A Question About Pirates

[Camillo]

I'm thinking about writing a piece of fiction where the primary antagonist is the master of a large pirate force.  That got me thinking about Warp Travel and how it works in this universe on a practical level.  I was hoping someone could help me with the following questions:

 

Near as I can tell, Warp Travel in 40k is similar to space travel in Dune. It requires a specially-trained psyker to enter the warp and navigate the ship through the Immaterium. The Imperium utilizes an entire specialized caste of people (the Navis Nobilite) to accomplish this.  I assume that Space Marine Librarians serve that same purpose for their chapters, but how does that translate to pirates?

 

In order to travel the Immaterium, a pirate would have to have access to ALL of the following:

• A ship capable of Warp travel
• At least one highly trained psyker to transport the ship through the Warp.
• Repair and replacement materials for (at the minimum) the Warp Drive, atmosphere, and traditional (non-warp) navigation and propulsion.
• At least one highly trained tech priest or its xenos equivalent (because no one knows how the technology of the ship works to attempt even mundane repair without one, I expect he'd be REALLY busy). 
• Sufficient personnel to defend and operate the ship in its more mundane capacities
• Enough fuel to maintain ship function and non-warp propulsion.

PER SHIP!

 

I understand how governments manage to make this system work - they are operating on an economy of scale, and have extensive preexisting supply chains and personnel.  But how do pirates do it?  What are the odds that a ship is taken over, and the Navigator on board is fine playing second fiddle to the "new captain?"  If he or she refuses to join, what could they threaten them with?  If they kill the Navigator, they are marooned in space.  If they try to force the Navigator to comply with them, they are trusting their lives to a person that can move them anywhere (like to an Imperial stronghold), or nowhere (simply committing suicide by opening their mind to daemonic incursion and taking everyone on the ship with them) and every conceivable option in between.

 

I can see individual scenarios where a Navigator and a tech priest could be suborned or recruited, but space pirates are treated as an existential threat to the Imperium in some regions of space.  There are even stories of pirate FLEETS. (source: the Lexicanum)

 

Is warp travel simpler than I'm thinking it is?  Can a single Navigator transport several ships or something? How are these pirates finding a ready supply of ships and specialized personnel for their high-space adventures?

 

I appreciate any and all help you can provide on this matter.  Thank you in advance for your time.

[Teetengee]

Short distance jumps can be done without a navigator, they just become a little more dangerous. (As far as I understand, at least.) Additionally, I believe fleets can travel as a group without 1 navigator per ship, if they stay together (although obviously, this also gets more dangerous). Furthermore, pirates in 40k often refer to Eldar, and any with sufficient knowledge of Eldar tech could potentially make use of the webway (navigator free) for certain areas of space. Finally, daemons and sorcerers can be used instead of navigators, if you are willing to pay a different price.

As an aside, I am fairly certain space marines typically use navigators and not librarians.

[Brother Dallo]

Additionally you will get pirates (most of them in my opinion) who ply the space around a particular system or planet, and hence don't need to be warp capable.

 

Dallo

[King Rob the IV]

I think an excellent place for you to start on your pre-writing prep is in reading up on Octavia from the Night Lords novels. As Chaos Marine renegades, they are a form of pirate and this can at least shed some info into a few of your questions. 

 

[Carrack]

In the Eisenhorn Omnibus, a rogue trader he frequently employs, Tobias Maxilla, has a ship crewed by servitors, with his navigator being described as practically a servitor himself. Perhaps this is a route you could go, with navigators that are less than fully in control of their fate, by means such as servitor lobotomies, drugs, or psychic control.

 

Another possibility is that some navigators might be okay with piracy. They are not described as being immune to corruption in anything I've read. There could be some that would pilot a ship for pirates given the right incentives, particularly if the other option is death.

 

As far as a support system capable of sustaining a pirate fleet, you could create ports or even worlds that exist in some fringe cut off from strong Imperial control. Or they could have support from one faction of the Imperium against another. For example, an Imperial Govenor might be willing to resupply a pirate fleet and purchase its booty as long as the pirates preyed on a rival governor, and did so with enough discretion to keep the Inquisition from taking interest.

[Erasus]

Hello!

 

Propulsion

Nearly all, of not all, Imperial ships use plasma drives. These insane nuclear reactors are self-reliant. Meaning they require little to no fuel input. They internally generate magnetic fields in order to kickstart a reaction. How this works I don't know. I'm no physicist and I'm sure to a real one the idea of the plasma drive is silly but here it works so viola! You have a fuel independent engine for your ship.

This not include warp travel which uses;

 

Warp Drives

Apparently only big ships have these, (I'm guessing anything the size of a Navy escort upwards) so you'd need to ensure you have a big enough ship to accommodate the engine space.

The only exceptions I can think of are specialised ships like smaller Inquisition runners and the like.

 

Navigation

So the warp is a bit like the sea, an angry, living, hateful, magical sea that doesn't follow the physics of any sea you've ever known, but a sea none the less. There are waves, currents and worst of all there are storms.

When a ship is in the warp they are subject to these mystical flows and rifts, meaning that to hit a wave could put you light years away from your goal or worse, chronological years before or after the time you wanted to arrive (if you ever manage to leave the Warp again . . .)

Now the longer a ship is in these shifting tides the more likely something will go wrong. So everyone uses short jumps to help maintain accuracy.

All jumps are made at the outer edge of the system, something to do with warp density or something, but attempting to do it closer to the star will likely cause your ship to ripped apart and the crew shredded in a cataclysmic clash of realities. Look at Space Hulks, they're a mess, but they only survive because they're such huge messes.

Some parts of the Warp are more stable than others, often more consistent in how long a journey takes in real time. These points are highly valued for trade and military movements. There's actually a word for a warp jump point at the edge of any given system, but I can't remember it. Anyway these stable warp jump points are important and the majority of trade will occur through these points

 

There are 2 types of warp jump;

1) the Blind Jump, this is where there is no piloted guidance by a Navigator or the like, all Imperial built warp engines have algorithms built in to calculate for small warp jumps. Apparently it's unsafe to jump unguided for longer than 4 light years in realspace, in real life terms this is just shy of jumping from the Sun to the next star Alpha Centauri (4.4) so your pirate will spend some time hopping in between stars (in the cold, dark, dead of the void mwahahaha . . . .)

2) the Piloted Jump, is a bigger jump guided by a Navigator or some such person/thing/other. These jumps are much bigger than Blind ones, topping out at 5,000 light years. Bigger one have been made but it's not the norm. They see the warp currents and inform the Enginarium on how to navigate it (like the guy in a Galleon's crow nest shouting out where the worst waves are coming from during a storm). Now there are BL examples of Navigators doing this in other ways, such as communing with the ship's machine spirit, or having direct access to ship controls. With the guidance of a Navigator, a ship can remain in the warp as long as a) the Gellar fields remain intact and b) the Navigator doesn't tire. Bad things tend to happen when either criteria isn't met.

 

Chaos often use possessed or Daemons, as apparently (and contrarily to many Black Library fictions) Navigators more often rather die than betray the Imperium.

Librarians are poor substitutes with the best examples often having the Librarian eventually falling to possession, the use of psyker powers over the Navigators' third eye is extremely taxing often swapping mental defence for navigational control.

Eldar utilise the Webway

Necrons are just super fast, and that's when they don't use Dolmen gates

Orks follow in the wake of Space Hulks, using their unprotected trip in the Warp as a field day to fight Daemons, cause Orks . . .

Tyranids do things the slow way (Emperor preserve us if they shortcutted everywhere)

Tau have only just mastered tech to do little warp jumps, they can't do the long Piloted Jumps yet, which is weird since they have the Nicassar as part of their fleet.

 

 

Pirates

So you wanna be a pirate? Well good for you matey!

Pirates are a common problem in 40k, preying on shipping lanes and stable warp jump points.

While Eldar Corsairs, Chaos Marines and Ork Frebooterz make up some of the more significant and somewhat threatening private groups out there, there are plenty of "normal" pirates. Rogue Traders gone um rogue, Navy personnel turned desperate and even criminal syndicates and such.

 

There's plenty of places to hide out, asteroids, planets, moons, abandoned space stations, all sorts. Some will be the lone property of a certain group, others may be conglomerate neutral zones where groups meet up. I don't know.

 

All will eventually face some form of Imperial retribution, whether the local PDF fighters or Imperial Navy badasses.

 

So the question is what level of pirate do you want to write about?

 

The small-time crew with a warp-drive-less ship who prey on those who arrive at their jump point?

A bigger raider group that run down their prey with short jumps through the Empyrean?

Alien Corsairs who enjoy raiding the pathetic human's blocky ships or fink dey az got sum loot worf taking!

Or a massive, apocalyptic force a la Red Corsairs?

 

Let us know!

 

There's probably loads I've forgotten to mention, so feel free to quiz us Liberites further! Others might know more than just what I've put here.

 

Best of luck!

Hope this helps!

[Indefragable]

Look at modern-day piracy off the Eastern Coast of Africa....are they using captured Nimitz-class aircraft carriers? Not exactly. In fact, they are using literal dinghies as times...but the element of speed, suprise, audacity, and local superiority in numbers and firepower makes up for this. 

 

I like to think of pirates and their various types of technology and organization falling into the following very-loose "classes" of threat: 

 

Localized near-space humanioid pirates

These are the galatic equivalent to street gangs patrolling a few urban blocks. They are restricted to  relative "ponds" from the perspective of the Imperium. The most numerous by far, and some would be pariticularly deadly and vicious. The most dangerous would be good enough at what they do that no one would know they even operate. Patches of space would be listed as "hazardous" with "frequency of warp storms" in the area or something. 

 

Rogue Rogue Traders.

Sometimes actual chartered Rogue Traders who have decided to use their resources for illicit gain. Sometimes not. But this is a class of pirates that encompasses near-Imperial Navy levels of tech and sophistication. Using Gellar Drives and so forth.This is probably what most people imagine when they think of "space pirates" in 40k, but in-universe would probably be fairly rare for the myriad logistical purposes. 

 

Alt-Tech

The Galaxy in 40k is a very large place. And with tens of thousands of years of human diaspora, it is quite likely that there are bands, gangs, and even civilizations of pirates that survive completely off the Imperial grid. They could have completely alternate means of technology and transportation, from hodge-podge jury rigged Imperial equipment that they've gotten to work, completely ignorant of the concepts of "machine spirits" and the like, to jury rigged xenos tech, to leftovers from the Age of Night, to hybrids of all of those. I'm sure there are far more of these out there than Imperial authorities would ever hazard to admit, and is defnitely one of the more fun ideas to toy with. The key here is that these pirates are practically "aliens" themselves because their entire way of life is so far removed from the Imperial way of of life.

 

Xenos 

As the "others" in the eyes of the Imperium, aliens (and any conglomeration of humans+xenos) will always be particularly dangerous, whether they are of Eldar, Ork, or altogether other varieties. 

 

Renegade Astartes

Oh :cuss . Threat level extremis, there's few things worse than genetically enhanced super soldiers who decide they like your stuff better than their own. I like to imagine that there are task forces or perhaps even an entire Chapter or two of Astartes dedicated solely to finding and exterminating these based on just how dangerous they can be. Whereas many of the above categories are holding up a 711 with a snub-nose revolver, these guys are the bank robbers in Heat. 

[Kierdale]

Renegade Astartes

Oh :cuss . Threat level extremis, there's few things worse than genetically enhanced super soldiers who decide they like your stuff better than their own. I like to imagine that there are task forces or perhaps even an entire Chapter or two of Astartes dedicated solely to finding and exterminating these based on just how dangerous they can be. Whereas many of the above categories are holding up a 711 with a snub-nose revolver, these guys are the bank robbers in Heat.

 

:tu:

 

I think I foresee a future Inspirational Friday entitled 'Tales of Piracy'.

 

 

I'll also add that Chaos pirates could be turncoat guard/navy.

[paulJam]

As far as a support system capable of sustaining a pirate fleet, you could create ports or even worlds that exist in some fringe cut off from strong Imperial control. Or they could have support from one faction of the Imperium against another. For example, an Imperial Govenor might be willing to resupply a pirate fleet and purchase its booty as long as the pirates preyed on a rival governor, and did so with enough discretion to keep the Inquisition from taking interest.

this would be my favored option for a fleet that remained 'traditional' (i.e. not resorting to xenos/chaos tech, crew, or methods).

given the size of the imperium and the autonomy of governance it's not too far a stretch for fringe systems to come to an agreement with shady groups for protection... as long as the tithes keep flowing.

 

I think I foresee a future Inspirational Friday entitled 'Tales of Piracy'.

perhaps via the liber so non-chaos folk can get involved?

[Camillo]

Wow, that was a lot more information than I was expecting! I borrowed a copy of the Night Lords Omnibus from my friend, and ended reading until 3AM. I would have kept reading too, except that I had to get some sleep before work.   Interesting social dynamics aboard that ship, some of which would be ubiquitous on any 40k vessel.  Terminology is good too, more 18th century navy than modern Air Force.  

 

While I was reading, I had the thought that every naval vessel needing a Navigator was potentially a great way for the Inquisition to keep tabs on things.  If you could recruit even a few Navigators and have them assigned them in the right vessels, you would have operational information about  (and potentially control of)  transportation, crew, and (if the psyker could read thoughts or "hear" distant conversations), secret motivations.  Even if the crew remained loyal, knowing such things would make extracting favors from them or turning them into fellow agents much easier. 

 

As far as a support system capable of sustaining a pirate fleet, you could create ports or even worlds that exist in some fringe cut off from strong Imperial control. Or they could have support from one faction of the Imperium against another. For example, an Imperial Govenor might be willing to resupply a pirate fleet and purchase its booty as long as the pirates preyed on a rival governor, and did so with enough discretion to keep the Inquisition from taking interest.

 

I like this option, and may go with some for of it in the beginning - the overall goal is to make the pirates a genuine threat to the region. At first, no one would be taking them very seriously (it looks like human pirate fleets that are considered dangerous are either rouge traders or chaos space marines), but through a combination of luck and skill, they rise to become a threat worthy of Space Marine attention.  Starting out in the employ of a corrupt government official would give them at least one functioning ship and Navigator, plus enough weaponry and start-up cash (Thrones?) to get a jump on things once they decide to freelance.

 

 The collection of options that Indefragable listed got me thinking about how the black market works in space, and for that matter how criminal communities are structured.  The number of interstellar criminals would be much smaller than the number of local non-warp capable pirates - small enough that many of them would be known to each other.  Most of these would have a strong independent streak, but if they managed to gather together, they would have a lot of agency.  Think of it like organized crime groups in modern times - all of them are criminals, so trust is a problem right away, but if any guiding principle could be used to stabilize relations (honor, steady profit, fear of reprisal), they could be formidable.  The group would still be treacherous - look at the Night Lords and their dealings with each other and with the Astral Claws for a similar paradigm - but they would be orders of magnitude more successful than smaller, fragmented bands for as long as the alliances held.

 

Erasus, thank you for the overview.  For some reason, I had never thought of the Immaterium as being so... chaotic, despite the name of the faction that lives there. I haven't read many books that deal with Warp travel in 40k - the only one that comes close was the Battle for the Abyss, which most people hated, but I thought had some well-written scenes and maintained good pacing.  In that book the Warp just seemed like a Warp Drive from Star Trek, mixed with Dune logistics and the threat of daemonic possession (which is why I made that comparison in the OP). I had no idea that it could be treated like an actual sea as well.  That could lead to some interesting complications during travel, including storms that cause the boat to "leak" daemons, or that drive the crew insane as the psychic protections from the Navigator are strained.

 

Now I've gone from having no ideas to having too many! Thank you to everyone here for their thoughts.  I hope this project continues long enough for me to post it here someday soon.

[paulJam]

Ps for some non-canon but interest (imo) concepts check out philip sibbering's site.

http://www.philipsibbering.com

Some fun contents re warp drive in there.

[Indefragable]

 

 

While I was reading, I had the thought that every naval vessel needing a Navigator was potentially a great way for the Inquisition to keep tabs on things.  If you could recruit even a few Navigators and have them assigned them in the right vessels, you would have operational information about  (and potentially control of)  transportation, crew, and (if the psyker could read thoughts or "hear" distant conversations), secret motivations.  Even if the crew remained loyal, knowing such things would make extracting favors from them or turning them into fellow agents much easier. 

 

 .

 

Ever read Asimov's Foundation series? 

 

Just as the AdMech has complete monopoly on technology, so it makes complete sense from a control perspective for only "approved" Navigators being allowed on starships.