@Chand - whenever you get the chance are you going to send out PM's regarding status of projects that nations are pursuing?
Secret projects that have made some especially notable progress will be privately reported on as soon as the stats are done, before the deadline is announced. Players who want an update on the status of a specific ongoing project should PM me now, so I know to include them in any reports I send.
And it's nice to see someone actually updating in these here NESing forums, for once.
I hear it used to be a pretty popular passtime, so I decided to try it out.
Speaking of pirates, I am a bit confused. I realise their motives are unknown in this particular case, but it sounds as though they simply harass colonies and blow up spaceships, and do little else at all. Do they actually plunder anything or try and salvage the destroyed enemy ships to sell their parts on the black market, or are they more like space terrorists than space pirates, destroying for a cause instead of attacking for direct profit (the two are not mutually exclusive, ofcourse...)?
Yes, the two aren't mutually exclusive. There are some pirates that try to claim an ideological high ground to attack from, whether they're radical Marxists or social Darwinists. Generally, though pirate attacks in the 22nd century are for salvage and loot. Destroyed military ships get carted back to a hideout to have their weapons either sold on the black market, or used in future attacks. Cargo ships have their cargo looted and sold, at the very least, and it's not unheard of for the crew to be slaughtered and the ship carried away for scrap.
22nd century industry is cheap and versatile enough that the pirate craft are often manufactured in the very same system that they attack, using factories hidden on some jovian planet's moon. These small "pirate coves" are rarely discovered, though it's a major blow against local pirate activity when they are. Commerce is conducted either with the black market on the system itself, or loot is smuggled through the system's stigma skimmer to more lucrative markets.
Pirate activity in a system tends to reach an equillibrium based on the traffic through space, the local navy, and the proximity to Sol. For example, though it wouldn't take much for pirate to overrun, say, Avis, there just wouldn't be enough loot in it for them. There's still an occasional attack on the traffic there, but it's rare and purely opportunistic.
A few factors combined to make the Soyuz incident possible. There was a lot of unguarded traffic between Logos and the smaller, but still significant, settlement on 110-142C, and it's a short hop from Soyuz to reach Earth or Bacchus. The main factor, though, was the sponsorship of the pirate attacks. Normally, once interplanetary commerce at Soyuz ground to a halt, the pirates would be smartest to take their loot and run (and indeed, there probably are a few clever former pirates sipping girly drinks on Bacchus right now after following that course of action).
The sponsorship, however, made it profittable for the pirates to hang around and cause havoc, even when their profits would otherwise have not have made up for the costs. The pirate attacks on the ground at Soyuz are a result of some of the greedier pirates (or as planetside pirates are coming to be called, "bandits") looking to grab more vulnerable loot while still pulling down the paychecks from outside. Aside from the Soyuz incident, planetside bandit attacks have been pretty much unheard of.
As of 2150, increased European military activity at Soyuz has changed the situation somewhat. The pirate coves at Soyuz are all wealthy and highly developed from their short time of unchecked growth, and the local pirate leaders have too much invested in the operation to just up and pull out without a fight. Meanwhile, there are a lot of bandits trapped planetside, who are more concerned with not dying than with making a profit.
I'm glad you asked that question. I wanted to include a more thorough explanation of the economics of space piracy somewhere, and an explanation of how the Soyuz incident was different in that regard, but that section was already hogging the update. I want, among many other things, to give a believable portrayal of space pirates in this NES.
das said:
(Also, "the Soyuz Union" is ridiculous
)
Bah, the stand up comics of the ChaNES universe need
some one-liners to warm up their audiences.
