I've preempted this post by reading this:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Pirate

As I understand it, SW Pirates typically use one or more ships armed with ion cannons to disable a ship, then send in a boarding party, presumably with the use of something like the Sienar T9 Stinger Assault Boarding Tube from DC p.61, to board the disabled ship and plunder the riches.

This leads me to a few questions, numbered for simplicity in reading. I'm asking here because we're all star wars geeks and I'm hoping others' knowledge of the EU can help me.

1. Does the boarding tube not leave a hull breach subject to the vacuum of space and thereby requiring the use of a pressurized space suit? Certainly the pirates of SW Legends never required such things.

2. Can you forcibly dock with another ship of similar silhouette (I'll say your ship's SIL or 1 bigger/smaller)? Like snapping your non-modded docking tube to their entry hatch and cutting your way in with an arc wielder or something?

3. How would pirates engage a victim ship? Like in space? Most ships carrying cargo of value are traveling in hyperspace, the best you could do is plot the same course as them in hopes of dropping out of hyperspace in the same coordinates, right? Pirates don't typically have interdictor ships capable of yanking you out of hyperspace from major trade routes, so how do they physically get in the same space, in well, space, as their victim?

Thanks in advance!

3: There are lots of ways to engage a cargo ship. Hitting it as it enters or leaves a system works, especially if you can get the ship's route and schedule. Lurking near common jump coordinates worked as well if they weren't after a specific ship. And some pirates would drag asteroids into known trade routes then ambush ship forced out of hyper by the asteroid's mass. Then there is the old classic have an agent on the ship sabotage the hyperdrive trick.

1. Yes, and that is why pirates gain access by simply threatening to do it this way. As long as the freighter-captain is somewhat conviced to get his ship and crew out alive he will rather open the doors than risk getting spaced. Not to mention that the pirates can also threaten to simply shoot the ship to bits and then sort out the cargo crates from the debris. It will take longer and be messier, but it makes a very good threat.

2. Also possible. Remember the threats stated in point 1 above, most likely the freighters will open their doors for you.

In General: Pirating is not easy and requires a long list of contacts.

Piracy requires you to know where and when valuable cargo will come along. Insider contacts/info and a good slicer take care of that.

Then you usually need to get rid of several tons of cargo, unless you steal meds and drugs streetselling is not an option. Good contacts to one or several crime syndicates mean you can empty your cargo hold faster.

Ports that do not exist or do not talk about their clients are important, and a few honest business owners can launder those stacks of credits for you.

And you need good intel on what the Empire and the bounty hunters are up too.

Even the most successful pirate leaders with cruisers and frigates at their disposal do not want an ISD (or a group of Victory s) to get the jump on them. Nor do you want a group of heavily armed and armored BHs to drop into one of your little social gatherings/deal brokerings. You won't be surrounded by dozens/hundres of henchmen every minute so there will be vulnerable moments.

That are quite a lot of people you have to keep paid and happy.

You don't need to have specific intel on ships to be a pirate, most cargo ships travel on very well mapped and know hyperspace routes from system to system. These routes are quicker and very safe so while space is indeed massive you will know the route freighters take between system A and B so a pirate can indeed just sit at the beggining or end of these routes to be able to jump ships.

Now the problem is the pirates won't know what the cargo is and any developed system will try to have some kind of customs or defense ship in place but poorer systems may not be able to afford this.

The bare minimum a pirate needs to be able to operate is a ship, people to crew it and fences to off load whatever they steal.

The biggest issue is do the pirates kill/enslave the crew and take the ship as well. Taking the ship will mean a bigger profit but is more work and if word gets out then the responce from the Republic/Empire will be quicker coming than "gentleman" pirates who just take the cargos.

I'd assume hyperspace routes spend a lot of time in real space, mostly made up small relatively small jumps. Particularly smuggler routes (bypass all that imperial security)

That and creating gravity shadows by moving rocks, asteroids etc.

Tractor beams and harpoon/toe-cables. Get some low tech pirates too . Pull them close until their literally next to each other and fusion cutters to weld the seal and get in there matey! Is it perfect? No. Are they smart pirates? No. Will it work? Sure...it's Star Wars...they have plasma blades in the shape of swords and magical powers.

Most transport ships take on passengers. Pirates will often seek to infiltrate ships via this method so they can sabotage the vessel and disable it to allow their comrades to board the vessel. Other variations on this theme involve sabotaging vessels while they are still in port by paying off maintenance crews, fuel vendors, lot lizards (landing pad dewbacks?), or others to do the dirty work.

You don't need to have specific intel on ships to be a pirate, most cargo ships travel on very well mapped and know hyperspace routes from system to system. These routes are quicker and very safe so while space is indeed massive you will know the route freighters take between system A and B so a pirate can indeed just sit at the beggining or end of these routes to be able to jump ships.

Now the problem is the pirates won't know what the cargo is and any developed system will try to have some kind of customs or defense ship in place but poorer systems may not be able to afford this.

The bare minimum a pirate needs to be able to operate is a ship, people to crew it and fences to off load whatever they steal.

The biggest issue is do the pirates kill/enslave the crew and take the ship as well. Taking the ship will mean a bigger profit but is more work and if word gets out then the responce from the Republic/Empire will be quicker coming than "gentleman" pirates who just take the cargos.

1. If you don't know what you are about to steal it can backfire greatly. Be it worthless junk (eg Emperor Palpatine bobbleheads), radioactive/chemical waste for disposal, sensitive equipment that your men can't handle properly (resulting in loss of worth), or guarded cargo (the Moffs private art collection with a platoon of Stormtroopers for safe-keeping). It will work for some time sure, but you need a lot of luck to stay afloat.

2. Poorer systems don't have the newest toys, that i agree. That goes for inner-system travles, not the inter-stellar hyper-lanes- Unlike in our real world the Imperial Navy patrols these lanes with heavy cruisers and ISDs. That would be like the US sending Carriers along routinly to patrol the Panama and Suez Canal.

You have to keep your eyes and ears open to know when to best strike unless you want that to come at you.

3. Such pirates need to be rather lucky and/or expand very soon unless they want to linger around like the crew of the Serenity. Not that there are no such pirates in Star Wars running around. How many of the are and how long they do it ... that's another thing.

4. Those get a reputation real quick. And depending on who they rob a nice fat bounty. The more caracsses (both from living and ships) they produce the higher it will go.

A couple TCW episode shows piracy in action. First is Revival, where Maul and his brother are boarded by the pirates extending a tube and cutting a hole in the hull. But that is brief.

Second is A Test of Strength, where Ahsoka and younglings are boarded by firing towing cables and extending a flexible tube to the hatch. This one is more extensive, and shows a couple pirates in space guiding the tube, and the consequences of rash escape actions...

Personally I'd hand-wave most of it, but it would depend on how interested the players are in the details, and how much story I'd want to leverage out of the procedure. If the players have never done a docking routine before, there could be a lot of tension and fun in going through all the details and figuring out penalties for threats, etc. So, for example, if they fire the tow cables and miss, is there a chance they hit a critical component that overloads the power cells and starts a countdown to ship destruction? Are they willing to let everybody die on board or does the piracy turn into a rescue? If the target ship has somebody hidden in a compartment who can override the bridge controls, if they try to break the ship free, what damage might that cause...to the target ship's hull, the pirate ship's tow-cable connection, the boarding tube...?

The only danger with some applications of Threat and Despair is that ejecting into space (or damage to a suit) is a one way trip.

BTW, the Test of Strength episode is a great one if you think in terms of Advantages, Threats, Triumph, and Despair...there seems to be a lot of everything flying around as each positive action seems to have negative repercussions, and vice versa.

Also think firefly where they forced the ship to stay on course into the net-- where the baddy was

Check out this book, http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Pirates_%26_Privateers

plenty of reference material.

I also assume that along the major routes, there has to be at least some pirates that use the hostage method - boarding and securing the ship, forcing it to jump to a dark point, then contacting the parent company and demanding X million credits to release the ship on it's way interact, otherwise they'll scuttle the ship and destroy the cargo. This works very well for large cargos of items that are not particularly valuable/resellable (like the aforementioned bobbleheads) because they're worth to the company is higher than their worth to the pirates.

Just like trade planets, the amount we see and hear about piracy in the Star Wars universe suggests that slow moving cargo vessels tend to make short jumps and realign/recalculate as they move along the trade routes.

The hostage method isn't likely to work out as well in Star Wars since many transport ships are independently owned and operated by crews that are barely getting by. Conversely, corporate ships tend to travel in well-patrolled routes often with armed escorts, so they are much harder targets.

Here is a scene of us doing just that. We are currently running a space pirate campaign using Roll20 and we record every session. https://youtu.be/NszpL_eJXM8?t=7183 (Just about 2 hours in if the link doesn't work properly)

I wondered about the gaping hole in the ship after our boarding tube pulled away... I suppose at that point you are either going to kill everyone on board, or you could say that you cut a hole in the outside of an airlock and the inside door can still be closed. Fortunately for them, we intimidated the crew of our target ship to let us dock regularly.

Our tractor beam / ION canon combination seemed to work out very well. Let me know if you have any questions. We played our third session last night, I should hopefully have it up on YouTube this weekend.

I wondered about the gaping hole in the ship after our boarding tube pulled away... I suppose at that point you are either going to kill everyone on board, or you could say that you cut a hole in the outside of an airlock and the inside door can still be closed. Fortunately for them, we intimidated the crew of our target ship to let us dock regularly.

It wouldn't kill everyone on board...that's the point of all those swooshing doors they're always passing through. All but the smallest ships would be compartmentalized and have automatic door closings in the case of depressurization.

And that's assuming they don't have the emergency air shields that we see pop up sometimes. (or in common use in hanger bays.)

Would you be able to mess up a ships hyperspace routes. Like slice into a ship and make it think suspicious asteroid field is in fact correlia. So a pilot will end up not where he expected/planned

3. How would pirates engage a victim ship? Like in space? Most ships carrying cargo of value are traveling in hyperspace, the best you could do is plot the same course as them in hopes of dropping out of hyperspace in the same coordinates, right? Pirates don't typically have interdictor ships capable of yanking you out of hyperspace from major trade routes, so how do they physically get in the same space, in well, space, as their victim?

I tried to come up with some creative ideas of how to attract a potential target.

• Have your ship sit in real space near a jump point wailing a distress beacon. Hopefully a ship comes by to assist you. Either use your own ship or a previous ship you have captured.
• Impersonate a Imperial patrol boat requesting a audit/security check.
• pretend to be a transport as well and ask if you can buddy up, travelling in pairs is safer.

  Also everything else posted above seems like great examples.

Would you be able to mess up a ships hyperspace routes. Like slice into a ship and make it think suspicious asteroid field is in fact correlia. So a pilot will end up not where he expected/planned

There are (at least) two ways you could go about this. The first is to hack the navicomputer (or astromech droid) to send the ship where you want it go rather than the intended destination. This involves all the usual tests of slicing and would be a form of internal sabotage. The second would be to flood the ship's sensors with false input to compromise the navicomputer's ability to calculate a route. This isn't sabotage so much as it's a form of external slicing.

ARRRRR!

- Nothing really to add to the discussion, I just like pirates.

The hostage method isn't likely to work out as well in Star Wars since many transport ships are independently owned and operated by crews that are barely getting by. Conversely, corporate ships tend to travel in well-patrolled routes often with armed escorts, so they are much harder targets.

While there are certainly quite a number of independent transporters, I'd argue that the majority of goods are transported by larger commercial carrier. A number of stories and background allude to such organizations (in addition to the obvious Trade Federation), they're just not interesting to write stories about - the same thing that came up with the "no middle class in Star Wars" thread. In addition, its routinely suggested in stories that the Empire's patrolling, while impressive, was only making a marginal dent in overall piracy. I'm not saying it wouldn't be risky, and often aborted method, but it probably does happen.

Even if you do end up hitting up an independent freighter, it might be easier/more efficient to just demand what ever credits they have, take you pick of the best cargo, so fuel and some parts, then let them go on their way. Having a reputation of letting the freighters go in decent shape can increase the chance they'll surrender and cooperate once they see they can't fight you off.

Best source of info on pirates so far. Check the D6 holocron.

I keep hoping that FFG will do their own equivalent of that book. That's my all time favorite Star Wars RPG sourcebook

If the keep the license long enough they likely will hit that. Seeing as how they've already renewed the odds aren't bad. FFG really lucked out when it came to timing on that license.

I hope so. On top of my group and I loving Privateer and pirate campaigns FFG has created several of my favorite new ship designs introduced to the Star Wars Franchise in the 21st century and I would love to see what they would come up for a pirate and privateer book.