cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/43972162

I'm guessing;

• space flight so cheap that a normal person could buy and use a space vehicle for less than the cost of a house
• space freight

This doesn't really answer your question, but if this is something you've been thinking about I highly recommend the "Revenger" series by Alastair Reynolds.

It's a sci-fi series about a group of extremely lo-fi space pirates. The world in which is takes place is essentially a post space colonization dystopia: civilization is spread across multiple planets and there's aging tech everywhere - some alien, some not - that people can somewhat use, but not really maintain. Space travel is handled by putting solar sails on old hulls and sailing through space via dead reckoning and gravity pools in the dark.

The whole thing is a bit ridiculous, but world building basically explodes your question and explores it in a really fun way.

That sounds awesome, I'll check it out

I think some kind of stealth technology. Not gonna do much pirating if they can "see" you coming days / weeks in advance, space is big and mostly empty. Either that or so much traffic that you can blend in.

Space flight it's self doesn't have to be that cheap. Easiest way to get a pirate ship wasn't to buy one, but for the crew to mutiny and remove the captain.

Want more pirate ships? Make sure the crews of other ships know that you will let them live if they don't put up a fight and they might reconsider following the orders of their own captain. Target ships you should be able to easily beat.

But I am sure you dont think The Expanse is unrealistic? 😉

Beltalowda!

Just look at piracy in the 17th and 18th century, and set that in space.

It would require space travel to be commonplace, with FTL - so basically impossible.

You'll probably need a ground terminal to get access to most new content but as long as you manage power generation and heat dissipation I don't see a problem with running jellyfin from space.

Without a ground terminal you could maybe get physical access to someone else's commsats and use their terminals, but orbital rendezvous in LEO is risky without a lot of dV and they aren't designed to stay in LEO for more than a few years anyway so you'd have to occasionally do it again. Maybe if you find some kind of remote exploit you won't need physical access but their radios will be facing away from you most of the time.

Space parrots?

with FTL

Not necessarily, the alternative is that there is human habitation within the solar system, such as Lagrange point colonies.

• For piracy to work, there needs to be a system that makes it work. Most pirates in the Golden Age of Piracy were actually privateers. They had a letter of marque from some government that allowed them to legally attack, plunder, sink or capture ships from rivalling nations. That means they had safe harbours, a place to resupply and sell their spoils. This is probably the most important aspect.
• Piracy also worked because stuff was hard to track and trace. On the high seas of the 17th century, if you were past the horizon you were gone. That means in practice you had to run for 4-6km, then you were mostly safe. The same would be necessary for space piracy. That means piracy would not work in a "The Expanse"-like universe with only sub-light-speed travel, because we can already today track space probes throughout large parts of the solar system. You'd need something like warp or hyperspace, where you could travel outside of trackable real space.
• A pirate doesn't need to provide their own Space Ship. They didn't provide their own ships back then either. They used mutany to take over a ship, then used the ship to capture other ships. The space ships would need to be rather easy to operate though, so that even a crew of low-ranking mutaneers could operate a ship they stole.

Love this insightful answer to what I originally thought was a pretty ‘duh’ question - very nice analysis!

funny

I love worldbuilding. There's always some mechanics, some incentives and/or some laws that cause rushes like that where for a certain time lots of people are doing something that hasn't really happened before or after.

People didn't become pirates over the roughly 80 years that are considered the Golden Age of Piracy because it was fashionable, but because the specific set of laws and circumstances that were present at that time made it a very worthwhile endeavor.

Space limes, so you don’t get space scurvy.

That’s traceable and predictable. It would be too easy for whatever authorities there be to watch you the entire flight there and know you were there. Too easy to intercept. Too easy to block your only haven.

Piracy worked with no tracking so you have plausible deniability, and multiple potential safe harbors

Still goes back to needing cheap space flight. Expensive and rare space flight means highly trained and compensated crew. There’s no incentive or likelihood to mutiny: it’s not in your best interest. It’s only when you have cheap and plentiful space flight that you can exploit and underpay crew enough for them to see an advantage in mutiny

Same deal: is it realistic to expect space travel to be so cheap and plentiful, while not highly automated, that we would ever develop an underclass?

Sure it’s easy to see the corporate oligarchy part, where companies become ever more powerful royalty. But when it only takes a few specialists, you’re going to be highly trained and compensated. No underclass.

I think of it like current software engineers. We’re nothing to the corporate royalty, and are definitely exploited. But we’re also paid more, treated better, more specialized, than many individuals. There’s just not going to be an underclass there

I suppose cheap is relative, but it doesn't need to be something 1 person can afford on their own.

Could be expensive in fuel but otherwise any idiot can do it and pirates steal fuel from merchant ships.

I'll remind you that sailing ships big enough for piracy very much cost more than a house. If nothing else, they're way bigger than a house, and literally house dozens of crew for long stretches of time. A huge amount of modern capitalism was invented exactly because ships were so expensive and risky (insurance, large scale banking, corporations, lots of contract law, risk assessments, time value of money etc)

But yeah. Valuable space freight passing through areas of space with complicated conditions with many safe harbours for the pirates, for one reason or another. Political (government doesn't care that they pirate against those other guys) geographical (countless small islands/asteroids makes searching for them futile), or otherwise

See, I think the one problem is that space is too big

An abandoned Martian lander and no ability to communicate with NASA back on Earth.

I think drone on drone piracy could happen with asteroid mining missions without the need for manned missions. And it wouldn't need to be that cheap, nations will finance privateers. Imo all you need for piracy is a good moving from a to b and the inability for even overwhelming force to keep the good secure. Space is very hard to secure.

Ooh that's a thought yeah, drone v drone

Computer, engage cloaking!

Cloaking engaged