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I don't know if it's been mentioned or not but one thing to consider is that the Diaspora is significantly bigger than our solar system's Asteroid Belt. If one were to add up all the material in the Asteroid Belt it would be about equal to 2% of the Earth's mass.
The Diaspora, on the other hand, is made up of the material of two whole planets. We don't know how big Damiar & Iovo were - the impression I always had was that they were in the Castrovel/Golarion/Verces/Eox/Triaxus range but I can't find anything to back that up. If there has been a definite answer on this, please correct me.
But even if they were comparable to Akiton or even Aballon, you're still looking at five to ten times the material, minimum. So it's a bit more plausible that there's enough material out there to make hiding in the Diaspora plausible enough when all the other factors are taken into consideration.
That’s a good point. We also know that there are various large scale magical phenomena from they planetary destruction, bad sensor readings would make sense.
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A couple of points from the lore:
1) The KOG is mainly concerned with protecting the endangered species of Old Golarion and therefore it is implied that their focus is further out in space.
2) The Hellknights are brutally committed to Order and thus would loathe the Free Captains...they would also loathe breaking the law and as far as we can see, the Pact Worlds are the direct jurisdiction of the Stewards.
3) Based on what I remember from the Starfinder Wednesday briefings by the developers: both the Hellknights and the KoG have "client" worlds in Near Space who support them. For the KoG, these are friendly caretaker style relationships. For the Hellknights, it is a brutally well enforced contractual obligation (like the Peacekeepers in Farscape). This means that both organizations have bigger fish to fry.
4) The Stewards are a well funded but relatively small paramilitary-style law enforcement organization and are probably not prepared to untangle the rat's nest that is the Diaspora.
5) The people in the Pact Worlds who would like to show up to stop the Free Captains are the Pact Worlds Military which is made up of fleets that are in service to their homeworlds but gather together to defend the Pact. The PWM probably includes ships from Eox.
6) There are many, many, many, many, many, many good reasons why certain sovereign races in the Diaspora would very much like to not see a fleet that includes Eoxian military vessels showing up with their guns drawn.
What I'm wondering is what ships the pirates can even find to attack.
This can all be gotten around with corrupt and incompetent law enforcement, but then law abiding and...
Or you can't really drift within a system. The beacon is at absolom station you have to blip in there and then head over.
Or you can't really drift within a system. The beacon is at absolom station you have to blip in there and then head over.What I'm wondering is what ships the pirates can even find to attack.
This can all be gotten around with corrupt and incompetent law enforcement, but then law abiding and...
Or, despite the cheapness in BP 9an abstraction), many companies in the pact worlds produce ships without drift engines for in system trade, and those are the common target for pirates.
Or the pirates also randomly wander in the drift in system, hoping to find a target at random. After all, it's already been proven you can meet in the drift by accident.
Edit: actually, I'm pretty sure they do that last one. The drift is probably crowded around absalom station, and I'd bet the pirates hit incoming traffic somewhat often.
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I don't know. The fact that the Free Captains has maintained its headquarters in the same location for centuries does not speak well for the Pact Worlds or groups like the Stewards or Hellknights. I'm not opposed to the existence of the Free Captains the real issue that I have is that somehow their main base had gone unnoticed for literal centuries breaks my suspension of disbelief.
And there is the subjective reality at the center of this lively discussion. I suspect that no one will discover a single resolution to the issues and ideas expressed here because each of us has our own threshold for breaking our suspension of disbelief. Beyond this, each of us has our own threshold for even caring if that suspension is broken in the first place.
That said, I have enjoyed reading the majority of posts. I enjoy the creative challenge of wrestling with these sorts of what-ifs, exploring them from multiple angles. If there has been any controversy or contention here at all, it seems to me that it comes from a subtext of either criticizing or defending the game designers' decision on this particular point. It is far easier for me to imagine space pirates skirting and flirting with interplanetary law than it is for me to truly imagine the challenges and pressures of creating, writing, editing and ultimately publishing a book of this scale. With twenty-three authors and developers all working together and individually to meet deadlines and coordinate efforts to produce 208 pages of creative writing, aimed at an audience ages 13 (or so) and up, the likelihood of certain details not passing the test of suspending disbelief for some readers seems incredibly high to me.
I came to a similar conclusion that zezia did quite a few posts back that I need to simply take what's written as a starting point and then adjust it to make it mine. I think zezia's solution to the problem is brilliant -- as are many of the other suggestions people came up with. The Starfinder setting broke my suspension of disbelief to pieces right out of the gate with far more things than the survival of the Free Captains' base, but I have enjoyed the journey with my group of piecing that suspension back together with a whole lot of creative re-imagining of my own.
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I definitely agree. I like trying to resolve these issues, mostly because as I and my players invest more and more in the setting, we gain a stronger ownership of our version of it. Canon is an iffy subject when it comes to TTRPGs because ultimately all the publisher is really doing is providing people the seeds for telling their own stories. That's why there are so many non-sequitur mysteries that will likely never be fully explored in official material.
Also, it is incredibly important to note that just because something breaks your suspension of disbelief doesn't mean it strictly doesn't work for other people and when they claim otherwise they are wrong.
Edit: actually, I'm pretty sure they do that last one. The drift is probably crowded around absalom station, and I'd bet the pirates hit incoming traffic somewhat often.That would mean that there is a 1 to 1 correlation of drift locaton to space location. That requires you to place ships in the drift for law enforcement and war in the same manner a normal space for the same reasons. It enables fleets to congregate at a single point in the drift and travel together without linking engines, and to hop back to normal space at the same time.
So if you do that then the whole thing about linking drift engines and being unable to coordinate drift assaults without it goes away. Absalom would have part of it's defenses in that point in the drift, and it doesn't.
The randomness of the drift and the way drift drives work make intentional interceptions really hard. Again, try it from the point of having PCs be pirates or law enforcement and ussing the drift/space rules how do they find and catch other ships outside AP scripted encounters.
There is a lot of randomness to the drift and everything it up to chance, but there is enough traffic to absalom, that I feel there's a high likelihood that you will run into someone.
So if you're a pirate you hope it's a juicy freighter to attack and steal from, then ransom back to whoever owned it, and if it's a vesk dreadnought, you start using that fly casual pilot action.
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A couple of points from the lore:
1) The KOG is mainly concerned with protecting the endangered species of Old Golarion and therefore it is implied that their focus is further out in space.
2) The Hellknights are brutally committed to Order and thus would loathe the Free Captains...they would also loathe breaking the law and as far as we can see, the Pact Worlds are the direct jurisdiction of the Stewards.
3) Based on what I remember from the Starfinder Wednesday briefings by the developers: both the Hellknights and the KoG have "client" worlds in Near Space who support them. For the KoG, these are friendly caretaker style relationships. For the Hellknights, it is a brutally well enforced contractual obligation (like the Peacekeepers in Farscape). This means that both organizations have bigger fish to fry.
4) The Stewards are a well funded but relatively small paramilitary-style law enforcement organization and are probably not prepared to untangle the rat's nest that is the Diaspora.
5) The people in the Pact Worlds who would like to show up to stop the Free Captains are the Pact Worlds Military which is made up of fleets that are in service to their homeworlds but gather together to defend the Pact. The PWM probably includes ships from Eox.
6) There are many, many, many, many, many, many good reasons why certain sovereign races in the Diaspora would very much like to not see a fleet that includes Eoxian military vessels showing up with their guns drawn.
1) KoG is about spreading justice anf fighting evil. And they also protect the defenseless or innocent all over. Specifically in the Pact Worlds. So kickinh pirate-ass is defintely on their agenda
2) Attacking the Pirates holds in the Diaspora is hardly a crime. The Stewards literally put bounties on pirates and criminals so why would they object against the HK ?
3) The bigger fish might as well be their homesystem. Thats why they fought against the Swarm, Veskarium etc
4) We don't really know how large the Stewards are but I can't see why the would have resources or the inclination to deal with the HQ of the systems Pirates. Especially since they if any could convince the Pact world planets to muster their armies and deal the deathblow to the Pirates.
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So on Earth, Caribbean piracy went on for 150 years, and during a time period where the imperial powers were actively consolidating their territories.
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Beyond the "it can't be found" handwavium, it might also be prohibitively expensive in ships lost to attack a planetoid with shielded and dug in capital weapons systems installed. The cost of leaving the Free Captains alone is higher insurance costs (they don't kill people who surrender and they honor their bargains) and higher costs on ship armament (probably a good idea anyway). The cost of destroying Broken Rock might be a double handful of battleships and cruisers with all hands even if none of the actual pirate ships in the vicinity fight.
In the Magefire Assault Absalom Station's defenses were enough to trash a sneak attack from what was probably then the strongest planetary fleet in the Pact Worlds' system. If Broken Rock's are even 5-10% as strong, the value of a similar attack is doubtful.
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So on Earth, Caribbean piracy went on for 150 years, and during a time period where the imperial powers were actively consolidating their territories.
Mapping a projected lifetime or viability to a concept in a post-FTL sci-fi setting based on that concept's history in the real world is tricky. This is mostly because, in the words of a great man:
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
Even without the recourse of escaping out into the infinite blackness of the Vast, the sheer scale of the local solar system does very strange things with timelines.
Well due to Drift Technology, timelines would actually shrink.It took months to cross the Atlantic, but you can get anywhere in the solar system within a few hours.
Isn't in system travel 1d6 days?
1) KoG is about spreading justice anf fighting evil. And they also protect the defenseless or innocent all over. Specifically in the Pact Worlds. So kickinh pirate-ass is defintely on their agenda2) Attacking the Pirates holds in the Diaspora is hardly a crime. The Stewards literally put bounties on pirates and criminals so why would they object against the HK ?
3) The bigger fish might as well be their homesystem. Thats why they fought against the Swarm, Veskarium etc
4) We don't really know...
1) Respectfully, the main mission statement is the protection of Golarion's native species. That's their like actual job.
2) Well, we don't know specifically if it is a crime or not but we also haven't seen an actual Hellknight NPC yet, let alone one in the Pact Worlds.
3) True. Fair point. But there's a big difference between a shaking up a bad neighborhood and military action against rampaging space monsters.
4)...yeah we actually don't.
Isn't in system travel 1d6 days?
Well due to Drift Technology, timelines would actually shrink.It took months to cross the Atlantic, but you can get anywhere in the solar system within a few hours.
You are right, although if you have a higher Drift rating it could shrink to 5-29 hours.
Regardless, its much faster than 1700s or 1800s travel across the Atlantic.
If you know your destination, sure. If not, you are incredibly screwed and have to search massive stretches of territory the old fashioned way. Remember, our example of the Diaspora is the remains of two planets crumbled for maximum surface area and spread over a three dimensional space. Searching that sounds like a nightmare.
Regardless, I was not referring to travel time so much as the sheer perfusion of options. There's a reason a lot of pirate media and explorer stories set in the tail ends of their respective golden ages talked about how the world seemed to be getting smaller. It wasn't necessarily because ship were getting faster but that all the exciting frontiers they had once relied on were disappearing. In a post FTL-setting, those frontiers can range for light years to functionally infinite.
Beyond the "it can't be found" handwavium, it might also be prohibitively expensive in ships lost to attack a planetoid with shielded and dug in capital weapons systems installed. The cost of leaving the Free Captains alone is higher insurance costs (they don't kill people who surrender and they honor their bargains) and higher costs on ship armament (probably a good idea anyway). The cost of destroying Broken Rock might be a double handful of battleships and cruisers with all hands even if none of the actual pirate ships in the vicinity fight.
In the Magefire Assault Absalom Station's defenses were enough to trash a sneak attack from what was probably then the strongest planetary fleet in the Pact Worlds' system. If Broken Rock's are even 5-10% as strong, the value of a similar attack is doubtful.
How would pirates with no industrial backing have a station armed so much as tu survive a attack by military vessels?
It has a few capital ship weapons and thats it. Do you know what else has capital ship weapons? Capital ships which navys and a few paramilitary groups have by the dozen.
There is no way Broken Rock could stand up to a single task force. And sending one is not too much of an effort either as it is still inside the Pact System.
All it takes to make weapons is enough UBPs and a guy who knows how to craft them.
Making the capital weapons is actually fairly easy.
Building an industrial base is a lot easier with the kind of steroid enhanced 3D printing tech a lot of sci-fi stories seem to take for granted these days. Never mind the corporate entities with a vested interest in keeping the Free Captains afloat
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They say it's the same asteroid. But are the pirates telling the truth? Tall tales and pirates go together pretty well.
It seems totally possible that the Free Captains' HQ has been turned into rubble (atomised sounds expensive) more than a few times, but nobody can prove it.
Indeed, this makes the most sense.
I say there is no headquarters in this most inhospitable part of the galaxy. Its just a death trap, filled with automated cannons that will tear anyone to shreds.
The pirates meet by the golarionspace equivalent of zoom. There is no physical base.
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And having space pirates in a space fantasy setting filled with starships is neither silly nor bad.
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"This could never exist, it's unrealistic" is not useful to me. "This is weird, what could allow this to exist?" is a better question. Because it's actually a question, instead of a rant.
1. Broken Rock isn't a real base. It's a carefully nurtured myth that the Free Captains use to lure in nice fancy navy ships which they then ambush and capture. It's actually how they got some of their nicest ships. Because it solves one of the big problems for pirates: how do you know where your prey will be? Simple, your prey will be where you lured them to go to.
2. Besmara wills it. Possibly. There's enough circumstantial evidence that it may be true. Last time some hardliner Hellknight tried to mount a serious assault on Broken Rock a lot of the omas and other space-travelling leviathans around Bretheda and Liavara got really upset. As a result, Bretheda now blocks any Pact World resolutions aimed at attacking Broken Rock.
3. Besmara wills it for sure. Besmara is actually known to sail around in her own starship (it's in the CRB). One time that Broken Rock was attacked a mysterious ship joined the battle and single-handedly defeated the entire attacking force. While most gods don't seem to do a lot of direct intervention, Besmara is chaotic and can't be relied upon to play by those rules, whatever they are.
4. Last time a major pirate stronghold got crushed it actually made piracy worse because there was no more restraint from the senior captains. Now, Abadarcorp votes against such actions because they're far too disruptive.
5. The Stewards have told the Hellknights that major military actions in the Pact Worlds are not allowed with sanction from them or the Pact Worlds Council. The Hellknights are lawful enough to adhere to that decision. Why did the Stewards order that? Conspiracy theories abound.
6. The drow on Apostae didn't take kindly to the concept of "we lawful people need to go out there and crush chaotic things". The drow know they might be next. Also they rely on pirates for some of their shipping to customers. Some of those customers are also highly placed, and pushed back against proposals for a serious, effective crackdown.
7. Last time some junior Hellknight went to lay siege to Broken Rock, on three other planets the local resistance forces suddenly had high-level weapons with a note attached "this is what happens". The Hellknight commanders from those planets told the junior to call off the siege.
8. The Stewards sometimes need people to do jobs that they can't be seen to be doing themselves. The Free Captains do their chores as the price for being tolerated.
9. Greys are involved. They want the Free Captains around for their own reasons.
10. Broken Rock is just a decoy, the actual base is somewhere else.
11. Broken Rock is absurdly heavily fortified. The pirates are actually much stronger than anyone likes to admit.
12. They're not actually pirates, that's just a cover story. Broken Rock is actually a Vercite military base that they keep around in case they need to fight Eox.
13. The dwarves and sarcesians in the Diaspora don't want any outside navies coming in and "restoring order". Such navies have been harassed by subtle and not so subtle sabotage, until they got the hint.
14. The pirates aren't that much of a nuisance to the people who actually have big fleets. They know who not to piss off. And those people have more important things to do with their fleet, like watch out for the Azlanti/Swarm/Veskarium.
15. Broken Rock is a sleeping Greater Old One and bombarding it might wake it up.
16. The Free Captains have bribed/blackmailed/donated to the reelection of the right people.
4. Last time a major pirate stronghold got crushed it actually made piracy worse because there was no more restraint from the senior captains. Now, Abadarcorp votes against such actions because they're far too disruptive.
5. The Stewards have told the Hellknights that major military actions in the Pact Worlds are not allowed with sanction from them or the Pact Worlds Council. The Hellknights are lawful enough to adhere to that decision. Why did the Stewards order that? Conspiracy theories abound.
6. The drow on Apostae didn't take kindly to the concept of "we lawful people need to go out there and crush chaotic things". The drow know they might be next. Also they rely on pirates for some of their...
Of your whole post, these are my favorite.
I like 1 and 3 the most :3
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Part of making good settings is having a believable story which the existence of the pirates in the form they are presented as is not.
Adding stuff without much thought because it sounds cool, which is was happened here, only gets you so far.
Sorry, you're almost right but just missed the mark.
We've been hurling reasons why the existence of pirates is believable in this setting at your argument for what feels like ages now and you've just been dismissing them.
Having a believable setting is important, internal consistency is important, working with the audience's suspension of disbelief is important. Just because it doesn't live up to your standards doesn't mean it shouldn't live up to ours.
Starfinder has a specific tone, narrative style, and level of realism. It's one that should lead to a more generous allotment of suspension of disbelief. It has never once tried to sell itself as a hard sci-fi setting. If it had, I might be willing to agree with you on a few more points. This is not The Expanse. This is Star Wars with a healthy dose of Star Trek and Farscape.
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Okay so there's a tv show called Black Sails. Wrapped up a couple years ago, for my money one of the best shows ever. It's a pirate show that's a prequel to Treasure Island, that grounds the characters into a historical framework with them interacting with real life figures from the golden age of piracy.
In the show there's an english nobleman who's family owns the island in the Caribbean that the pirates are using as a base and wants it back, and more idealistically, wants to redeem, rehabilitate, and reform the pirates back into productive members of society.
A naval officer takes him to see the public hanging of a pirate, but he isn't showing him the pirate and his defiant behavior. He's showing him the crowd cheering on the execution.
He explains that it's not necessarily the case that the powers that be - parliament, the sea lords of the navy - want piracy to continue in the west indies, but they understand that 'society needs it's monsters', the people need villains to hate, fear, demonize, romanticize, etc, and that when weighed against the cost of actually mounting a naval force to destroy the pirates, they decide it's distant enough to not bother.
As the officer said regarding the crowd of people cheering on the hanging, "that sound carries."
All of this is just to echo what others have said. There are many, many evils in the world today - including, incidentally, actual piracy - that we possess the capacity to either eliminate or fight more effectively than we do. They persist for two reasons; there are too many of these problems to solve at once and no one can agree on a priority order to go down the list, and some percentage of the powers that be either benefit directly from them or find the cost benefit analysis of eliminating the problem to be not worth it, and thus allow it to continue and block more ideologically inclined elements from dealing with the problem.
Isn't in system travel 1d6 days?
Well due to Drift Technology, timelines would actually shrink.It took months to cross the Atlantic, but you can get anywhere in the solar system within a few hours.
You are right, although if you have a higher Drift rating it could shrink to 5-29 hours.
Regardless, its much faster than 1700s or 1800s travel across the Atlantic.
I was thinking more along the lines of there's no system to system drift travel: which would solve the problems of how you pirate at all as well as why the pirates aren't found in an afternoon.
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Psst, hey Ixal, there's still pirates today. They kind of, I don't know, changed with the times?
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Except that the piracy shown Black Sails was pretty thoroughly eliminated. And after the British were finished with the Caribbean they banded together with other European powers and reduced the pirate ports in North Africa to rubble and eventually invaded to stop piracy.
Making the British the new pirates.
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Making the British the new pirates.
Imperialism, the grandest of all piracy!
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Except that there is 0 connection between the piracy in the Caribbean several centuries ago and modern pirates in Asia and Africa.
...And? They still exist despite the interests of the nations they operate around, global peacekeeping forces, and horned up Judge Dredd wannabes. Just because they don't wear the impressive hats or go 'Arrr' doesn't mean they aren't still pirates.
If they can exist in the fixed system that is the Earth, they can definitely exist in a space-fantasy setting.
EDIT: Ching Shih is likely the most successful and influential pirate of all time and she was Chinese! So if anything they have their roots in a stronger tradition!
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Ah yes, I forgot that you are bad at reading posts.
1. Reread what I wrote about Black Sails and how I specifically meant piracy in the Caribbean.
2. Reread what I wrote about the circumstances in which piracy can exist and how Starfinder does not follow any of them.
1. You were acting like that was the end of piracy, so nah.
2. Because the rules of Earth are a 1-to-1 parallel with a space-fantasy setting? Also nah.| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Yes, the Caribbean piracy was eventually eliminated because eventually the scales tipped in the other direction as the balance of world power and certain interests shifted, and the cost of exterminating the pirates was no longer outweighed by the benefits of allowing them to continue.
And perhaps that will eventually happen with the Free Captains, but Starfinder takes place in a moment in time where it hasn't yet.