Pirates of the Carribean, Return of the Tall Ships Options

[hyzmarca]

Personally, if I were rich enough to own a yacht I'd cut out the middle man and just mount a phalanx on its bow.

[Thain]

[hyzmarca]

You can't shoot down missiles with a handgun.

[Butterblume]

You actually can shoot down missles with a handgun, but I wouldn't depend on it;).

[ornot]

If someone's launching missiles at your pleasure boat, you're pretty much fragged anyway.

[Banaticus]

As someone else pointed out, most of the juicy targets will be owned by mega corps which have one awesome advantage that pirates didn't have to contend with in bygone years -- satellites.

Remember, if someone isn't looking at the video camera in real time, if they're watching recorded footage, invisibility doesn't work. So, once you find the ship where the ship was, you extrapolate how fast it can go and where it might be -- then you fly a couple mages onto a destroyer and they set off hunting the tall ship down, constantly checking the recorded satellite images (which could be updated every five minutes or so).

[Mistwalker]

Hich level spirit concealment would help even with the satelite and the wake left by the ship

[nezumi]

[Thain]

The Caribbean Sea is 2,754,000 km² (1,063,000 square miles) in area....

The KH-12 (aka Keyhole) spy satellite can take images every five seconds, which is basically about as "real time" as it gets. Ground resolution is probably 0.15 meters (6 inches) or better. (This is all from Jane's Defence Weekly, fwiw.)

The USCGC Eagle (WX-327) is the only tall ship that ever sees regular use by the US military, and is a pretty good basis for our fictional flying dutchman. She's capable of 17 kt (31 km/h) under sail, has a waterline length of 234 ft (71.0 m) and a beam of 39 ft 1 in (11.9 m).

Let's round things off a bit, and call it 70 m x 12 m. That's 840 m² or 0.84 km²

Now, I have no doubt that a KH-12 satellite could, in fact, detect a 840 m² object from orbit. This things can read license plates, after all...

The problem is finding a moving object.

The Eagle is capable of moving at a speed of 8.6 meters per second, which means it moves greater than its own length in under 10 seconds. The spy satelite can only capture an image every 5 seconds, so it has to be capturing wide enough area that the ship stays in the frame for several seconds.

But, this gets tricky when you consider that the ship takes up less than 0.0003% of the Caribbean's surface area. Let's assume that you have an idea of which 1% of the sea that the ship is in... you've only reduced things to the point where the ship is 0.003% of the search area... and it's moving.

It is very, very hard to track a moving naval fleet by satellite, unless you are monitoring transponders, SIGINT, heat, or something else...

Frankly, if you wantto find one ship in the Carribean, your best bet is some Coasties in a helo, with good eyesight and powerful binoculars... and have them sit between where you think the ship is coming from, and where you think its heading. This is how we find 12' speedboats loaded with cocaine... and we're not 100% successful.

BIG Ocean, tiny ship.

[Austere Emancipa...]

840m^2 is 0.00084km^2 or 0.0000000003% of the surface area of the Caribbean (or 0.00000003% of 1/100th the surface of the Caribbean). So, uhh, yeah, searching it by taking pictures of where it might be is not a good idea with modern technology.

How you see spy satellites working in the 2070s, though, is another matter. Are their capabilities described in any canonical SR literature?

I assume discussing different ways of physically defending the ships from the conventional threats posed by the sorts of vessels and equipment mentioned here would be pointless since the whole point is using lots and lots of magic for all aspects of pirating, right?

[bibliophile20]

Let's also not forget the wonderful effects of cloud cover when it comes to finding a wooden ship; it's not going to have a major infrared signature, which means that you're going to have to search in the visual spectrum, which means that the ship can hid underneath cloud cover--which an air spirit would undoubted be happy to provide.

[Cheops]

Funny enough the best way to find our Flying Dutchman is to track it astrally. Thing would shine like a beacon.

This monstrosity is HARD to find and you're not going to be able to stop it.

Best case scenario: it is cruising along at the 15 knots that the Eagle is capable of. With a force 3 spirits that becomes 45 knots and with a force 6 spirit that becomes an incredible 90 knots! According to Wikipedia the current Iroquois-class destroyers used by the RCN can go a max of 29 knots and the proposed Zumwalt-class destroyers in the USN are only capable of a 30.3 knot speed.

Also, if it were a Water spirit how would the movement power work? Would the ship be able to submerge like the Flying Dutchman did in the movie?

So the Gorch Fock-class of barques, made with wood instead of steel, would probably weight the same since you use the lost weight in the steel-wood conversion to add a gun deck. So displacement at full load is 1510 tons or 151,000 kilograms. It would be an Enchanting + Magic (2*3=6, 1 day) extended test to prepare the ship as a vessel and would require 15,100 radicals or 30,200 refined reagents. Hmm...that's actually pretty expensive unless your GM is willing to make a "regular wood" category instead of having to use rare hardwoods.

[nezumi]

[Austere Emancipa...]

[Cheops]

[Thain]

The U.S. Navy's Mk-50 advanced lightweight torpedo... one of their fastest, for use against the faster, deeper-diving and more sophisticated submarines... has a speed of ~40kn (74 km/h).

Our Flying Dutchman is moving at 90 kn, more than twice the speed of the torpedo. (And, incidentally, the same wind speed of a Category 2 hurricane.) Thus, our Dutchman may simply outpace any torpedoes until the batteries on the darn thing die!

Now, an anti-ship missile stands an excellent chance, but targeting is going to be a real wench. Every modern navy does everything in their power to reduce their ships radar signatures and also take measures to reduce their infra-red and acoustic signatures. A tall-ship, with no running diesel engine, has effectively zero infra-red or acoustic telltales, and their radar signature is going to be fairly low too. Frankly, radar sucks for finding ships from other ships... you've heard pilots in the movies talk about "flying under the radar?" Guess why? It doesn't work great close to the surface... and guess where ships are?

Further, there is nothing to stop our Dutchman and her crew of magical cyberpirates from employing any other the dozens of anti-ship missile counter measures available. Anti-missile missiles, anti-aircraft guns, close-in weapon systems (e.g. the phalanx mentioned above), jammers, and good old fashioned chaff... Plus, you've got your shadowrun options like anti-missile lasers, chaff/decoy drones, low-force spirits, barrier spells, and so on.

[Austere Emancipa...]

If you can't afford a couple of dozen thousand nuyen for protection in a pirate-heavy area, then I guess all talk of satellites etc. is pointless. The merchant vessels wouldn't have a single guard, and no one would give a fuck if they went missing.

If someone actually wants to protect their shipping, small missiles are a plenty cheap alternative that allow you to safely sink any smaller vessels at 5km+. Considering the cost of having at least 6-8 trained safety personnel on each ship, 100k :nuyen: per sunk pirate boat ain't bad. M2HBs wouldn't be much cheaper, unless you have to sink dozens or hundreds boats.

I'll go ahead and assume that a Force 6 spirit is not enough to protect you from weaponry that will poke big holes into more than 10" of armor steel.

[PBTHHHHT]

If you're hitting large scale merchant ships and such, those are multi-million dollar investments. If the area is started to get bad with pirates, the corporations in the Srun world will do something about it. So they use up a few hundred thousand nuyens to take out a pirate problem, ok, they'll be gone for awhile, worth it more than losing millions in nuyen.

If the pirates cause too much havok, why wouldn't the corp and gov't form a taskforce to deal with the pirates?

[Thain]

First, that is not an anti-missile missile. Now, we didn't ever actual use missiles for anything in my USCG days (although, there are Coasties who do), but my gut tells me that is probably a cruise missile.

This is a AIM-7M Sparrow air-to-air missile missile being loaded, I use this pic for scale. Because the Sea Sparrow is, for all purposes that matter here, basically the same dang missile. It looks more like this when launched. Not ideal on a masted ship, but really no more dangerous than cannons. Now, the sensor systems needed to make it work are very, very bulky... but they were designed in the 1960's/70's... for ships that were built in the 1940's.

In 2070, we can fit much more powerful sensor systems into a standard passenger sedan... Ask you local Rigger about his Eurocar Westwind. ;)

But, I really think a CIWS is the better bet. Much more cost effective, and just as reliable.

[nezumi]

AE is right to a degree. The ship certainly wouldn't want to mount any launchers or ECM gear or what not. That increases their signature. However, the freighter might. The launcher is $5k. The cheapest missile is $350k (although it's a torpedo, so it wouldn't affect our example boat since its too slow). The next effective missile is $450k. This isn't a small amount of money, and I have no idea how much it costs to maintain them and what sort of skills and cyber the human pilots need to use it. Assuming the only cost is the initial purchase, and we can be fairly certain it'll destroy what it hits, it would perhaps make sense to load half a dozen on super-tankers, and maybe two on smaller ships, in addition to the small-arms. But that's still a lot of cash, and not something they'd spend idly. It would be worth figuring out how likely a missile is to actually hit the ship given someone of below-average skill (probably a 2, no more than a 3, but likely a VCR 1 or 2).

[Austere Emancipa...]

The RIM-66 SM-2 Block III isn't an anti-missile missile? Well, I guess the Navy doesn't come out and call them exactly that, so have it your way.

If you believe the sorts of sensors capable of identifying, tracking and accurately guiding in missiles on high-supersonic, stealthy, ECM-capable objects in extremely short time frames are tiny and ultra-cheap, I don't see what the problem with finding the Dutchman is.

Cannon-based CIWSs are pretty far from reliable against modern (let alone 2070s) anti-ship missiles. They would be great for reducing the Dutchman to kindling, however.

nezumi: SR4 doesn't have any equivalents to the M-GM Outlaw missiles from Rigger 3? Those have range of 10km, have the same Intelligence as AIMs and SAMs (ie. are among the most accurate missiles in the game), are plenty capable of sinking boats, and cost, at most, 35,000 :nuyen: each. [Any of the prices I've discussed above are in real-life terms with $1 = 1 :nuyen: , BTW.]

This post has been edited by Austere Emancipator: Feb 26 2007, 09:08 PM

[nezumi]

I was looking at Rigger 3's anti-ship missiles, not SR4.

[Austere Emancipa...]

Ah. Then M-GM Outlaw Block IIIs it is. :)

[Thain]

The RIM-66 SM-2 is a medium range surface-to-air missile, at least, if my copy of Jane's is to be beleived.

[Austere Emancipa...]

Right. And the air targets it is primarily meant to engage include anti-ship missiles, just like with the RIM-7.