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The difference between Near Space and the Vast is the density of drift beacons present, but the number required to become Near Space is unknown. Also, there is no mention of the required number of drift beacons for in-system travel.
1: Would a star system to be in the vast require at least one drift deacon?
2: As long as a star system has one drift beacon, can you drift travel anywhere in that system?
3: How many beacons do you think it takes to become Near Space?
4: Is it even possible to travel to a star system with no drift beacons in it?
5: What keeps two ships from coming out of the drift at the same point? Do drift beacons act as air traffic control devices?
1. Probably not. One three systems over might be enough.
2. Of course.
3. 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197
4. Backmatter of AotS suggests some stars aren’t in the Vast. How far from a beacon it has to be is not clear.
5. Probability. Space is big.
This really has not been spelled out at all.
Like, if someone goes from Vesk 3 to castrovel do they boop to absolom station and then head to castrovel on impulse? Appear right in orbit around castrovel?
I heard somewhere that one of the impellers for the drift crisis was a writer saying "hey. so.. there;s no way for space piracy to actually work is there...?" and there may or may not be depending on the specifics.
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I was wondering the exact same thing as your example of Vesk 3 to castrovel. Absolom station seems to be the exception to the rules, but we don't know the rules.
I've pieced together the start of a theory on the number of beacons to qualify for near space based on Liberation of Locus-1, and the spell summon drift beacons.
The start of Liberation of Locus-1 it says the system is in the vast. In the back mater, is says that the first drift beacons were found in the outer asteroid fields. Assuming the first are at least 2 or more and not the last in the Locus system, that's at least 3 drift beacons without being near space. But we don’t know the exact number, so it falls under ‘Couple,’ ‘Few,’ or ‘Several’:
Couple: 2 or more.
Few: 3 to 10ish
Several: Equal to or more than a couple or few: so 2 to 11ish. Which is close to 2d6.
The spell summon drift beacons causes a star system to take 2d6 fewer days to reach. 2d6 days is exactly the difference between traveling to the vast vs. near space, and near space and Absalom station.
This suggests the difference between near space and the vast might be 2d6 drift beacons.
Absalom station: 1d6 days, 1 beacon, but => 5d6 beacons
Near space: 3d6 days, 3d6 beacons
The vast: 5d6 days, 1d6 beacons
So maybe Vesk 3 to castrovel, would make near space travel 2d6 + 1d6 in system travel for a total of 3d6 days.
A minimum of 2 beacons in a system would help to be able to triangular on it. So a star system with only 1 drift beacon likely has been more recently added to the vast and possibly unexplored from the outside.
You’d drift travel d6 to Absalom Station then add on your in system travel from AS to Castrovel. It’s two independent legs and locations, two separate navigation rolls and you’d exit the Drift at AS before doing your second leg.
Or you go straight to Castrovel, 3d6 days Near Space travel.
The drift be weird. And vague.
And personally I like it, because you can make up whatever rules you like regarding the details and specifics of how it works beyond what is laid out.
One interesting thing though is the concept of space piracy and how someone said "it isn't possible".
I say that's rubbish, it just get's harder.
There are plenty of space pirates in The Expanse, and they don't have faster than light travel (except wormholes).
You simply need a place where pirates can hide. And probably some technology to make tracking a ship harder. Just because the pirates aren't going to live on a civilized planet doesn't mean they can't have an asteroid base. Heck, I think there are even alternative space ship rules that provide a base of operations for multiple smaller ships that would make a good pirate style base.
I guess if you're idea of piracy is specifically one ship intercepting another and making off with the loot, then I guess not because you're unlikely to be able to intercept them in transit. Except that where you come out of the drift is variable. You'll be "close" to your target but it's not exact. Pirates (with good technology to hide) could wait at popular destinations and try to intercept before a ship reaches safety.
Maybe not at a place like absalom station, but other locations seem feasible.
That would apply as much to the prey as it would the pirates.
And IIRC all the known different drives (drift and other interstellar drives) require you to be "stationary" and have your conventional thrusters off for 1 minute.
Distances in starship battles are made of wibbly wobbly time-spacey stuff, but if a pirate can get within range of enemy to use their weapons before being detected 1 minute is a reasonable time frame to try to disable a drift drive before they can jump away. And they have to be sitting still, they can't even maneuver so even more of a sitting duck.
I'm pretty sure that one minute is the minimum to "bring the drives on-line" and jump "randomly". It takes longer to calculate a deliberate and safe route between two specific locations.
Piracy in dense/wealthy areas of Pact World space seems pretty hard to pull off - by the time you win the combat or force a surrender, board, transfer cargo, and escape to the drift there'd presumably be time for a nearby ship to intervene. A simple strategy of (1) have active long range sensors and decent speed, (2) always scan/hail all ships appearing on your sensors [within 50 hexes] that don't keep their distance, (3) never let them get close unless you're really sure who they are or they have a really good reason at least forces a long stern chase easy to drag out as you impose some range increment penalties on their weapons (significant if medium/short) and can easily pull all of your shields from the forward quadrant and some from the port/starboard at little risk.
Small, isolated stations in the Diaspora (which is big and dispersed without dense nodes of traffic) or at a small colony in an isolated system (ditto) avoid the first problem, but you can still hold your distance and run pretty easily. (Any less than 5x sensor range distance for starting a starship encounter really needs a justification, not just a random number formula in the CRB.) Get those gravity guns going, pirates, and boost that accuracy with the captain and a computer since they're only medium range. Don't forget the thruster booster housing for that sprint to get close.
I don't buy that a particular navigation course plotted from System A to System B cares very much at all about the precise location I leave System A or has to be updated very often if I keep one in my backpocket as an escape plan. And what else is my backup/copilot doing with his time? Just plot more or less continuously, good training.
And 1 minute of sitting still to enter the drift is quite possibly one round (or less! but I'll allow rounding up) of starship combat, negligible.
I generally agree with your assessment Xenocrat. Or at least that in densely traveled populated locations it's unlikely to happen.
I guess I should say while "classic" piracy of other vessels is unlikely, unless they're super slow (think like a space cargo shipping container vessel, but it would probably have an escort) but I do think it's possible to be raiding frontier outposts in a pirate-y sort of way.
I think also it's conceivable that not every vessel is going to have the best (fastest) engines or an always vigilant crew so there is room narratively to have a big slow transport ship, full of unrefined ore, unescorted, who's 4 man crew is all asleep except for the one crew member who is too busy posting on the net about whatever to notice the ship that showed up on sensors.
Of course, these aren't going to be super common situations but I think there's room to have it happen narratively.
The one thing that I do disagree with, is that 1 round of space combat is 1 minute. To the best of my recollection they don't specifically state what the time frame is of space combat rounds, and there are weapons specifically designed to disable drift drives.
If anything, if you want piracy to be more of thing, just increase the warm up time of the drift drive to "long enough that you can't just jump away from battle" to be a thing.
And honestly, I think it's pretty important to make that change to the setting anyways because otherwise space battles shouldn't really happen except when one side wants to defend a specific location. Otherwise ships just jump away if they're not trying to defend something. Why even bother fighting if you can get away without trouble?
But to me, that ruins the setting and shouldn't be feasible as a solution.
You simply need a place where pirates can hide.
you need a place for pirates to hide where
They can hide
they have a reasonable expectation that there will be ships
there will not be police.
FTL travel is exactly the problem here. BAMF out of Vesk 3 and then BAMF into orbit around castrovel and you've bypassed anywhere that could be an ambush.
The Drift is too big, too chaotic, too weird and too dangerous to hang out in. You could be physically right next to a ship but still be 3d6 days away because you need to go three whiddershins and two tesseracts thataway
Ye olde asteroid Tortuga (Astrotuga?) is fine as a base but if you drift from absolom to castrovel or eox then no one passes through there.
You can't hang out around a planet you'll get pulled over by the cops
If you BAMF out of the drift around a planet you're at least as likely to pop up next to a problem as a target.
I like not needing a slide rule to figure out travel times, but how hyperspace works is something a setting needs to know. It drives a lot of plot points if you need Babylon 5 style gates or whether hyperspace is ollie ollie oxen free zone.
Like I said, I think piracy more in the form of frontier raiding is going to be reasonably common, but piracy as in intercepting a vessel mid journey is not, because there's no way (as currently written) to intercept a ship in the drift.
Now, we can argue about "is frontier raiding really piracy" but I think the important thing is we agree vessel interception is out and raiding smaller, lightly defended but "important" locations is plausible.
Also, although it's not detailed it's not impossible to imagine their are "drift disruptors" that pirates could deploy in real space in places the the drift passes through (how exactly the drift and real space interact isn't super clear) that could knock other ships out of the drift. I realize such a thing doesn't currently exist in the rules, but it's not improbable either. You figure out common "intersection nodes" and deploy a disrupter.
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Creating a drift disruptor effect might be doable by hacking a drift beacon to create a localized drift crash effect.
In Liberation of Locus-1, all the pirate encounters are off-ship except for ship battles during the pirate's getaways. Definitely feel more like the frontier raiding type of piracy. There are no space cops around Locus-1 to stop ship-to-ship piracy.
All that's missing from the current rules is to state that things like a gravity gun or physically anchoring your ship to another will prevent it from jumping to the drift. An EMP cannon could disable a drift drive with some luck. Once you can prevent a ship from jumping to the drift, we have all the rules needed for boarding.
I've been trying to think of good examples of space piracy outside of Starfinder. In star wars, a bigger ship uses a tractor beam to capture a smaller ship. Capture it in a docking bay, then board by force. In star trek, there's a ship-to-ship battle until shields are down, then board by transporter.
I think I'm most cases, the ship itself is worth more than its cargo. Even if that's not the case, it's still likely easier to steal or hijack a ship than attack and board.
All that's missing from the current rules is to state that things like a gravity gun or physically anchoring your ship to another will prevent it from jumping to the drift. An EMP cannon could disable a drift drive with some luck. Once you can prevent a ship from jumping to the drift, we have all the rules needed for boarding.
https://aonsrd.com/Starship_ExpBays.aspx?ItemName=Drift%20Shadow%20Projecto r&Family=None
Check this out. Drift Shadow Projector.
It's from the hellknights and
more or less does kinda what you want.
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I missed the Drift Shadow Projector will do the trick. Every pirate needs at least one. To capture a ship with a fast drift drive, the pirates need at least 3 ships armed with Drift Shadow Projectors. With three ships, pirates might not worry as much about running into a patrol craft or two.
The other pirate tactic that would help a lot is to disguise the ship, so they don't look like pirates until it's too late and attack before their shields are up.
The other thing pirates really need is an ECM module that disables communications so the ship their attacking can't call for help.
Yeah, the drift shadow projector is perfect for piracy! Get a couple ships together that can fit one and you've got a setup to go a hutning!
And small and larger ships all have room for expansion bays, so it's not terribly hard to get a group of a few ships together with these. This prevents ships from running away.
Although you still have to actually encounter them. Which is harder if they're jumping from near a "safe" planet to near another "safe" planet. So you still need a "drift crash" event or to go raid an unprotected frontier world.