers that be around those areas were fighting.

>You need FTL

Uh.. why?

If I have a ion engine with enough solar cells and radiators to out-accelerate and enough delta-v to catch asteroid mining ships taking their haul to mass drivers for delivery to earth I can make money.

In some ways low energy, no FTL space exploration is more vulnerable to space piracy. If cargo containers on purely kinetic transfer orbits are common then all you have to do is spot a gap in the orbit of anyone that might try to stop you and you can intercept them and send them somewhere else with a little nudge and a bit of delta v.

The only danger would be getting hunted down by the cyber-clones of Elon Musk with their fusion powered robot ships.

Depends on the setting.

For example, here's how it works in Traveller's Third Imperium.

>Uh.. why?

Everyone would see where you came from, who you shot at, and where you took the stuff. You can't make a getaway when telescopes can track you every step of the way.

>Uh.. why?
There are no shipping lanes in space. Piracy would not be worth the effort to try and find victims when there's a 0.0000001% chance of ever even seeing a potential victim that you could conceivably catch up to for years at a time.

With FTL, depending on how it works, you could conceivably create reasons why and how there would be "space lanes" and the like.

Read the fucking links I provided.

that's intra-stellar space.

inter-stellar space piracy would be impossible without ftl.

Because the pirate ship needs somewhere where it can resupply and offload stolen goods. But, without FTL, the pirate ship will be tracked to said base because there is no stealth in space:
projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php#nostealth

Then the authorities pay that base a visit. That base then ceases to function as a pirate base.

Yeah, kind of.. except you could deflect cargo pods so instead of landing in the mid Atlantic they land in the south pacific and get picked up by your buddies, where the authorities that track you might not even have enforcement powers. They can track you until you break line of sight, then they just know you went somewhere on the far side of Jupiter.

No stealth in space is right, but the implications are misunderstood by retards. Project Rho, by the way, is mostly retards.

>Robust law enforcement would make piracy impossible

Well.. yes.

This sounds pretty cool m8. Would play.

Is that the Ginyu Force?

Obviously it depends on how FTL works in your setting, use your imagination. Some settings have bunny-hopping FTL, other settings require you to move far away from any stellar bodies before jumping.
If you can jump instantly between secured locations then pirates wont have much of a chance.

>entire site is "i am so much smarter than you people cuz i can into syens, and you don't (even though i have no way of knowing this)" science masturbation
Not worth reading regardless of the contents t b h.

...

>except you could deflect cargo pods so instead of landing in the mid Atlantic they land in the south pacific and get picked up by your buddies
It doesn't matter if the cargo is recovered or not. All that matters is if the pirate ship is tracked.

>where the authorities that track you might not even have enforcement powers.
Is the income from the pirates worth losing trade with everyone else ?
What about risking a war ?

Because the longer they keep sheltering the pirates by preventing anyone from destroying the base*, the worse their relationship with other major powers will get.

*Destroying the base will hurt the pirates even if all their ships and people escape.

>They can track you until you break line of sight, then they just know you went somewhere on the far side of Jupiter.
That works a few times. Then the authorities build a few monitoring stations that can view whatever blind spot the pirates are exploiting.

I honestly thought the pic was Death

Not to mention that method of piracy will work exactly once before the ship is identified, tracked, and then destroyed on sight any time it appears from outside its little hiding spot. It'll be impossible for a pirate to ever get close to a cargo pod more than once.

The whole endeavor will be completely impractical and unprofitable, even if it were technically "possible," real people don't do piracy for the sake of piracy, they do it when they can make more money being a pirate than an honest citizen.

And they have to prove the murders, stealing of the cargo and destruction of the trader ship.
"your ship was there when it happened" is not enough.

>the trader ship.

You mean the unmanned cargo container that suddenly makes a drastic course correction for no other discernible reason at the exact moment you just so happen to rendezvous with it for absolutely no reason? Two events for which the term "astronomical odds" has never been more apt. Your legal defense is "Nobody saw me stab him, he must have just fallen on the knife 17 times in a row." Except that's probably more likely to actually happen.

Something I had been considering for Sci-Fi settings, is space pirates don't steal starships but instead steal planets with threats of nuclear bombardment.

How viable is doing this in Star Wars: Edge of the Empire? Getting an Interdictor?

Because I thought Star Destroyers were basically the toughest things in the system.

And obviously no one is going to be monitoring said unmanned cargo pods at all times just in case something should go wrong or anything.

Space pirates would probably just forge the cargo manifests of ships they target.

AFAIK an interdictor has 4 gravity well generators, to be capable of holding back Mon Calamari Cruisers and their escorts from jumping into hyperspace.

Therefore, the characters do not need a whole one, just one generator.

Let them ghetto-rig it to an ol' Nebulon-B, and have fun.

And yes, the Rebels/Republic has an interdiction-capable cap ship as well, but I do not remember its name.

I think it was still the Interdictor. They started using Star-destroyers after they won.

How would terrorism work with FTL technology? I'd imagine that a fifty thousand ton ship going the speed of light into a planet would cause a little bit of damage.

Oh yes, it would be brutal, Perhaps even to the point that many people prefer to live in spaceships, if the technology for long term space habitation is available.

What the fuck is a secure system? You think muggings never happen just because a city has cops?

Unless a system can provide escorts for every ship, and a genuinely busy and prosperous system wouldn't, then there's always gonna be opportunity.

most scifi misses the point or forgets to answer an important question to the world and story that they are trying to deliver to their audience.

How far away are planets and settlements?

In some settings, these places would be impossible to get to without some sort of FTL technology and in others, civilization might be a few agonizingly slow days away.

>How would space piracy even work if ships have FTL capabilities?

I've always based this line of thinking on the concept of the "impervious safe"- which has been regarded for centuries as an impossible thing. As long as a physical technology exists, there is a way to counteract that physical technology. always.

There, as a general rule, will always be people willing to exploit a technology for profit.

Is there a lead time up to getting the RKV up to speed? If so there's always the chance it could miss unless it's pointed directly at the intended target with no time for it to move or some other object to get in the way of it

>most scifi misses the point or forgets to answer an important question to the world and story that they are trying to deliver to their audience.
>How far away are planets and settlements?

Most sci-fi fans miss the point that shit like this doesn't fucking matter unless it affects the main character's goals in some way.

Assuming FTL has limitations and some predictability, it's the only way it is GOING to work.

You can't hide in space, so you have tohope some poor schmuck FTL:s in on your position to give you a shot at shooting their engine.

...

>secure systems

Think about the scale that you're describing.

The sheer size of an entire solar system, or even the sphere of influence of the Earth is mind boggling. Good luck providing any form of reliable security in such a voluminous area.

What is refueling and maths, Alex?

Depending on your fluff for FTL travel basically FTL nets/dampeners. I believe Eve online has something to stop spinup of FTL so that ships can't escape but the thought process is that you know there is an FTL lane between these two planets that trade so you set up one of these FTL nets that drags a ship going through the region into realspace and either bug out when you see it's too big for you to take on or raid it. Bonuses if the setting has naturally occurring temporary phenomenon that makes realspace dangerous and people will drop out of it to avoid being torn apart or dragging them in like the nets so they aren't suspicious every time one of these happens.

Technically the ships could feasibly avoid any known regions but it's a detour that could take days, weeks, or months depending on how good the FTL is in your setting any delay is horrific to trading or delivery services so they'd lose money doing this.

Authorities would have a hell of a time tracking down light year long ambush spots in empty space or in some sorta gas/asteroid field. Now if Authorities do find them they could FTL in but then they'd be caught in the FTL trap to which the pirates just bug out as per usual, they could FTL in a reasonable realspace distance away you now risk the pirates spotting them and then FTLing out themselves.

The only way they'd really secure an FTL trading lane is that they basically have military ships with some sort of automated targeting system that activates when they're pulled out of FTL and hope they can damage/destroy the pirates before they can verify it's a ship they want. Which again would cost a lot of effort on the authority part and is probably only reserved to very secure systems.

>Good luck providing any form of reliable security in such a voluminous area.
And good luck having any sort of lucrative piracy in such a voluminous area, too.

>The super-rich are super-bored so they hire out privateers to do fake boardings and put on a show to liven up the monotony of ocean/space travel occasionally.
Why doesn't this happen more often in fantasy and science fiction settings?

>The only way they'd really secure an FTL trading lane is that they basically have military ships with some sort of automated targeting system that activates when they're pulled out of FTL and hope they can damage/destroy the pirates before they can verify it's a ship they want. Which again would cost a lot of effort on the authority part and is probably only reserved to very secure systems.

//its easy:

antiPiracyDroneAI.c

const SpacePort A;
const SpacePort B;
var SpacePort dest;

dest=A;
while (true) {
travelTo(dest, FTL);
if (distanceTo(dest)

>Veeky Forums eats my formatting
fuark

>this triggers the reimbursement director

Over 90% of theft at a business is perpetrated by employees.

Having an inside man is not exactly a new idea for pirates.

They'd still have to keep these drones in working order, the thing that people fail to realize is drones are entire vehicles minus the pilot and life support. You'd still have to outfit it, repair it from no combat damage, and resupply it on a regular basis. All you cut out is people doing the runs and humans are frankly pretty cheap to keep alive. It's just the space required.

Bait ships are likewise a time-honored maritime tradition.

...

>repair it from non combat damage
I lost a letter.

I like how it works in elite dangerous / FTL where ships jump from point to point. This allows for much interdiction time and interaction.

They're called "Q-ships."

The Expanse is great, but I find myself wanting to punch the guy in charge of mixing the audio. He's constantly making the background sounds too loud, to where it's a little hard to hear the actors. Yes, that's a great ship engine sound. No, we don't need it that loud, dude.

Have you heard about security cameras?

>They're called "Q-ships."

That is one example, yeah.
The strategy predates that time period considerably. Baiting has always been one of the better piracy/anti-piracy strategies. It's no surprise that we find that pattern repeated throughout history.

>How would space piracy even work if ships have FTL capabilities? Wouldn't it be kinda hard to ambush something going faster than you can see?
well, likely if piracy were to be conducted, it would likely be within the system, or areas where a ship HAS to drop out of FTL to continue their travel.

One example might be to ambush a ship as it is entering or leaving a planet's gravity well.

The real question is, would there be much of a point. Consider for a moment how much resources we've extracted since the dawn of civilization and how many valuable minerals still have yet to be tapped. That's just one planet, once you get into interstellar nation-states well, now you have potentially dozens of planets and potentially a dozen more natural satellites also being mined for resources. The end result could be similar to what happened with sugar, refined sugar was once worth it's weight in gold but after the Americas were colonized it was discovered that sugar cane could be grown easily there, the result was that farmers grew tones of the stuff and over-saturated the market so thoroughly that they effectively destroyed it's value to the point that even today, as heavily used as sugar is, it's still dirt-cheap. Likely once you start having an interstellar economy this could potentially happen to just about all mineral wealth. So then the question is, "Why pirate at all?"

what's the point of, say, raiding a spacecraft carrying a shipment of gold, platinum, and/or diamond when it's going to fetch the same market cost as iron or lead?

Nuclear bombs dont exactly need servicing, they are fairly simple devices. A computer doesn't, either.

The only thing that might need to be looked at from time to time might be the FTL drive, but surely you can make a fairly rugged one.
Power source might also be an issue, but then you can probably strap a big ass fusion reactor to it - this is quite literally a mine, but it moves. All its going to irradiate upon detonating or losing containment is pirates which it is supposed to kill anyway...

I don't think non combat damage is going to be a thing unless that damage can happen during the FTL travel time which would make the whole FTL travel thing a LOT less attractive imho, for obvious reasons.
Even if, you could just have the thing autodestruct upon getting damaged. Its utterly likely to be in empty, deep space, so who cares?

Just post big ass warning signs at both ends of your warp/FTL/whatever route saying "warning, do not use anti-FTL nets here or else"

Also humans are really not "cheap to keep alive". Like, REALLY not. Even in-atmo flight (aka airplanes) are ridiculously expensive when it comes to life support systems. Expensive both money- and weight-wise. Think pressure chambers, think heating (its like below -40 even halfway up in the stratosphere), think oxygen supplies, think the pure weight of the human(s) themselves. Then triple that (at least) because the human can't be strapped into a machine for a prolonged period of time, they need to get out of their chairs, stretch, take a shit, eat (oh boy thats a whole other story there) and generally move about a bit to survive.
Why do you think drones are so en vogue with the militaries these days?

The problem is that cities have buildings and shit to block peoples' view. Solar systems are going to have a bunch of telescopes watching shit just in case someone tried to do something illegal, plus probably some kind of sci-fi "sensors" of whatever type exist in the setting. They should have plenty of those all over if this is some sort of secure trade hub, since they'd likely be pretty cheap compared to the goods flowing through there.

They just need to be watchful enough that they can see someone doing something funny to someone else, and then have ships in the vicinity to respond promptly.

Even if you manage to FTL away before they get you, they'll have some kind of record of your ship and they'll know to come get you next time you show up in any system allied with that one.

>"Why pirate at all?"
>what's the point of, say, raiding a spacecraft carrying a shipment of gold, platinum, and/or diamond when it's going to fetch the same market cost as iron or lead?

well if its less work than actually working to "get" that shipment?

you'll only be shipping something around if you are going to be able to sell it somewhere else. that means at that "somewhere else", someone is willing to pay money for whatever you are shipping because they cant (or cant be bothered to) produce it themselves. and unless space travel is going to become as cheap as a railway line, the latter is not going to be the case.

so, whatever you are shipping has some worth to someone.

now you just gotta do the calculations. rule of thumb obviously because you can't really convert the risk of getting caught/hunted by authorities/eaten by xenos/... to space dollars.

but as long as people think that stealing that something you are shipping from you is going to be more profitable for them than any other business opportunity (such as using their ship to ship that something themselves), they ARE going to try and do it.

because hey, easy money.

you lack creativity, or maybe just criminal instinct (should I be worried?)
>have pirate ship
>paint it black for shits and giggles and name it the "Edward Teach"
>have another, inconspicious ship, name it "Totally honest trading company, ship #4"
>use the "Ed Teach" to board, then hijack some poor trader
>FTL both somewhere safe (user suggested hiding behind jupiter, but any empty system will do)
>transfer cargo from hijacked ship, to your "Totally honest trading company, ship #4"
>FTL the "Totally honest trading company, ship #4" to some place thats willing to buy your shipment
if you sell for half the price, some people ARE going to buy without asking questions
>that'll be one shilling and your name, sir
>how about three shillings, and we forget the name
>welcome to alpha centauri IV-a, mister smith
rinse and repeat

also, now you have THREE ship
>pic related

Unique items and people. You can grow cuban style cigars anywhere but Cuban cigars only come from one place so they have value. People are of course unique so if some perv wants his news reporter waifu kidnapped so he can cut off her arms and rape her then he would probably hire pirates to do the job.

>because hey, easy money.
Well either that or they are utterly unable to even conceive of a way to make money that doesn't involve criminal behavior.

I mean, think of how many times WTFIWWY has to talk about some jackass who went and got arrested doing something criminal that is actually harder than if they had gone about reaching the same ends without breaking the law. like ramming into a convenience store to steal exactly one banana.

I don't know how big of a blast radius this nuke would have in space, and how big of one it would need to get the pirates and/or their ambush equipment, but theoretically the pirates could just move out further once they figured what the authorities were doing.

You may want to do something more along the lines of launching a shitload of seeker missiles or firing lasers / kinetic weapons / whatever at any nearby ships.

A potential downside is that you risk killing civillians who happen to have also been stopped, but they're probably a bit of a lost cause unless those pirates are big on ransoming prisoners or something like that.

>WTFIWWY
wat?

also, those guys are (naturally) the ones that get caught. we're talking about the successful, uh, business ventures here

What. The. Fuck. Is. Wrong. With. You.

channelawesome.com/the-good-the-bad-and-the-walmart-wtfiwwy-live/

>You may want to do something more along the lines of launching a shitload of seeker missiles or firing lasers / kinetic weapons / whatever at any nearby ships.
Same principle.

>nuke radius
quite a bit bigger than in-atmo but then (I just realized) blasts are not really a thing in space because lol no air to transfer pressure. Just think of a nuke like a big ass relativistic hand grenade.

>A potential downside is that you risk killing civillians who happen to have also been stopped
well if you are at the point of sending nukes on an automatic hair trigger through your warp routes then you probably have stopped giving fucks anyway. thats basically akin to mining the Persian gulf to get rid of those pesky Somalians.

What the fuck am I watching, is a better question

>be a freighter pilot
>do a routine haul of minerals on a well-known route
>SUDDENLY your warp drive stops working, you start moving at conventional speeds and this BAD BOY is setting course to intercept
>shit your pants

The authorities wouldn't necessarily catch on in time to stop you the first time, or the second, but they would know that someone robbed that trader over there and they may have records about the Edward Teach boarding it and causing it to change course (they would certainly see you doing that sooner or later).

So then your pirate ship gets blacklisted and the authorities start checking for it, and tracking it when they see it. If you keep the hijacked ship they're going to be looking for that too.

The second ship is going to be pretty safe, most likely, though merchants may put something trackable into their cargo so that they can try to trace who bought it, and that could potentially screw you over there if you fail to remove all the serial numbers / etc.

I'm sure someone would buy your spare ships from you, though those are probably going to be relatively easy to track, so you wouldn't get much money from that since your buyers will need to put a lot into altering the ships so they don't get caught selling or using stolen ships.

tl;dr you can probably pull off a few heists, but the authorities will be watching and you will get caught sooner or later. Possibly years after you've retired, if you only pull off a few heists and then go legit.

>if you sell for half the price, some people ARE going to buy without asking questions
Some other people are also going to report you to the authorities, so you need to make sure you don't let any of them know. I'm sure there's some point where it'll be cheap enough that people won't ask too many questions but expensive enough that people won't be suspicious, though unless you sell it in smaller chunks (maybe mixed with other stolen cargoes) people could also be suspicious about that dude selling almost exactly the cargo manifest of that trader that got robbed the other day.

>you lack creativity, or maybe just criminal instinct (should I be worried?)
No u

>if you sell for half the price, some people ARE going to buy without asking questions
well that's what fences are for.

And the fences will take a sizeable cut to cover the risk of getting caught and their expenses in reducing that chance.

two people making jokes at the impossibly stupid stuff that makes its way onto the news.

>tl;dr you can probably pull off a few heists, but the authorities will be watching and you will get caught sooner or later. Possibly years after you've retired
Just like any crime that one could possibly imagine. And yet there are criminals.

Piracy literally is a thing, even today, when "the authorities" have things like surveillance aircraft or even satellites. You don't even need to "report it to the authorities", everyone just knows that in the Gulf, or in the strait of Malacca, there be pirates.
And you bet the local authorities, and even the world community does its best to curb that piracy. Is it gone, or will it be in the forseeable future? Unlikely.

Well, that's the cost of trying to do things illegally.

I think there's a phrase for this.

>the authorities
Your setting is based on some space-wide UN or something - which is not necessarily the case.
For instance, what if the human colony on Alpha Centauri IV does not give two shits about the Vasudans from the Deneb system, and vice versa? Certainly they would not be sharing those blacklists - maybe one side would even "hire" those pirates to grief the others, like the privatiers in the olden days?

Shadowrun IN SPACE

Stop thinking about the Age of Physical Piracy and start thinking about the Time of Internet Piracy. You don't have to steal the whole ship, just the microchip that the Johnson IN SPACE wants to get his hands on. Bribing people, changing shipping manifests, causing a disruption and forcing a route change, all these things add up to the same piracy, but IN SPACE.

>interstellar civilization
>scarcity
It's just absurd.

>Certainly they would not be sharing those blacklists
Not necessarily.

If they felt that those pirates may prey on THEIR trade as well, they would happily share their blacklists.

Either way, there are likely to be a limited number of new places to run to when you get blacklisted, and you'd either have to retire or risk venturing into areas where the authorities are looking for you.

That said, privateers could totally be a thing, until some peace treaty or the like happens, though you'd still run the risk of being shot at by the other side's navy.

With autonomous drones you have to wonder which station manager is gonna take the bullet when a drone is taken out of ftl by natural phenomena and destroys a colony or station or the ship of the space senator's son by mistake.

>I don't think non combat damage is going to be a thing unless that damage can happen during the FTL travel time which would make the whole FTL travel thing a LOT less attractive imho, for obvious reasons.
Except that's one of the main ideas behind the "lanes" people are talking bout. Routes of space that are relatively clear because, as people have touched on with talks of space terrorism, objects hitting things at ftl are terrifying.
That's not even considering the possibility people have mentioned of pirates attacking near normal stops that don't have defenses to hold them off in which case you drones will either be useless or virtually guaranteed to do more collateral damage than the pirates.

>Even if, you could just have the thing autodestruct upon getting damaged. Its utterly likely to be in empty, deep space, so who cares?
If it's equally likely to explode in empty space or near a friendly ship as it is to catch pirates then why even bother sending the things out?

>Why do you think drones are so en vogue with the militaries these days?
Except that modern "drones" are still operated by a human someplace that has to do all that stuff and it's actually very straining with a huge burnout rate that we have no idea how to address.

This is probably where it's at, quite frankly.

SOMETHING will be scarce, even if it's just antiques. Someone, somewhere wants something that's different (at least in name) from what everyone else has and is willing to pay top spacedollar to get it.

And of course there's always information too sensitive for transmission on the space-internet, though that sort of thing is likely to be pretty heavily guarded (though potentially worth so much you could retire after stealing it).

>This route uses nuclear unmaned mines that have a twitchy trigger
>Oh yeah we have to send these mines to de FTL at their destination so they can travel back and get maintenance, just be fine with nukes spawning in the middle of the designated FTL landing zones in your commerce port
You daft?

Trade World :"So how do these anti piracy weapons work"
Weapon dealer : "They travel between the two major ports and when pulled out of FTL they rocket towards the nearest craft and explode!"
Trade World :"Alright how do they know they exited FTL other than being at the end of their jump?"
Weapon dealer : "Simple their they internal timer for the jump is checked against the actual time estimated and if it's shorter seek and destroy mode is activated. Otherwise basic service mode or the return jump i started."
Trade World :"So what you're saying is that if someone enters in the wrong estimate or the clock glitches out it's an unmanned indiscriminate missile entering real space in the middle of our commerce fleet. No deal."

>Because I thought Star Destroyers were basically the toughest things in the system.
They are. Interdictors are speciality ships, and will get eaten alive by a capital ship. They have enough firepower to deal with smaller ships trying to sneak around on their own. For fleet to fleet engagements, they depend on the Star Destroyers. They pin the enemy fleet in place, and the Star Destroyers win the fight.

As for a pirate,
This sounds more viable. An interdictor is a big ship, which needs a lot of support, and is bound to get attention. And once it gets attention, it's slower, more vulnerable and has less firepower than a star destroyer.

>implying they wouldn't tripple check the unarmed mines to make sure theyre working and then loading them up with nukes
>clocks glitching out
>hyper advanced space age clocks glitching out

Agree completely, our operating systems have less bugs and are less prone to failures than operating system designed decades ago!

Oh wait.

They are. An Interdictor would get eaten alive by a SD but costs just as much as one because gravity ain't cheap. Still an incredibly useful ship to have

>don't worry we triple checked and we double promise that the mines won't malfunction and explode at port or along the way near trading vessels or stations/colonies or get disabled and hijacked by the pirates but will definitely take out the pirates who will all be conveniently gathered around the bomb and not hiding to see if the ship is something they can safely take on
Yeah, no deal.

Have you heard about sarcasm?