Suppose you have stolen a warship...

[GrandpaTrout]

Ok, you are a officer in a mercenary company commanding a multimillion credit warship. And you find yourself needing to desert. Why, you ask? Perhaps you have fallen in with the evil side and you want out. Perhaps you have been passed over for promotion one too many times. Perhaps selling a ship this valuable is just what your retirement account needs. But the Why is not so important. More important is the What Happens Next?

What happens when a military force loses a whole ship? What do they do? Give in peacefully? Assign bounty hunters? Scramble the navy?

How long should they track after you? Should it matter if you have joined up with another navy?

The Hunt for Red October is the only movie like this I know about. Anyone have another story of this nature to relate? Anyone stolen a warship before :D

[Hot4Darmat]

I imagine the answer to that question would depend on a few important things: Is the warship in question the property of a recognized sovereign government? If so, then they'd be right pissed and demand the extradition of the seller, and the return of the vessel unmolested from whomever tried to acquire it. The only way you could get away with that kind of defection would be in circumstances like the Red October story, where there was a hostile cold war going on, and the receiving nation had some pretty strong political cards to play.

If the seller went to some less reputable force to unload the vessel in question, then we're talking underworld Pay 'n Spray stuff: disguise it and innocently claim you bought it from a legit dealer (yeah right), or be tough enough to discourage anyone from trying to re-acquire it. Or you could take it and sell it to some skirmishing forces very very far away, so the cost of the effort to retrieve it would outweigh the return, or they'd never actually figure out where it went.

Either way, no matter how you unload it, a warship would be a hard thing to chalk up to normal inventory 'leakage' for any gov't. They'd be pissed. They'd want it back. And they'd put a very high price on the head of the thief.

[Hot4Darmat]

Just as a small addendum to the previous post, if you're looking for some quantifiable thing that will determine how long, or how far, or with how many ships a gov't will pursue a stolen vessel, you could use a rough estimate of the value of the vessel (or tonnage or something like that), it's ongoing military value vis a vis the manufacturing rate of that gov't (i.e., it isn't that expensive, but we only had three and we won't be making any more for another year, and we need them all to defend our borders), and the total cost of retrieving it. How much does it cost to operate a vessel and all its crew for a week or a month? If sending four corvettes out, at a rate of X each per day will exceed the total value of the stolen vessel, which is 24X, then the retrieval costs will outweigh the recovered vessel's if they're still trying to retrieve it after six days.

See THX-1138 for a cinematic treatment of this approach to law enforcement. Just as the protagonist is about to get nabbed by the cyber-CHiPs, they stop, turn around and give up the chase, because they just exhausted all the money in his account, and trying to catch him was no longer cost effective.

[Red_Hex]

you're talking about a mercenary company.

so cost effectiveness is not the only factor to come into play. the merc unit has a reputation to consider, as does its commander; id feel pretty embarassed if some ungrateful, disloyal ***** of a captain took off with a prime piece of hardware and the rest of the mercenary world heard about it, and id feel downright angry when my employers questioned me. id devote considerable, and economically unreasonable resources to smacking this guy down and reclaiming my property.

then theres external pressure to consider. the sort of people i'd be working with and for arent going to like my weaponry vanishing into other people with unknown agendas hands, and itll be my responsibility to rectify it. unless its a real ******* bit of kit that nobody wants floating around, i wouldnt expect a merc unit to get support from the military.

so i would expect determined efforts to bring back the ship, even if its quite a small one. the hunt for the ship and the guy who stole it would never really end, even if it cools down the longer things go on. theres more than money at stake; theres principles.

[arrrse]

I'm sure there's plenty of Napoleonic era 'ship of the line' type books covering the issue of deserter ships.

The story of the Bounty is one.

Though if its a mercenary army then what red hex said.

[GrandpaTrout]

you could use a rough estimate of the value of the vessel (or tonnage or something like that), This is a really good idea. And something quite easy to code.

the hunt for the ship and the guy who stole it would never really end, even if it cools down the longer things go on Good point. And perhaps this would work for the mafia types as well. So stealing from governments can cause a larger set of ships to come chase you down, the effort is more constrained. But with the mercenary company, you will always need to keep glancing over your shoulder.

[jessica00]

did you steal a warship?
if so, dock it somewhere and invite us all there for a party.:cool:

[AR81]

Warships are slow and big. Can be tracked easily.

Also, if you steal a warship, where would you go?

[jessica00]

he'd go....TO THE WORLD OF TOMARROW

sarcasm aside, you could bring it to china or iran. they would pay a good amount for it i bet.

[GrandpaTrout]

Why yes, I have launched a new career as pirate hunter in the South Pacific. Fun job, nice beaches, fancy resorts. And no shortage of pirates.

And zipping around in a ex-navy frigate has a certain style that even BMW cannot touch upon. I think it's the 10mega watt gas turbine engine. You cannot beat the internet connectivity built into an AGISIS enabled warship. This thing makes the whole pacific ocean a WiFi hotspot!

But these darn things are expensive! 10,000 gallons of fuel at a gulp. Crew always demanding air conditioning and ice cream.

And it has complicated my taxes to no end. Since the ship is now my place of business, I should be able to deduct the whole thing right? But my largest worry is getting audited. For instance look at these itemized deductions:

$1.29 paper clips
$3.46 envelopes
$1,250,000.00 ex-SAS mercenary team
$30,000.00 Machine gun bullets, 0.50 cal

Do you think these will trip the IRS fraud detection software?

[jessica00]

maaaaaybe

[AR81]

Originally posted by jessica00
he'd go....TO THE WORLD OF TOMARROW

sarcasm aside, you could bring it to china or iran. they would pay a good amount for it i bet. Yeah, and it wouldn't take long before a sub launches a tomahawk or a torpedo to sink it, or before an Exocet reaches it's deck.

Sinking a foreign country vessel may cause tension, but sinking a stolen one of your own won't.

BTW, I hope you are not in the US Navy or the Royal Navy... having such ideas could be interpreted as a threat to national security.:p

[Red_Hex]

im sorry, i didnt think we were talking about actual seabound navy. i thought we were talking spaceships, in the FUTAR

[jessica00]

in that case, cloak it

[AR81]

How about teleporting the ship?

[Red_Hex]

sorry again, thought we meant pseudo-realistic FUTAR spaceships... otherwise, just DESTROY THE UNIVERSE and erect an anti-anti-universe missile shield, and while youre at it, use the knowledge of the ancients to learn the secrets of time and save the alien robots. with a sonic screwdriver.

[AR81]

Pirate hunting? Getting a reward for capturing criminals and then taking their bounty? Less criminals means a safer world.

The only problem is to make a difference between those who are criminals and those who aren't. Do you have a device capable of spotting a criminal?

[Red_Hex]

well dur... even ive got one of those. its called "prejudice". works for me

[DrCR]

Originally posted by GrandpaTrout
Ok, you are a officer in a mercenary company commanding a multimillion credit warship. And you find yourself needing to desert. Why, you ask? Perhaps you have fallen in with the evil side and you want out. Perhaps you have been passed over for promotion one too many times. Perhaps selling a ship this valuable is just what your retirement account needs. But the Why is not so important. More important is the What Happens Next?

What happens when a military force loses a whole ship? What do they do? Give in peacefully? Assign bounty hunters? Scramble the navy?

How long should they track after you? Should it matter if you have joined up with another navy?

The Hunt for Red October is the only movie like this I know about. Anyone have another story of this nature to relate? Anyone stolen a warship before :D


Well, there's the whole delicate issue about the crew too. They have to be either blindingly local (like Julius Cesar and his march on Rome) or you would have to deceive them and/or get rid of them (like Hunt for Red October).



DrCR



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