| Role/Occupation Space Pirate |
| Total Entries 47 |
| Representative John Kidd |
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“Space Is an Ocean”, so it’s only logical that it must have pirates as well. Depending how you view the future, lawlessness will always be present in society. There’s always going to be a shadier, nastier way of doing business, and that will almost certainly follow humanity to the stars. Thus, sci-fi authors will include “Expies” of modern and historic un/organized crime, be they space mafia, gangs, or—in our case—pirates. It’s not as anachronistic as it might seem. After all, “Ruthless Modern Pirates” have made a “Real Life” comeback in Somalia and South East Asia, and it’s a lucrative enough “business” that it’s taken a multinational military response to fight back. Surely an established society in outer space with significant trade and commerce would suffer similar problems! …Well, maybe. The major problem with space pirates preying on space commerce is that space is vast. The challenge of catching commercial shipping in open space is orders of magnitudes more difficult than catching them on the open seas. On the other hand, detecting commercial shipping in open space is orders of magnitude easier, just because it is so empty and clear. Sometimes, this is cleverly worked around and justified. Most of the time, however, it isn’t. Particularly since doing so would require working in a plausible means for the pirates to escape undetected after plundering their target… ~ Space Pirates – TV Tropes
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