Looking for peoples thoughts and experiences with which stock starfighter's work the best for a pirating type roll (both disabling ships of all sizes so they can be pirated and for fending off starfighter defensive screens while larger pirate ships dock with the victim ship). Starviper M-2 (Mask of the Pirate Queen), Y-Wing, B-Wing, Tie/D, jump out at me as obvious choices...

Thanks in advance.

Fist

Tie are imperial fighters so good luck any pirate group having them. Same things for the B-wing.

As for anythng else i'd go with commonly available fighters, from Y-Wing to Z-95 and anything in between. Pirates are gonna target lightly armed transposrt of lightly defended convoys, so they don't need state of the art fighters. What tehy need tthough is a good ship to act as carrier, and ships to carry the plunder.

Z=95 Headhunters are my standard ships for pirates. Sometimes I'll give them Uglies, like TIE=wings.

B-Wings and TIE/D fighters are way too new for pirates to have, at least in decent quantities. If a pirate group even had one of such, I would probably make it a big deal so as to highlight the oddity...maybe even make it a story point, like "Where are these pirates getting B-Wings?"

Great points Lareg and awayputurwpn

What if we look at the question from another point of view, if you were a pirate group, what starfighter's would you like to have, or try to get? Opening it up a little more so its not just the cookie cutter pirates, more of a player characters as pirates...

The favorite starfighter for a pirate should be imho no starfighter at all. Sil 3 starfighters do imho not really suite pirates that well. Some may have a few Z-95 as support crafts for their modified freighters or frigates, but the bread and butter ship for pirates are imo sil 4-6 ships which provide decent enough protection from just randomly exploding, retreat options, cargo space and the ability kill the idea of fighting back from their prey. Plus the option to actually have enough crew to board and pillage other ships.

Fighters are more of a military/militia thing, because they blow to easily up and thus are always a huge risk to the profit margins. Now that does not mean that desperate people might not use old fighters, but it certainly seems unreasonable to use high-performance, but fragile fighters like the B-Wing or Defender, even when they would have access to them. You get a gozanti cruiser + tons of modification for that cruiser just fine for the price of a single defender.

Want more ideas than you know what to do with? Get a cup of coffee and browse this awesome thread like it's a Walthers catalog.

SEApocalypse brings up some good points... thanks for destroying my thread!!! lol

To try and tease some more answers out of people, let me put it in a situational context. Players are part of a pirate group based out of a Marauder corvette, what starfighter sized ships should they try and have in the Marauder's hangar bay? If not starfighter's, maybe gunboats?

Great thread you linked in here wilsch. Lots of reading, thanks.

What a pirate leader is going to want is a fighter that is cheap to buy, easy to find, easy to maintain, cheap and plentiful parts, and is effective at its role. A well funded and equipped military can afford to have hanger queens that are constantly down for maintenance but every 12 hours a ship is down for maintenance is potentially a profitable mission that it cannot go on. For pirates profits are what matters. Two F14's that you can bring along on every mission is better than one F22 that can only come along every other mission. Also low key is better, you don't want the Empire or Rebel Alliance sniffing around trying to figure out how you got your hands on a front line ship that you shouldn't have.

Hyperdrive equipped fighters are a debatable point. Hyperdive equipped ships will be more expensive to buy, more expensive to run and have worse performance but will mean you don't need a carrier to transport them and give you more flexibility.

If you were a pilot it's a different matter. What matters to you is purely performance as the techs and quartermasters deal with all the boring bits. So the better the performance the better. Plus I expect pirate starfighter pilots to be quite individual and want the techs to mod the hell out of their rides.

What ship in the Star Wars universe is cheap, easy to maintain, relative high performance and easy to mod? The M3-A Scyk. Load it up with ion cannons and you have a flexible star fighter to fun down those targets that are too fast for your actual main combat ships and to provide cover.

So a pirate band would probably be a "mothership" that has the cargo and carrier capability along with some modified freighters or Gozanti like ships that do the actual pirating.

Rember that there are hyperspace sleds to carry starfighters that don't have an hyperdrive. This allows you more variety among the fighters.

As for the Scyk, isn't that a typically mandalorian fighter? I think a pirate would like a figther that is very common and not attract particular attention.

The M3A is iirc a ship from MandalMotors, but is used mainly by the hutt cartels. Those ships perform in a milia/military role, similar how modern world drug cartels use military grade equipment right now to protect their goods, power and influence. They are rather common and should not attracted much attention. I actually might attracted even less attraction than old republican / imperial Y-Wings in pirate hands.

Though MandalMotors itself is one of those pieces from legends which does not fit with cannon very well even before the disney buyout.

Great suggestion with the M3-A, just re-read it in Lords of Nal Hutta and it really does seem to fit the roll as a support fighter to a pirate mothership.

I'm a big fan of Cloakshape fighters for my pirates. Next to the Z-95, they're a solid standard.

Fighters are a waste for most piracy operations. Thier purpose (to allow force projection from the ship) just doesn't really match the pirate mandate to capture other ships are cargos.

In some cases they are useful, they are intimidating when put up against unescorted, poorly armed merchant ships. So there's that. But as far as actually taking a prize... Not so handy.

I'd look more to gunships, combat shuttles, and assault boats. You want something that can scare a prize into submission and then deliever your boarding party to subdue the crew. Not only is it more efficient, it reduces the risk of counterboarding....

4 hours ago, fist said:

Great points Lareg and awayputurwpn

What if we look at the question from another point of view, if you were a pirate group, what starfighter's would you like to have, or try to get? Opening it up a little more so its not just the cookie cutter pirates, more of a player characters as pirates...

For NPCs, I veer fairly close to cookie-cutters, simply because I want it to be obvious to my players what's going on. Pirates generally use older ships.

That being said, for a group PC pirates, I'd probably have one of them built as a mechanic with the objective of retrofitting starfighters with ion weaponry, for the express purpose of disabling other craft so that it can be captured. Y'know, pirates and all. And then you'd have to have at least one fighter ace in the group (because otherwise why would you go to the trouble of having fighters?).

At that point, it'd be a question of what the group could get their hands on. You could raid an Imperial shipyard, for instance. Take the latest season of Rebels as an example. Or you could try and infiltrate a planet-side base, and abscond with a few fighters that way. A-Wings, TIEs, pretty much whatever they could get their hands on. In the default timeline era, Y-Wings would be relatively easy to obtain, whereas X-Wings would be an extremely hot commodity, almost impossible for pirates to get their hands on. And plus, pirates generally don't want to weaken the Rebellion...the Alliance provides a welcome distraction for the Empire, so that pirate groups can operate with increased freedom.

Koensayer ad15 from sped modifications, can be anything you want, and in the hands of a gifted mechanic can give you exactly what you need thfrthfrough mods.

Speaking of the Kensayer ad15 from sm and gifted mechanics.

I would not be surprised when the nemesis characters of a pirate frigate have their own personal ships, nifty tuned fighters, freighters and other tools to fly to special missions or just escape out of a hopeless combat situation. Nothing you would usually use for piracy, but something more in line with a personal insurance when things start to go south.

Another possibility among those would be characters who are obsessed with flying and actually can't resist the adrenal drill to bring a fighter to the job, such people would be actual good candidates to own high-performance fighters. The hapan Miy'til starfighter would be something fitting for example, considering the hapan history of piracy and the reputation of those fighters and the actual in game stats. Sil 2 fighters with hyperdrive are sexy, especially when they offer an astromech socket. Make the astromech for example a nemesis himself, the personal droid of a high-ranking member of the gang, with a position similar to the CAG of an aircraft carrier, add maybe even two hard-points to that Miy'til, have a kickass astromech and a squadron commander style pilot and you have some kickass npc who usually does not go into the cockpit anymore, but coordinates the pirates ships still …

… so many options, so little time.

Y-Wings are great. Having 2 pc's (3 if one is an astromec) in a single fighter is a big advantage since you can shoot at least once every single round and still do some fancy flying.

The Y-wing is also Rarity 4, meaning it's as easy to find legally as a common blaster pistol. Let that sink in...

41 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

The Y-wing is also Rarity 4, meaning it's as easy to find legally as a common blaster pistol. Let that sink in...

As easy to find, but a little pricier

11 hours ago, HappyDaze said:

The Y-wing is also Rarity 4, meaning it's as easy to find legally as a common blaster pistol. Let that sink in...

As easy to find, if you're looking in a place that would sell that sort of thing.

There are good, logical reasons why pirates wouldn't use fighters. Increased maintenance requirements, the need for skilled pilots as opposed to thugs with blasters, and as SEApocalypse said there's the risk of one well-placed shot blowing up your expensive fighter. The main reason, in my view, for using them is that it's thematically appropriate - this is Star Wars, people use fighters in space combat.

As for which fighter to use... It needs to be cheap, reliable, with easily-acquired spare parts. Ion cannons would definitely be preferable, though ideally you'd want to take the prize without frying the controls.

3 hours ago, Dafydd said:

There are good, logical reasons why pirates wouldn't use fighters. Increased maintenance requirements, the need for skilled pilots as opposed to thugs with blasters, and as SEApocalypse said there's the risk of one well-placed shot blowing up your expensive fighter. The main reason, in my view, for using them is that it's thematically appropriate - this is Star Wars, people use fighters in space combat.

As for which fighter to use... It needs to be cheap, reliable, with easily-acquired spare parts. Ion cannons would definitely be preferable, though ideally you'd want to take the prize without frying the controls.

I would agree on that if legends and canon did not actually portrait it different, canon shows us one pirate gang in action and they use a Corona-class armed frigate as mothership and Flarestar-class attack shuttle with a crew of 3 and a cargo capacity of 20 tons, so a silhouette 4 ship. Similar in most EU books, modified freighters for smugglers and pirates mostly, simply because they are cheap, reliable, sturdy and can be armed even heavier than fighters, etc

Even the iirc first appearance of pirates in the fighter combat centric rogue squadron comics had the pirates use a bigger ship and not fighters. (X-Wing Rogue Squadron 6: The Phantom Affair, Part 2)

Now as mentioned, this does not rule out pirates using fighters, the galaxy is big and all, but I don't think that fighters are the common choice among pirates. And armed freighters are certainly thematically appropriate for star wars, they are even central to all major space battles of the original trilogy.

3 hours ago, SEApocalypse said:

I would agree on that if legends and canon did not actually portrait it different, canon shows us one pirate gang in action and they use a Corona-class armed frigate as mothership and Flarestar-class attack shuttle with a crew of 3 and a cargo capacity of 20 tons, so a silhouette 4 ship. Similar in most EU books, modified freighters for smugglers and pirates mostly, simply because they are cheap, reliable, sturdy and can be armed even heavier than fighters, etc

Even the iirc first appearance of pirates in the fighter combat centric rogue squadron comics had the pirates use a bigger ship and not fighters. (X-Wing Rogue Squadron 6: The Phantom Affair, Part 2)

Now as mentioned, this does not rule out pirates using fighters, the galaxy is big and all, but I don't think that fighters are the common choice among pirates. And armed freighters are certainly thematically appropriate for star wars, they are even central to all major space battles of the original trilogy.

Well you know of one more canon appearance than I do - of the canon sources I've only seen the movies and the first couple of seasons of Rebels, and I don't recall a pirate gang like that anywhere, though I may well be wrong. That being the case, however, it just reinforces the idea that fighters aren't a good choice for pirates.

I think a Star Wars pirate ship would want the same characteristics as a real-world pirate:

• It should be fast, to chase down merchantmen and outrun warships
• Heavy armament is not necessary unless going after well-armed targets, just enough to intimidate and merchant ship into surrender.
• The only reason to have a large ship is if you intend to remove cargo from your victim. Ideally you want to take the ship as a whole, to carry off the cargo and hostages for ransom/sale as slaves.
• You generally don't want a large crew, as it means the take is split more ways.

Hondo is in Rebels is a pirate who basically lost everything when the empire rose to power. He had a whole fleet of those Flarestar-class attack shuttles and commanded the Corona-class armed frigate during the clone wars.

And once he got control of that Sentinel Class Shuttle, he started to modify it and get back into business. He had little to no interest at the same time for those Y-Wings which he rather sold to the alliance.

In the X-Wing Miniatures game the basic pilot for the Z-95 is the "Binyare Pirate" which I'd take as a decent indication that headhunters are used by at least a few pirate groups.

The Skipray Blastboat looks like a good choice too, ion cannons, decently tough, and you can fit a boarding party in the back too.