Well regardless, since we're about to have an AP about Blue Collar space truckers, we'll probably get a little more about the people who victimize them.
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In regards to the question of, how do the Free Captains get their ships, they probably make their own, at least partly.
Asteroid mining is set to be the next major gold rush - it's been predicted that the first private trillionaire will be an asteroid mining mogul.
So they probably have access to the majority of the raw materials they need in the Diaspora. Anything they need that the can't mine & process themselves, they can salvage off the surface of Akiton or have smuggled to them via the Aspis Consortium or the Drow or the Shadari or any other that either has a vested interest in the Captains continued existence or otherwise doesn't care who buys their goods so long as they pay, and the material from asteroid mining would mean, the captains have plenty to pay with.
Which would go on to raise the question, why be pirates when they could be miners, and the answer to that is, as someone else said, because Besmara.
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Somalia had a piracy outbreak that went on for ten years, severely affecting the oil industry, despite not having much in the way of heavy weaponry. Eliminating pirates is tricky. With an enemy nation, you can just win some battles, push them to the brink, and they are like, okay, we'd rather you not burn our entire society to the ground. But pirates, typically facing harsh legal consequences, and with no normal society to fall back, disperse quickly, regroup at every opportunity, and surrender almost never. During the last part of the Golden Age of Piracy on Earth, many governments resorted to simply buying pirates off. They would pay pirates large sums of money to just retire already.
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That’s a whole lot of assumptions you’re coming up with there.
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Broken Rock may not exist. It may be a concept, not a hard target.
Aside from that, I think they are supposed to be similar in various ways to the Barbary pirates, the Caribbean pirates, and the ancient Phoenicians, all of whom were extant threats for hundreds of years.
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Maybe the real Broken Rock was the levels we gained along the way?
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Except they do have all that.
What I’ve gleamed from this thread is that you don’t like space pirates (cool) but you’re letting your bias warp your responses in order to to try to justify your dislike (not cool) and that isn’t backed up and has been repeatedly countered in this thread.
Your arguments keep circling around “I don’t like space pirates, therefore they shouldn’t exist” when there’s been plenty of reasons and explanations given, and most likely more to come, on how they’re able to exist.
I’m aware, just stating for others.
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- The means to have ships and to maintain and crew them. Technically spaceships are high tech vessels which need a big industry and specialized knowledge to maintain and crew. Although SF ignores much of that and instead spaceships are conjured from thin air
You state this as if it's already proven. But just about every level 1 crew of adventurers manages to come by a ship. And they keep upgrading them as they level. So apparently that's really not that hard.
Which brings us to even more possible reasons the pirates cou still around;
17. Some of the pirates are high-level and will rapidly crush a typical navy ship in combat.
18. Some of the pirates are high-level and will board a flagship, kill all the officers, have enough DR to just ignore the low-level crew, and take control of it, then cause chaos in the fleet. I mean, if level 12 PCs can do it to the flagship of the Corpse Fleet, why not a couple of veteran Free Captains?
19. Some of the Free Captains are high-level and the Pact Worlds Council has them on speed dial to deal with the occasional existential threat. The rest of the time they do their pirate thing, and the Council knows better than to piss of these shady heroes.
20. Some of the Free Captains have the control codes for a precursor superweapon, say, a Stellar Degenerator, and use that to threaten mutually assured destruction if massive naval action is undertaken against their home base.
21. Absalom Station uses the Free Captains as a deniable asset just like Eox uses the Corpse Fleet as a deniable asset. In fact, they often use them to counter Corpse Fleet operations outside of the Pact Worlds. As a side effect, "pirate hero saves people from undead horror" is a bit of a meme now and the pirates have some public support.
22. Enough hotshot officers have tried to take down Broken Rock and failed miserably, that cooler heads don't really want to take the career risk. That works fine as long as the pirates don't become too much of a problem.
23. The pirates have infiltrated the computer systems of several navies that might attack Broken Rock, or that have enough scanners to know about it if anyone else were planning to. Every time such a navy gets under steam, suddenly there's a crisis somewhere else.
24. Piracy requires extraordinarily good scanners to find prey before they find you. Also, cloaking technology (found in Near Space). The pirates are actually much better at ambush warfare and seeing the enemy coming than most classical navies. (Hence why they can always be where the plot demands.)
25. The pirates have scavenged some alternative FTL tech that's actually better than Drift travel for some things, and hard to keep up with using Drift pursuit. We've got enough examples of alternative drives - helldrives, cathedralships, rune drives etc.; why can't the pirates have some?
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Except they do have all that.
What I’ve gleamed from this thread is that you don’t like space pirates (cool) but you’re letting your bias warp your responses in order to to try to justify your dislike (not cool) and that isn’t backed up and has been repeatedly countered in this thread.
Your arguments keep circling around “I don’t like space pirates, therefore they shouldn’t exist” when there’s been plenty of reasons and explanations given, and most likely more to come, on how they’re able to exist.
As do all of his arguments.
I don't like space pirates.
I don't like the Starfinder economy.
I don't like leveled equipment lists.
I don't like the lack of law enforcement rules.
I don't like dungeon crawls disguised as space adventures.
I don't like...………..
Really leaves only one conclusion.
Ixal doesn't like Starfinder.
Makes me wonder why he continues to troll these forums.
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And yet strangely I write extensive responses with factsExtensive yes, but assumptions are not facts. You’re not providing many of those.
while you reply with "They have that" without any argumentBecause everyone else has provided plenty of arguments against your assumptions you’re pushing as fact
as for how and others present their houserules as core even when they flat out contradict the information from the books.They don’t for the most part, there‘a been a few post of people not quite having a 100% grasp of the setting and setting mechanics, but those posts have been few.
If you are not interested in a logically consistent world because your games take a more Diablo style approachAaaaand we’re back to insults and assumptions.
and you are fine with "Jack Sparrow" style pirates its fine.Yes I’m fine with romanticized fantasy pirates in a fantasy setting.
Everyone can play how he wants.Precisely. And how she and they want as well.
But please don't pretend that the Pirates of the Caribbean style Free Captains with their century old space fortress make any sense in consistent world.
Please don’t tout your assumptions and biases with no in setting evidence to back them up as fact.
P.S I don’t play Starfinder, so making assumptions about how I run the setting is an even bigger assumption XD
This one deserves more attention. Especially given the historical parallels that some people keep bringing up. You know one of the big factors that kept piracy going in the golden age of piracy ( and many other periods )? Proxy warfare and secret ( or not-so-secret ) state backing. And, again, the Pact Worlds *just ended* a centuries long period of low level war with the Veskarium. That is exactly the circumstance to encourage privateering as a means of covert warfare.
21. Absalom Station uses the Free Captains as a deniable asset just like Eox uses the Corpse Fleet as a deniable asset. In fact, they often use them to counter Corpse Fleet operations outside of the Pact Worlds. As a side effect, "pirate hero saves people from undead horror" is a bit of a meme now and the pirates have some public support.
That would work if the Captains would mainly attack the Veskarium. But apart from that tiny Vesk outpost they can't manage to dislodge (so much for them being strong enough to plausibly defend against a Pact World) there isn't much of a indication of that.
It would fit history though.
What history?
What history?Real world history about how piracy works.
Which has less than zero bearing on how space piracy work in a space fantasy setting.
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Saying since something happened on earth at certain point in time in the past that the same thing has to happen in a futuristic fantasy setting is not logic.
The past influences, it does not predict nor mandate in fantasy. Especially in setting that don’t overlap.
Assumptions and biases are also not logical.
And there’s more assumptions, if partial. Yes a lot pirates do so out of necessity, but in a “golden age” on earth a lot equally did so out of romanticism and thrill seeking, just the same in a fantasy. Necessity and thrill seeking and other motives such as revenge can all play a part in being a pirate.
So when you really believe that pirates in Starfinder would work like a paramilitary organization and survive then list what in the setting has so fundamentally changed that the pirates could stop using proven survival tactics and instead adopt a Pirates of the Caribbean organization and not get caught instead of just screaming "Its fantasy!" over and over again.
That’s not my stance, again, I’m not rehashing the arguments in this thread because they’ve already day been made, more eloquently I might add, by others.
You’re the one stating over and over that the pirates can’t function as an organization with not a lot of actual evidence to back up your claim. Simply pointing out other organizations exist isn’t evidence. Not hard coding how every group interacts with other groups isn’t a writing mishap, it’s an intentional boon. It leaves room for GMs to come up with stuff, and for their own writers later if they decide to do an AP there.
It’s intentional.
One big change is the drift, but as pointed out it makes the job of pirates much harder as they can't stalk known trade lanes any more.
In some aspects, but they can adapt. There’s other targets, they can also go into the drift as well.
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As I noted above, Somalian pirates managed to conduct a devastating campaign for ten years, without heavy weapons, capital ships, or state backing.
The Caribbean at times resembled a number of quasi-states controlled by pirates in hidden harbors or flying under false colors.
The Barbary pirates acted with near impunity.
The Phoenicians were notorious, and acted essentially as a floating empire.
There is nothing about "how real piracy works" that suggest the Free Captains are implausible.
If the only question is why one of the major players doesn't just level the Rock with a horrific, civilization-ending weapon, just devise a political or military explanation that makes sense to you.
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I don't see how what you agree about the Phoenicians supports your point at all. It's like you're saying, the Free Captains are basically Phoenicians in Carribbean drag, but I don't want to acknowledge that as a valid comparison.
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but all of them show that without a nation to support or to hide behind pirates are very vulnerable.
Low tech earth pirates confined to certain seas most likely, but that doesn’t apply to space fantasy pirates with various means of movement and engagement and other tricks.
And this is something the Free Captains do not have.
That is an assumption you are having.
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One quick note: It was brought up earlier that Broken Rock is roughly the same size as Ceres. It really isn't. Ceres has a diameter of 587 (and some change) miles, which means that assuming both are spherical (which Broken Rock might well not be, the 450 miles might just be the widest diameter of an odd-shaped asteroid) Broken Rock has a smidge more than half the mass of Ceres. Add in the previously brought up point that there is so much more mass in the Diaspora compared to our own Asteroid Belt and Broken Rock might well not be anything special. It might not even be the largest rock in the area. Add the possibility of Divine Protection to that (like was mentioned, it is the center of Besmara's worship, and she's not exactly a minor Goddess these days) and it could easily slip notice.
Also, while a large number of the Free Captains might be the ol' chase 'em down, loot the ship, ransom the crew types, I will remind this is a post-modern-tech society, and in the modern day and age that's not the only kind of pirate. It seems not only plausible but even downright likely that there'd be, among the other residents, a ton of professional Hackers on Broken Rock. We also know that literally Unlimited-range wireless communication (you know, the same thing the internet runs on... well, more wireless than the internet really) is possible, it's right there in the core rulebook after all, so it's fully possible for a hacker sitting in their home on Broken Rock to hack into the systems of any faction in the setting, even those that aren't actually located in the Pact Worlds. So they could potentially just shoot a faked message to any would-be attacker that appears to be their higher ups telling them to call off the search. And by the time the attacker's made it through all the red tape to be able to confirm that no their SO did not in fact send any such message, well, the Asteroid might well have been moved, with well-encrypted, and possibly encoded as well, messages sent to their trusted people (minus whoever may or may not have tipped them off, I'm sure the hackers are already well aware of this fact) with the new location.
To be quite honest I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if there was an entire team of hacker pirates per faction who's day to day is checking over incoming and outgoing messages from each of the potentially risky factions while their more automated programs distribute pirated goods and maybe skim some funds from Abadar Corp. for some income. Or maybe they have an automated system skimming the messages too while the pirates browse the most recent copy of each infosphere for the next biggest thing to copy and redistribute.
Are there any published ships without drift drives? Other than pre-gap relics of course. Is there even any mention of non-drift shipping freighters? I haven't exactly combed through the books myself for these sorts of things (don't have access to all any how).
Some fighters in the CRB, and I think at least one ship in an AP that's a system/local defense ship.
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So I looked it up and the Diaspora is officially listed as having a total mass of x2 a standard Golarion/Earth mass planet, which means that Damiar & Iovo were roughly Golarion-sized(or were oddly imbalanced and just happened to add up to two Golarions but it doesn't matter), which means that the Diaspora is literally, if my quick early morning maths is right, 100 times more massive than the Asteroid Belt.
It also specifies that all objects in the Diaspora are individually less than 1/100th the mass of a Golarion-mass planet. Which would imply that there are individual rocks floating in the diaspora nearly half the mass of the entire real world asteroid belt. Though it also lists the max diameter of a given rock at 600 miles which I'm not going to do the calculations because I'm no where near smart enough, but I feel that wouldn't work. It's no where near neutron star density but still.
Side note, to something Shinigami02 mentioned, Broken Rock is shown in artwork in Pact Worlds to not, in fact, be spherical. More of a misshapen heart.
It also specifies that only 8% of the asteroids in the Diaspora are inhabited. But that's still a huge number. Now, I know we probably aren't looking at literally 100x more asteroids, more likely it's just that more of them are bigger to account for the extra mass, but for the sake of simplicity; there's 1.9 million asteroids in the asteroid belt; if 8% of those were inhabited we'd be looking at 152k population centers. We know there's significantly more than that but can't be sure on a firm number, but it could be as high as 15.2 million inhabited asteroids.
Granted, also, "inhabited" in this case could mean one guy set up one sealed habitat to live on out there, but still, that's more than seven times higher than estimates I've seen for how many cities(emphasis, cities, not towns) there are on the planet Earth irl.
So you have a vast area of space, with a vast number of objects to search through. The area has a native population in the sarcesians, it has a legitimate immigrant population in the dwarves and other 'homeless' races that have settled it. The area is also full of strange, often dangerous supernatural phenomena such as a worm hole that just opens up twice a year.
And among this you have one rock with less than fifty thousand people on it causing some degree of trouble, that you don't know the exact location of, that may or may not be being protected by other powerful forces for use as a deniable asset, who have "an array of capital lasers" to defend their rock from attack.
Could the Stewards or the Hellknights destroy Broken Rock if they really tried? Probably. But the time and the effort it would take to find the place, and the ships that they would lose doing it, and the disruption it may cause depending on whether or not the Free Captains do have a silent partner backing them, vs how small of a threat they really are in the grand scheme of thinngs...
Look, Ixal, it's abundantly clear at this point that for whatever reason, this is the thing that breaks your suspension of disbelief and that no one is going to provide an answer that satisfies your specific criteria due to the conceptions you have of what the setting is, what certain factions are capable of, and what their ideals will compel them to do and when.
It doesn't violate my suspension of disbelief, and by the replies in this thread, it doesn't seem to violate very many peoples. My advice would be to either lower your suspension of disbelief if you're playing the setting, or if you're dming the setting, in your home game to either alter some other aspect of the setting to allow for space pirates, or to excise the space pirates, whichever works better for you.
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The Free Captains are nothing like the Phoenicians.
Yeah, they got spaceships.
Is that easy? No. But they had 200 years to capture a single captain.
Yep, and they haven’t.
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I don't see how what you agree about the Phoenicians supports your point at all. It's like you're saying, the Free Captains are basically Phoenicians in Carribbean drag, but I don't want to acknowledge that as a valid comparison.The Phoenicians were much more than just pirates. They were also a large trade power who controlled several cities.
The Free Captains on the other hand neiter have a "legitimate business" or nor an industrial base on their rock (they have to outsource ship repairs according to the book).
The Free Captains are nothing like the Phoenicians.[...]
So you have a vast area of space, with a vast number of objects to search through.
You don't need to search every asteroid.
Take a Free Captain captive and you have the location. Mind Probe will let you get the location. Even the corpse of a free captain would be enough thanks to Speak with Dead.
And not only Free Captains, several traders would also know the location of Broken Rock because they supply the Rock with all it needs and sell the loot from the pirates.Is that easy? No. But they had 200 years to capture a single captain.
At this stage I'm genuinely curious as to what you consider to be the point of this thread.
Are you trying to convince others that the pirates should have been wiped out by now, and for all of us to collectively reject them as part of the setting?
Are you trying to convince Paizo that they should publish a supplement that retcons the existence of the pirates?
Are you genuinely searching for a compelling argument as to why they should exist?
Is it something else entirely?
If it's the first one, I'd question your motivations & also suggest at this point, it clearly isn't going to happen.
If it's the second, it isn't going to happen.
If it's the third, at this point, I concede it isn't going to happen, but I'd also point out that if you are DMing a Starfinder game you're not obligated to include the Free Captains as part of the setting as you run it. They may have never existed, they may have been a historical foot note, or you can set your game 190 years before the official current day and make capturing the a free captain your players starting adventure.
If you're a player in a game and the DM is insisting on using the Free Captains, my advice would be to find another game if it truly bothers you so much as to rob you enjoyment from playing.
As described in the Core Rulebook, the Free Captains are so amorphous that destroying the Rock probably wouldn't even destroy them, although it would ensure their destroyer became a favorite target.
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So Broken Rock has a big civilian population. They might profit off of the pirates, but they're not actual combatants or recognized members of a pirate crew. They're more like the waiters in the fancy restaurant that the mafia likes to dine at.
So any kind of brute force assault on Broken Rock (say, pulverize it with capital weapons) would kill thousands of civilians. But Broken Rock has enough weapons of its own that if they say you can't dock, then you can't dock without such a fight.
It's not surprising why the Hellknights haven't attacked it then. The Pact Worlds Council isn't going to authorize them to just kill thousands of civilians. And because they're so lawful, they just grit their teeth and follow the law.
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I'd imagine big corporations actually benefit from the Free Captains in a way, since only bigger corporations can afford the exorbitant protection fees (I think this is from Pact Worlds). That means that smaller and mid-sized companies whose growth could threaten the megacorps down the line are also subject to the threat of piracy which eats into their profits and slows their growth. Plus I imagine Broken Rock could easily function as a neutral ground for under the table dealings that corps don't want others knowing about. All you'd have to do is pay a Free Captain a large sum of credits to take you and bring along enough company mercs to ensure your safety.
It's probably a big hub for moving goods from the black market to the gray market.
It's a fact, often times governments and businesses just prefer organized crime to disorganized crime.
I really doubt the Knights of Golarion want to be on the news for nuking the pirates' day care from orbit. I mean, where else are you going to raise baby pirates in safety?
Actually, I think there might be decent amount of arrivals (likely through the drift), but departures probably use a variant of the drift slingshot thing that came with the ultranought article in dead suns, launching ships from broken rock directly into the drift, instead of them flying out with conventional thrusters.
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.
1) https://starfinderwiki.com/sf/Knights_of_Golarion
2) There are Hellknioght NPCs in Pact World. We don't spefically know if murder is a crime either. My point is there are several bounties on the Pirates and the Stewards are said to use bounty hunters to deal with criminals. They themselves are said to deal Harshly with Pirates. Why would the now use "Boounty Hunters" like KoG or HK ? Seems weird.
5 Indeed if the Pirate HQ was only a bad neighbourhood and not the HQ of well Pirates that make space unsafe.
2) There are Hellknioght NPCs in Pact World. We don't spefically know if murder is a crime either. My point is there are several bounties on the Pirates and the Stewards are said to use bounty hunters to deal with criminals. They themselves are said to deal Harshly with Pirates. Why would the now use "Boounty Hunters" like KoG or HK ? Seems weird.
5 Indeed if the Pirate HQ was only a bad neighbourhood and not the HQ of well Pirates that make space unsafe.
I imagine they don't have the funds to hire several dreanoughts, carriers, the support ships, spies, trackers and army needed to successfully hunt down the free captains. The actual militaries being busy rattling their sabres.
As pointed out earlier, sending too few ships will likely result in those ships becoming the newest additions to the free captain fleet or destroyed by broken rock's defenses.
Sending too many results in the pirates scattering to the drift inside a few minutes, and 'broken rock' being reestablished elsewhere.
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Whenever I see something in an RPG setting that doesn't seem to make sense, I find "what reason can I make for it to be this way?" rather than "how can I justify why this shouldn't be the case?" So in that vein, here are some Echo-style solutions to the Free Captains problem. A couple notes: These ideas don't all fit neatly into canon (and some explicitly go against what's stated officially). Also, none of these ideas are waterproof. It's likely not difficult to create an argument as to why my explanations wouldn't work, or how this group of NPCs is too smart to not notice this workaround you've devised. That's not the point. Finally, these are all ideas for why Broken Rock is difficult to find/assault. Reasons as to why the pirates' enemies are, instead, choosing not to take action are left as an exercise for the reader.
1. Technomancers. This is really a family of solutions, based mainly around the fact that technomancers are my favourite part of science fantasy. So if I was a team of reality-hackers trying to keep the asteroid pirate base hidden, what would I do? I could establish a field around the asteroid that automatically hacks the nav system of any non-pirate ship close enough to find us. I could alter the space around the astroid in several ways to prevent or discourage approach. I could spoof the ship's sensors to make it look like there's no astroid here, or that a small fleet of, idk, vesk just dropped out of the drift and are charging weapons. I could send some kind of engine-virus that overloads the ship's reactor core. Basically if you're a wizard and love physics, there are like 241 thousand fun ways to protect a place.
2. Broken Reach has its own drift engine, so if a big fleet shows up to hunt them, they just jump to a different part of the Diaspora.
3. You remember the Diaspora is the remnants of two entire populated planets that were destroyed by a superweapon, right? I can't read something like that without thinking the place must be space-haunted. Clearly, with the sarcesians and dwarves and whatnot there are reasonably safe parts of the Diaspora. But Broken Reach could easily be in one of the parts that isn't.
4. Okay so this one is super-weird. But in one of the volumes of Attack of the Swarm! the backmatter has a whole thing about mindscapes, because
Anyway, maybe Broken Reach isn't a real physical place, but a sort of collective mindscape that the pirates go to to swap advice, vote on captains, whatever. It might correlate, appearance-wise, to a place in the Diaspora, and perhaps the only way to access it is by being in the right place in real space.