*Grins* I aim to please.

~J

safest in terms of mission success, yes.

safest in terms of blowback, as you note, maybe not... Could we set them adrift in lifeboats or something? Maybe drug them, and stick 'em in those life jackets that force your head to stay above water?


edit> I see Flak is ahead of me on this one.

The Constellation is in harbor in Baltimore, totally unguarded. I'm sure with a crew of a dozen men you could get away with it.

Of course, the Constellation is also kept afloat because its one of the first ships the U.S. Navy ever had. "Old Ironsides" is a tall boat and I'm pretty sure the cannons aren't quite functional any more. I'd like to see the rigger try to jack into that one... But it would make for a very cool run!

I should think such checks and communication attempts, as well as the relay of information and orders within the Navy, would happen quicker in 2063. With the kind of C&C gear that will be used by Navies by then, they can probably check the status of their own ships a lot faster than that.

It might still take the 24-48 hours to order someone to do something about it, but the technical side of the thing should happen a lot quicker.

The scary thing is that it may even be true in some groups. By the time that a group of characters are powerful enough to consider it; they may well have rubbed-shoulders with the big shots. It depends on the GM's style, of-course.

I tend to relate some of what the PCs do to the plot, they just don't always know it. They were once hired to recover a fragment of Halley's comet. They didn't know what that the small bit of rock was, it wasn't even magical (aside from a bit of background count).

more info please.

kthnx

That's CONSTITUTION. I also think there's a canon reference to a free spirit living there. I would assume that the cannons are long gone, but adding 10 or 20 trolls with assault cannon/great dragon ATGMs will do just fine .

I dunno if I'd wanna mess with the Israeli's. They're pretty hardcore...

Rigger 3 page 21 though I don't think the price is given. The contract is signed in early 2061 so the ships may not be in duty in 2063. This being said the Canton Federation also have one or several medium air carriers in the 40-50,000 tons range, still according to Rigger 3 (page 107). And their navy is probably concentrated in a lot smaller area than the UCAS Navy. Between aircraft and the help Wuxing might give, and maybe some submarines (considering navy that maintain air carrier often have submarines too), it ain"t gonna become a cakewalk. some corp might not like the idea of a rogue destroyer somehwere between Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore...

Speaking of corps, PoaD says Atlantic Security provides "armed protection for ships". If that means they have military ships, there might be something to do since the Gunderson Corporation that owns Atlantic Sec is near bankruptcy in Threats 2.

If you don't want to go after the Israeli toy, you can also opt for the Swedish Visby corvette. It packs a little less firepower but the crew is even lighter, 43 members. And the design is much more coooler Then you have Skjold, a lot more faster. Of course in all those case it's 2000-tech, not 2060. So you can also wait a few years more for the US Navy to get its next destroyer with 95 crew-members. But we're back on messing with the UCAS Navy then.

the USS Pueblo.
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/...nsh-p/ager2.htm
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/...h-p/ager2-k.htm


I was right its north Korea

they have her stuck up a river somewhere in north korea. Shes a kind of military museum now and a feather in the North korean govenment's cap.

A good point. Okay, call it a response time of 36-48 hours - tops.

I agree. My original plan during the campaign in which I played was to hijack a nuclear sub (preferably an SSN), which could be used by our team as a both an underwater transport and base of operations.

However, I got distracted by the thought of hijacking a modern naval surface vessel for profit.

Hijacking a sub presents added complications of having to make the boat surface, something that nuclear subs don't do at sea except in emergencies or as part of their operational orders (RARELY!). I couldn't think of any other way of forcing a sub to the surface except the old Hunt for Red October trick and that would mean having to subvert key personnel on the boat.

Hehehe, yeah, that would be good ... if you could get a boat-load of mages together for the op. I was figuring with a team of only about 50-100 men out of which I might be lucky to get 4-5 Awakened individuals for magical support. Let's face it, it's always hard to get enough magicians for any op.

A pirate ship wouldn't be equipped with the latest, mostest and bestest (excuse the grammar) in electronic warfare suites and weapons, especially missiles with nuclear warheads.

We were playing experienced runners in a "low-level" kind of campaign where we had no connections to speak of with people like Harlequin, immortal elves, and dragons. We were just using our own initiative to up the stakes for ourselves.

Thought about that, too, Flak, but I wanted a vessel carrying SOTA weapons, especially nukes, if we could get our hands on them. I guess I thought the Chinese navies wouldn't be carrying any (I reasoned that no warlord would allow such a balance of power to be concentrated in one warlord's hands). The other reason was that we were all playing characters without backgrounds that would give us any insight into affairs in the Far East so we had no contacts out there, no form of help, etc., to lay the foundations for such an op.

Hey, Rasta. Thanks for your comments. As I mentioned earlier, I abandoned the idea to capture a carrier - just not possible. For the kind of resources you'd have to dump into such an op, you might as well buy one.

For the reasons given in one of previous posts, we didn't look at hitting any of the Far Eastern navies, like the Chinese. For pure profit, I agree with you: it would be easier to seize a small vessel, say, a Chinese missile corvette. But, such a ship would not be carrying land-attack missiles, which would be focus of the "clients" we had in mind (like rebel forces fighting in the Yucatan, for example, or an AA corp which needs a precision strike against a rival's facilities).

I would agree, Bit. One reason why I was targeting an SSN rather than an SSBN is that its loss would be easier to swallow for countries and megacorps since they don't carry ICBMs and don't constitute a first-strike delivery platform. Sure, an SSN is still a grave threat but there are pirates who are already armed with submarines so it wouldn't be a unique situation. Other pirates would be severely pissed-off and green with envy, too (and, if they had the resources, might come and hunt our asses down to try to capture the sub for themselves).

Since I had a different agenda with stealing the sub (I wanted to keep it rather than just use and dispose of like a surface vessel), the hit would have to go down differently. The possible way I can think of is to make people think the sub had been lost to an accident or scuttled to prevent a successful hijack a la The Hunt for Red October.

You're right about that, but which country do you think would say 'hey, someone just stole such and such submarine over at these coordinates'. Certainly none that I know of. I'm not sure as to whether attack subs use 'clean' reactors or not (whether their fuel can be used to make a nuclear weapon). Even if they could, they can't deliver them except by literally driving into the harbor of your target coastal city. Beyond that, as far as I'm aware, an attack sub is only a threat to other seagoing vessels and a diplomacy problem if a US sub attacks a foreign convoy.

Right now I have little doubt that the United States would not report the theft of a submarine of any class, it would not tell anyone else if a given submarine has the ability to use nuclear weapons and would not reveal its location. That's all classified material and the U.S. has been reluctant to reveal that sort of information for much smaller, but sillier problems. The idea of an American sub attacking a ship of any nation is ridiculous (especially since, unless it surfaced, very few ships would be able to identify its nationality in the first place), and the US would probably prefer to diplomatically deny it than admit their great weapons are so easily stolen.

In regards to it providing a nuclear threat... I suspect the US would deal with it the same way they deal with terrorists who are possibly a nuclear threat, and that still doesn't involve sharing unnecessary information.

So your foreign destroyer which just picked up and identified an American sub on sonar wouldn't fire on sight. It would track the sub, gather information and, if the sub is within national waters perhaps try to claim it somehow. Firing upon a foreign ship during times of peace is a pretty big no-no.

It's a lot easier to find a surface vessel at sea than it is to find a sub. (see also: Hunt for Red October) Satellite tracking, etc -- great if you can see it, hard if it's underwater. I'm also sure that SR-era subs are even more stealthy than current best-breed submarines, due to the technology curve growth for detection (and the resulting arms-race of stealth tech).

I don't think that even the naval command has a good idea of where a sub is on patrol, more than a general "Oh, they're somewhere near section 2515...". So, your chances of being able to rig a rendezvous is Reaaaaaally slim. Couple that with the fact that no sub skipper in his right mind is likely to surface anywhere near another ship under normal circumstances.

However, that does sound more doable than taking a ship from port or within a battlegroup. So, I'll assume that the team wants an SSN (as someone else said, a nuke-boat is generally ... a bad idea.) Thus, your initial objectives seem to be:

1) be able to FIND the ship, or arrange for it to go someplace prearranged.
2) be able to remove the ship's crew (life rafts, helicopter, elemental spirit ... )
3) survive stealingthe ship: i.e., no one's gonna find/track/kill you.

Subs seem the best for #3 - since you can submerge and then pop up in some hidden grotto in the Caribbean or off the coast of Chile at your friendly neighborhood pirate chop-shop.

Removing the ship's crew (#2) seems relatively easy, if you have been able to infiltrate some agent or toxin or somesuch. Anything that eats oxygen is bueno, esp fire or some quick-acting oxidation reaction (I suppose). Fire spirits probably would work really well. If you do this underwater, they're unlikely to be able to get a distress call out, too... unless they have a rigger send a drone to the surface with an SOS -- hopefully your action would be swift enough to prevent or intercept that.

It seems to me like the hardest part of this is the first -- finding a sub on the open sea, when it's alone, and force an encounter. Possible ways I can think of:

1) hack their nav computer to display fake results, while actually taking them to where YOU want to meet them. This would be wiz, except that I bet any sub worth its displacement would have a navcomputer that's not on the Matrix. So, that's reaaaally hard to do without actually having been on the ship already. Maybe a run while it's in port or drydock to do this. Would require some highly specialized knowledge and skills not to mention a good decker.

2) subvert one of their riggers to send periodic reports to you via seafaring drone (surface, blip a signal to your favourite data drop, then self destruct or somesuch). This sounds easy, when you consider replacing the rigger with your own stand-in ... except, I suspect that any rigger team (as ships probably have more than one working together) would notice that the New (Fake Old) Guy didn't have the same character in his workings of drones -- much as a decker might recognize another decker not jsut by icon, but by the way he manipulates code or approaches a task. So, you probably need to replace ALL the riggers, or none at all. Note that the more people you replace, the more likely you need to replace everyone.

3) Replace the sonar guys with a stooges, and just have someone follow the ship (while he neglects to say anything)... I think, though, that the sonar guy is probably one of the riggers, so see #2. This makes it easier though for you to have a second sub creep up on an intercept, though! Riggers could also do things like shut down the air scrubbers, or something ...

4) put a "limpet mine" (TW2002 reference! yay!) on the thing, and have it periodicaly release a little floating drone to say "here I am!" in much the same way that the subverted rigger might -- this seems better, in fact, since it's outside the ship and crew's knowledge. This would tell you where it WAS (or was heading), but couldn't really force the ship to surface. So, you probably have to combine this with the crew-incapacitating-solution to render the ship dead in the water (or just heading in a predictable manner), and then sneak in with another sub and ferret in your own crew. (like the sub to sub rendezvous in Red October, I imagine.)

. . .

Of course, Dim Sum wanted something to attack a land target -- not such a good match with the submarine. Maybe the best way to get such a craft (capable of attacking a land target) is to BUY one on the shadow market. It's probably cheaper than funding a theft operation, and is more likely to succeed. That makes it more appetizing to the bean counters, too.

Or, rather than spending your hard earned nuyen on a ship, why not make a run into the manufacturer's host, and fake an order to a fake buyer (complete with datatrails to make the buyer's ID credible ...) Then again, that might be precisely how the shadow market DOES it ... IMO, the shadow market is a big "don't ask, don't tell" -- I don't care if they faked the order, or stole it, or built it themselves, as long as it does what I need.