Pirates and Writing, Part Whatever

[chris_gerrib]

News comes today that the US-flagged M/V Advantage evaded a pirate attack. The Advantage is one of ten ships owned and operated by Sealift. Of interest to me as a writer is the fact that the attempted hijacking was launched from a recently-hijacked chemical carrier.

From a writing point of view, in The Night Watch, the latest WIP, I'm trying to "persuade" the Space Rescue Service to arm their ships. So I think that the hijacked ship that they are about to liberate was undergoing conversion to an armed raider.

I love it when a plan comes together!

Comments

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Aprpos this kind of thing. Have you ever come across "Jupiter Moon" it was a short lived Space Based Soap opera on the precursor to Sky in the UK?

I think you can watch the DVDs on Netflix.

It wasn't terribly good, but there was a section on dealing with some pirates where the students "armed" the ship with a home built rail gun and a nuke built from equipment in their Starship Program.

There was a nice throw away line where somebody asks the Captain of the ship about the environmental impact of using a Nuke and his reply is along the lines of, "that's Jupiter out there! One of our nukes won't even show up in the local background radiation."

It wasn't all that good but they did try for some accuracy.

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

No, I haven't heard about Jupiter Moon. The idea of making a nuke from stuff lying around in the shop is kinda interesting... ;-)

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Well the setting was the Space University Ilea, in orbit over Castillo where Project Daedalus was being constructed, so they had a LOT of stuff lying around :)

The acting was awesomely bad, but some of the story lines were good.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Given the extreme passivity of our (the civilized countries') current anti-pirate operations, the conversion of large ships taken by previous attacks into motherships or even pirate "cruisers" is to be expected. History is repeating itself: the 17th-century era of bucaneering in the Carribean started with small bands of men launching desperate attacks from longboats and pinnaces, and eventually led to pirate fleets with frigate-sized flagships.

Hopefully, we'll wake up before we let it get that far.

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, Jordan, you are shockingly uninformed. The European Union, via Operation Atalanta (http://www.eunavfor.eu/about-us/mission/), has 10+ naval vessels off the coast engaged in escort and gunfights with pirates. The blog Information Dissemination (http://www.informationdissemination.net/search/label/Somalia) has been covering activities there for months, including Dutch and British helicopter gunship strikes (http://www.informationdissemination.net/2010/10/not-mercs-royal-navy-destroys-pirate.html) on the coast.

The US Navy, under 5th Fleet and another multi-national group, Combined Task Force 150 (http://www.cusnc.navy.mil/cmf/150/index.html), has maintained another dozen or so ships in the region, also actively in gunfights with pirates.

The problem is not "lack of activity," the problem is that piracy is the maritime equivalent of guerrilla warfare - it's inherently difficult to deal with. The other problem is that, as per this <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cys2T5FgJdo/TQmSCMQG7XI/AAAAAAAAH80/IA-JmaBYcAw/s1600/NATO_Piracy_Nov25_Dec15_2010.JPG>chart</a>, attacks are occurring as far as 2,000 nautical miles off the Somali coast - and 500 miles off the Indian coast.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I also suspect that the stuff they're operating in is really hard to spot using radar and the like, so there's a lot of ocean to cover with your eye balls looking for relatively nibble, fast moving small craft.

[(Anonymous)]

I am quite aware of the naval operations. I am also aware that (1) they are almost purely defensive in nature and (2) some of the participating Powers don't even try to capture or sink the pirates, being content to merely warn them off their targets. No Power, not even America, has yet struck at the pirate bases.

Yes, piracy is the maritime equivalent of guerilla warfare -- to be precise, both are "raiding" operations. And a guerilla war in which the counter-insurgent forces are forbidden to do more than defend their own bases and convoys is utterly unwinnable. One must strike at the bases of the raiders to win any guerre de corse.

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

Jordan, backpedalling furiously...