I’m trying to figure out how modern pirates take a large ship.
Are they issuing threats like “let us board you or we’ll fire a missle at your ship?” Or are they shooting at you from their little boats until you decide it’s too dangerous to not give in?
Otherwise, assuming you have a couple of rifles/machine guns and some decent shoots, can you not just move everybody into the center of the large ship and shoot at them as they come towards you? There must be only a couple ways for pirates to board a large ship, no? Isn’t that fairly easily defensible? Or do the pirates just make it too dangerous for you not to give in? Is sophisticated weaponry required to make shark food of three or four speedy boats?
Thanks. I shoulda searched first, but sorting through those threads and the hijacks in those threads it seems the summary is:
They can do it because nobody sees them coming nor boarding until it’s too late. This strikes me as odd. Doesn’t the ship have radar that notices even a tiny ship coming or is that not going to work for tiny ships?
They use the “projectile threat” method.
Ships cannot carry weapons, or at least sophisticated weapons, into port therefore ships don’t have them.
Priracy is still rare enough that it’s not worth the training and arming costs to prevent.
To speak to your point #1 - I served on a Navy cruiser. We were using the SPS-48 radar, which is nearly the most powerful and sophisticated ‘traditional’ radar made. (I say traditional to differentiate from phased-array radars, which are on all the AEGIS ships.) We would routinely lose mid-sized craft in routine swells. Small craft would rarely show up at all.
Routine swells at sea are in the three to five foot range. If you’re out in a motor launch - you have to be careful in those swells, but it’s quite possible to motor in them. A motor launch will often have no more than five feet of freeboard and superstructure above the waterline. So, a high-end multi-million dollar military radar installation would be unlikely to pick such a target out of the slop with surface action.
Civilian radars don’t even discriminate that much - they’re meant mostly as aids to navigation - and are notorious for missing even sailing vessels at night. Which is one reason that people sailing at night in navigable waters will have a radar reflector in the mast.
I wouldn’t expect a civilian radar installation to be any defense against pirates in small craft.
I just checked the Wiki article for my ship, and I was reminded that we also had a surface search radar, the SPS-55 installation. But from what I recall from my SW training it was a slightly beefed up version of a commercial navigation radar, and we did most of our surface searching with the SPS-48. I was a snipe, however - so I may be wrong about which radar was being used for most of our surface searching.
I do know that while we had been on counter narcotics operations we lost a 55 foot motor vessel with the radars, because we couldn’t see it for the surface slop. That had about ten to fifteen feet of free board above the waterline.
ETA once more: The Akitas would probably do very well - provided you could get them to recognize friend from foe.
NPR’s “All Things Considered” recently carried an interview with an Indonesian pirate in which he described his life and the techniques of his group. It’s pretty much as has been described in those other threads. They’d jerry-rig grappling devices to hook onto the large ships to get themselves on board, then use small arms to handle the few crew members on board. In most cases they were only after the ship’s safe, not it’s cargo, and a take of a few hundred dollars was a good day’s work.
You might find this an interesting read. It covers pretty much why governments haven’t done much about the pirate menace, and in passing addresses why shipowners also don’t bother taking defensive measures. Basically, it’s complicated and expensive, and shipping is all about being cheap.
An interesting article - and I agree Libby Purves definitely has military connections. I twigged that from some of her novels - ditto the article.
This morning, on the BBC World Service (radio) I heard a guy from Chatham House saying that one of the major problems is the ‘legality’ of killing a Somali pirate.
Personally I reckon that one of the problems of all warfare, but especially asymetric and non-conventional warfare, is that both sides have too may opportunities to ‘learn’ - eg: each ‘event’ is a ‘game’ and one learns from experience how to best your opponent.
The obvious solution is to ensure no ‘learning’ takes place. However there seems a reluctance to extend tactics used in Helmand to the Somali coast.
It would be a shame if that massive oil tanker got out of control, ploughed a mile inland and rendered Eyl totally uninhabitable.
It wouldn’t be a shame it would be a bloody miracle. If you tried you’d just run it aground at about the 20m (approx) depth contour. I doubt Eyl is a deep water port. It’d probably run aground miles offshore. It would damage its double bottoms forward, and no more. It would then be stuck and either break up slowly releasing millions of tonnes of oil in an environmental disaster, over a period of years, or require a massive salvage job.
If ships would only operate at night it would be a simple matter of installing a series of infrared cameras around the ship.
Put double layers of razor wire around the ship so the pirates have to vertically transition 2 layers of shit.
sticks of dynamite make lovely parting gifts when dropped over the edge of the ship (gift-wrapped in steel tubing). Before docking they can be thrown overboard as garbage.
It wouldn’t take much to harden a ship to prevent entry. That would require cutting torches and other tools be brought on board.
Beyond all this it would be easy for nations to pool their resources and hire the US to patrol the area with Predators.
It all comes down to cost. Infrared cameras would be the cheapest things to use as would dynamite and small arms. Operating under a convoy mentality would be the best bet because multiple ships with infrared technology would increase the likelihood of spotting pirates and an escort Predator would make quick work of their boat.
If ships operated only at night, they’d be only half as economically efficient.
And razor wire is going to stop projectiles how?
What makes you think the pirates are going to leave the ship with its original crew unrestrained? In fact, what makes you think the pirates are going to leave the ship at all?
gonzomax, do you mean why didn’t the tanker run down the pirates’ vessels?
If that’s what you mean - it takes something like a nautical mile for a tanker, or similar sized vessel, to begin to respond to rudder changes.
AFAIK there are no tankers that are being powered by Azipods, which would significantly increase maneuverability - but I’d still wager that a motor launch could run circles around a tanker.
The sillyness of this just boggles the mind. Imagine a flat plain stretching in all directions, a motorbike, and the largest bulldozer you have ever seen. And you are questioning why the bulldozer can’t run down the motorbike. Jeebus.
From what I understand, Helmand has turned into a cat and mouse situation, with the protagonists continually changing roles.
I am not sure that a fully laden oil tanker would stop simply because it hits shallow water. I’ve seen people saying that a tanker could plough a mile inland, until recently I’ve refrained from talking about such things, but it looks as if the disruptive possibilities of a tanker are pretty well known. Reading between the lines, early reports sounded relieved that the tanker hijack was a purely commercial action.
Personally I reckon that the ship owners should be employing units of armed guards to offensively protect the vessels. The regular crew do not have the will to protect their boats (and could well be pre-bribed). Interestingly when Somalis have gone for cruise liners, they have been seen off.
The solution to the problem is to ensure that any Somali pirate boat that leaves port is never heard from again. Something that is impossible with a mindset where one is worried about their ‘human rights’ and whether they’ll claim asylum.
I’m not sure about convoys. The Somalis will simply target ships outside the convoy. The problem, as I see it, is not protecting shipping, rather wiping out the problem entirely.
And I’ve seen people say they’ve seen fairies. I’ve been handling the legal side of marine casualties for nearly 20 years. A fully loaded capesize or ULCC is a very big lump of momentum, but the planet Earth is bigger, heavier and it may be soft in places (not many) but it doesn’t give up. When a ship hits the hard stuff it stops. How quickly depends on how hard the bottom is (and it can go all the way from “navigable mud” to rock) and how fast it shelves. A ship might make it tens of yards into a shelving beach but it will stop.
I handled a case involving a fully loaded capesize bulker weighing about 200,000 tonnes which hit the sloping edge of a channel. It was at about 17m draft and the water outside the channel was at about 13m. It stopped in about 30m distance from about 7 knots.
According to its wiki entry the Sirius Star has a loaded draft of 22m. That’s serious depth. Ports with that much water are prized. There’s not much info about the port of Eyl but (doing the best I can) using Google Earth I can see that it has a dried up river that doesn’t even flow to the sea, and I can still see the bottom from the aerial photo about 500m offshore. My guess is that the Sirius Star couldn’t get within a few hundred metres of the shore.
This is just silly. There is no way in the world a tanker is going to plough a mile inland or anything of the sort. A large ship that hits anything big enough is just going to be destroyed. The Titanic did not plough through the iceberg.
Again, this is silly. The ship owners and charterers know much better than we do what is best for them. A few guards armed with small arms is going to achieve nothing when the pirates are armed with RPGs and other military ordnance. It would take military force to repel them, not a few guards onboard.
Yeah, like they all fly the skull and crossbones for our convenience :rolleyes: They are fishing vessels who look like fishing vessels and act like fishing vessels and hide among fishing vessels until the time comes to act. This is like saying the way to stop all gasoline station robberies is to exterminate those who do them. Which would be a fine plan if you could recognize them but they happen to look like everybody else. And, yes, even pirates and suspected pirates are due human rights. Those who advocate drastic solutions a la “converting Somalia into glass” and “nuking it from outer space” are morally worse than the pirates and not fit for a civilized society.
in those threads it seems the summary is: