Leaked Messages from Nimbus Hint at Piracy Epidemic

It has nothing to do with WHO made it

It has to do with WHAT it DOES

I'm all for advancement and efficiency but that basically turns all EWF tech into fancy scrap

my ship is a glorified shuttle now

Fucking geth.

If I believed you'd started doing that, I would've replied to your post to begin with.

Ah, you're predicting a Hierarchy deployment. Probably right, but two years means that some of the farer flung colonies will be either miserable or dead.


I believe that Sidescrapped is a salvager, not a pirate.

And pirates attacking shipping lanes generally do not blow up vessels they're preying on, unless it's a fight to the death (Rare, if they're preying on merchants and shipping). By and large they cripple and loot, or force a surrender on pain of death, then go for the cargo.


Yup, E-War is not the leading horse at the moment, which is probably a good thing for merchants. E-War high means pirates who know enough to go into Autistic while raiding are going to be the trump. E-War can shut down Primacy of Retreat, which is worse for merchants than pirates (Merchant ships are often unable to go into Autistic Mode for safety and security reasons, while some modern military ships come with Autistic Mode modifications standard precisely due to Electronic Warfare.

E-War not being the leading horse, on the other hand, means that retreat is always an option if you can get space, which is nice. Especially in my business.


Well, ship-raiding is possible, though without trumping Electronic Warfare it's certainly harder. In my experience the standard tactic is to demand that the victim surrender or die (Which, in the case of a civilian vessel with a civilian crew, generally works) or else to deploy smallcraft or GARDIAN lasers to cripple the ships engines, allowing you to demand their cargo with impunity.

It is, however, generally harder than station or colony raiding, and honestly is mostly just jumping people while they vent static or dock at their destination.

(One of the bonuses of station raiding is that you get everyone docked at the station as well as the station itself. Which is why you always specify that the contract ends after goods are unloaded. )

I apologize my lady for not creating an appropriate atmosphere of approachability for this discussion. Rest assured that deep down I am completely, one hundred percent, committed to creating an effective environment of emotional safety for all individuals in this thread, so that they might feel comfortable enough to respond to my debate points.

^

Disclaimer: Titan Corporation's CEO is, in fact, lying. Yeah, that's a lie. Totally a lie.

Hilarious, but a lie.

You have been warned.

The Nimbus Cluster?

So... Trategosan survivors?

Ice-Mountain-Goddess Trategosans?

Elcor-Wrestling Trategosans?

Subsists-On-Ice-Shards-I-Punched-From-The-Glacier-Myself Trategosans?

Seems to me a relatively minor investment to properly guard a few weapons shipments will do wonders.

It's the exact same thing I said when there was talk about shutting down FTL research. If you secure the major shipping lanes, you can rebuild the major centers quickly and then use them as FOBs to push the pirates out of the less-traveled areas. Yes, it's not fast, but it's still the most effective way.

One mans trash is another scrappers treasure. Red is right though, back before the war we used to jet around the 'pirate' lanes. You'd get your cannon damaged craft, laser punctures, and occasionally those massive ruptures from rails but most of the pirate stuff I've seen tends to be board them and take the obvious loot.

We settle for the simple stuff. Rare metals, salvageable tech, power cores that sort of thing. And even then, we get a good half of a little cruiser? Drones break it down and we just tug a big hauler back out and bring in the scrap metal. Even that has a price on the market.

...This is absurd, woman, and, frankly, incredibly stereotypical of you. We aren't hearing about this because the matriarchs let it leak, we're hearing about this because Information Brokers sold it without their permission. We are hearing about this precisely because the Asari Republics did not want this information to leak.

And, frankly, your arguments are unsupported and hilariously vague.


I don't think you understand how piracy works.


The thing is a slow deployment is liable to be too slow for many, especially with the defensive scheme of the Asari Republics. I do agree with the sentiment though.

For anyone with relatives or interests in Nimbus (Or plans to have interests once the relays go public) I heartily recommend RedOut to protect your cargo. We're professionals who know exactly what we're talking about.

Now this I will argue against furiously.

Asari tactics and strategies are, in practice, the best and most flawlessly performed maneuvers in the known galaxy.

Why, you may ask?

Time. Time is a relative entity to this galaxy due to our varied lifespans. The training of a human, salarian, or turian military officer will, at the longest, accounting for any ordinary circumstances, conclude in less then half a decade. By that time, the officer is determined to have the best knowledge possible for his or her term of service.

An asari commando's training takes no less then three decades from their induction into the academy to their graduation ceremony. Even still, during their service a huntress continues to learn new skillsets and correct old ones as methods advance. Any woman in a cadre can be taught a military trade and master it for centuries of service.

Every asari, every soldier in the ranks of the cadre: The doctors, the engineers, the pilots, the mech operators. Every single one of them have had full training in the cadre martial arts before they learned the skills of their specialization. I myself acquired anti-piracy interceptor certification during my service. However, this was not my title. I was still considered a "huntress".

Should my certification come into need during a mission, such as a pirate boarding scenario, then I would take responsibility of any interceptor craft available and offer support as such. At every other point, my duties as a huntress still applied.

This of course, has other benefits on the strategic and political level. With the certification system, as well as the structuring of the cadre unit, the asari spend much less on food, wages, and equipment for their soldiers. this allows them to be outfitted with the best where possible as well as cutting down on military upkeep.

This is unusual in the grand scheme of galactic military powers due to our unique biological and cultural traits. The krogan do not adopt a system similar to ours because it does not fit their culture.

It also has quite a few disadvantages, like the fact that after times of war, due to the length of time it takes to train a commando, numbers can be rather sparse. and of course, our current problem. Even with the overall cheaper upkeep of the cadres, funding can still outright cripple them.


Edit: I realized after posting this that I was speaking into my STT for a full five minutes. I must apologize for this rather extended rant.

And how it doesn't actually help when dealing with anything except hunter-gatherer esque commando raids!

That's a big one.

It could be that asari are very, very, very, very, very, very, very slow learners.

(very)

But no asari would ever admit to that.

And for this, no matter how wrong I might think you to be, you have a measure of my respect.

Because you're actually being interesting.

And there is a reason that turians, salarians, or humans don't spend a proportionately comparable amount of time training their own soldiers and officers. For one it makes training up new men and women in a timely manner next to impossible when any number of the first batch are wounded or killed in action. For another it's not cost effective. Particularly not on the larger scale which, as it just so happens, is the realm in witch virtually all militaries operate by necessity.

You average soldier doesn't need to be an undisputed master of combat in order to be competent at their jobs and, frankly, you reach a certain point where your potential returns for such intensive training diminish when compared to the price and lost time and resources.

The issue with this high degree of formal and informal specialization is that it makes reallocating manpower challenging, if not prohibitively difficult, in the short term.

Which is somewhat important when fighting a campaign of any appreciable size or duration.
Except whereas virtually every other armed forces has a standardized system for ease of mass production, repair, upkeep, and personal modification the asari can choose what they like. The fact that it is high quality really only serves to further complicate already overtaxed Republic's logistics trains. Which in actuality is at least partially responsible for the extreme localization of cadres.
Also because, until recently, the krogan were not expected to project military power on the galactic level.

In fact it was very much preferred that they did not.
Which, as demonstrated by this article, can be a bit of a problem.

As I see it, the major issue was the lack of most of the capital fleets in Nimbus. All of them had been over earth for the final battle leaving only very limited defense forces behind when the relay was shut. It seems though that elements originally meant to support, most likely from the outside, were roaming the cluster and when the Reapers fell they turned back to their old ways of making a living. The numbers, especially on appropriate shipping seemed to be at an unfortunate imbalance there. Claiming this as a flaw of a flaw of asari doctrine in general is so idiotic, I won't comment it.

The Nimbus fleets are now going home, alongside an expeditionary force. Securing the shipping lanes will be done and a cleanup will follow. Maybe A Justicar or two will also slip through. Enough work for more than one of them.

On the other hand, the situation in these Republics is not as bleak as some here like to draw it. But there are reasons why the inside and out traffic must be controlled more thoroughly for some time. Time and timing is an interesting and confusing thing, especially when perceived so differently by species as we can witness it these days.

Shockingly an actually fair point though I will maintain that there were a great many of battlegroups and units not included in Sword and Shield that remained to fight holding actions against Reaper forces. Given the Nimbus's position as a not insignificant asari colonization cluster I think it's reasonable enough to assume based on logic along that there were an appreciable number of such flotillas and planetary defense units left behind.

Or desperate militias and abandoned civilian entities with ships have turned to the quickest way of acquiring the most assets in the shortest amount of time available. Let's not forget that ugly possibility no?
No you see that's not actually an argument in and of itself. God knows I think plenty of things on this board which could charitably be called crimes against general intelligence that I still take the time to respond to.

Why is it a flaw? Don't be shy now, share with the class.
Which will take time. Which in turn means that there will be a degree of morale loss amongst the colonies contained therein when/if they aren't rescued fast enough for their liking.

Say, after their settlement or their ships have been pillaged and stripped of anything useful.

Subtlety my dear.

Learn it.

Ehhh what was the name of that fleet heading there? I mean with all the battle doctrine talk being shared I wouldn't be against knowing which fleet to follow in.

You misunderstand; I wasn't suggesting the information's release was part of some anti-piracy strategy, I meant that the existence of the communiqués at all, outside of routine law enforcement message traffic, is cause to be assured the local huntresses are paying as much particular attention to the problem as the newsies out here. Even in isolated Republics lacking the full measure of outside support an open relay would bring, huntresses would note and pursue suppression of pirates well before their predations were bold enough to be considered 'newsworthy', let alone attract the attention of brokers in need of something to advertise themselves with.

Perhaps not - I haven't had the chance to become particularly familiar with it - but I understand a little of commerce. Unless a pirate is stealing for her own table, she needs to be able to convert her loot into clean currency. That means she needs buyers, and in an astrographically isolated cluster, especially operating on such a scale as to be newsworthy, there can't be many fences in the internal trade markets both willing and able to move commodities in those sorts of amounts without drawing attention to themselves. Clearly they are operating, but I'd place my credits on their lines of support having very few fallback options. Once more rapid travel is opened up, they'd have to be very quick on their feet to build up an operational defence in depth faster than the Republics can dismantle them.

Or the huntresses could be failing miserably.

Which might explain why the issue is particularly prevalent. How and, again, with what. I can say that a human N-Program soldier can fire a round from one world and headshot a raider on another but that doesn't make it so.
The brokers who did this are of the breed that don't need to shill themselves.

That's rather the reason they were able to obtain the data in the first place.

Which he or she can accomplish rather efficiently by reducing the tech to subordinate components and the salvage to basic materials through fabricators or disassembly modules and then proceeding to find a buyer who values the resources over little things like "where this came from".

Because God knows there aren't any of those in a post Reaper War economy. ...or fabricators and desperate people. Or fabricators and desperate people. Or they could just not stay in precisely the same place blasting their location on all available frequencies.

This would be nice if they weren't, in effect, a self funded glorified militia unable to do anything but Special Forces actions.


If this was being used for self advertisements we'd see brokers names or titles attached to this.


Look at what those pirates are doing, going after and grabbing. Vital supplies, things people need and are not getting because the pirates stole them. They've made hard contact with the local military and are still around. They're pillaging millions of credits of gear in the documents we know of.

You know what that means? Loads of the locals are going to be resource starved, especially in the less-well-defended parts of the cluster which, due to how the Asari Military works, are going to be damn poorly defended since they have to rely on their local militias.

You know what that means? They don't need a fence. They just sell to people who don't have any choice but to buy from them.

Or, you know, fabricators and a false identity to pretend to be a legit salvager. Yaaay.

(Or, alternately, act like any other criminal enterprise in history, which rather kindly prove that fences honestly are not that hard to find, especially in a wartorn cluster without external influence.)

Really, the only thing this doesn't work for is ship parts, and they're pirates, they can either use those themselves or sell them to other pirates.


You'd have a better point if this wasn't the Asari Republics we were talking about, a force legendarily incompetent at anything that is not a special operations mission.

You know what would be happening if this wasn't an actual problem? Matriarch's wouldn't be calling hard facts 'wild speculation' and 'fearmongering'.

Ignoring the fact that they're fucking pirates not separatists, they aren't going to have a defense in depth or strongholds you can raid, they're going to be, well, mobile criminals who can pretty trivially play salvager for a few months and avoid a huntress deployment.

I'd say 'deploy a justicar', but frankly, from how you people describe them they do not fucking impress.

Doctor of little faith:) Nothing can bring the Trategos sisters down on their home turf, don't you know that?
I fought alongside one of them and would do so again any day.

Daia, the thing about trading the loot is something I have been thinking about as well. A thriving black market must exist inside the cluster by now. Cutting off the heads of it must be possible now that outside forces and ghelp can get in but the pirates and their supporters can't get out. With a reconnection to the rest of the Republics the market collapses and the pirates will lose their foothold, they can't hold the average people hostage anymore by dominating markets.

Lesson learned from what seemed to have happened in Athena Nebula, wehere the pirates hoarded and whitewash the goods to ship them outside the cluster from bases like the one taken down by that Justicar.