How does the whole pirate thing work? Why doesn Star Fleet stop them?
Starship sensors can only pick up ships up to a few hundred AUs away. This the same as the width of a solar system, or a couple of hours warp flight. Planet based systems (and some military starships) can see farther, but only by focusing on a small section of space. Communications represent similar difficulties, and though it possible for a ship to talk to a nearby star system at any time, in practice the time needed to set it up prevents its use as a pirate distress signal. Pirate vessels are typically small-medium transports with some anti-ship weapons in one cargo bay converted to a launch bay. The preferred tactic is to intimidate a ship into surrendering using the starfighters, and then transfer cargo via shuttle while the base ship remains at a safe distance. Pirate Law is based around to singular principle of “Don’t anger Star Fleet too much!”. Other common practices: • Smuggling gravity-bombs onboard ships. These produce negligible explosions, but temporarily weigh many tens o
