Modern day pirates

[claykrys]

articlehttp://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/200811...ws/ynews_wl155
video http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/play...26714&src=news
well armed, high tech, strong strategically. Pretty scary.

[CoyoteMesc]

read about that last month and seen today about the 100million worth of
crude oil taken...Crazy,, they say 7 ships in 12 days have been taken.

[prism]

that oil shit had to be some govt's OP..


Didnt it?

I wonder where you fence 100 million in Crude?

[claykrys]

Originally Posted by prism1234

I wonder where you fence 100 million in Crude?

I dont think they fence it, from what I understand they collect ransom. Crazy shit indeed.

[claykrys]

The Indian Navy sinks pirate mother ship and chases two attack ships.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/piracy

let's go fight the pirates! seriously, there has to be some kind of private industry that goes at these guys... hmmmm.

[stimpy]

No I'm cool. Don't see a good reason to combat people with lots of guns on a ship who are out to steal oil because of all the money it can bring in now like an illegal drug.

[greenie]

i thought we had a fucking navy? hmmmm...

[DrAstronaut]

Isn't there a show about this on History channel? I believe it's called "Shadow Force"...private military fights pirates/poachers/bad guys in Africa. It's 'aight.

[ernestro]

well...as one of the pirates stated in some footage.."we're just people...we do it to feed our families..." just like politicians and managers and other garbage..

[fattyz]

to quote capt'n smollett from Treasure Island, "they'd look remarkably well from a yardarm, sir."

Which is a better fate than they deserve, IMHO

Yours, conservatively,

FattyZ

[claykrys]

Six armed bandits tried to take a cruise ship with 1000 people on board. I guess cruise ships are faster than they look because according to the story the cruise ship outran the 2 speed boats.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081202/ap_on_re_af/piracy

[Lefty]

Saw that incident today, I guess a cruise ship can haul ass or it's hard to board a huge ship throwing a wake at full speed. Probably shot at the ship out of frustration but they really need to upgrade from small arms.
I see the cruise ship industry avoiding a certain coast...but you would think they would have already reached that conclusion.
On the upside, private security work just picked up. Bet it won't be long until some country sets them up by having two submarines follow a slow ship or just arm a ship with some missle systems.
May have to look up the penality for international piracy & who prosecutes, sounds like good work

[claykrys]

good work indeed

[aumbrellaforainydays]

wonder how many knots that cruise ship can go?

"I'm giving her all she's got Captain, but she can't take much more of this."




these guys look cheery

in september these guys captured a transport ship carrying
33 T-72 tanks as well as grenade launchers and ammunition bound for Kenya. wonder when they'll be unveiling their new tank turret/fishing boats?

whatever happened to those 33 soviet-era main battle tanks anyways?
seems like Kenya would be anxious to know what happened to their shipment. guess their shipping insurance covered it.

Do you want to insure your parcel? Yes/No
How much is the value of the parcel? _______
How much does the parcel weigh? _______

[claykrys]

23 pirates captured by Indian Navy

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081213/ap_on_re_af/piracy

[greenie]

hang 'em high

[Cultosaurus]

Originally Posted by claykrys

I dont think they fence it, from what I understand they collect ransom. Crazy shit indeed.

They have collected millions of dollars in ransom. Somewhere between 20 mil and 100 mil. I think the number I heard was 20. it was weeks ago on the radio, so memory is vague.

(grabs eye patch and bottle of rum)

[weeeeeee]

i was listening to talk radio the other day and they were talking about the muslim pirates that have been going after passenger cruise ships and what we should do with them.

the only defense these ships currently have is a radio and some frequency emitting device. and i believe it was boortz but he said something along the lines of we should build a giant catapult or 2 on the back of the ship and launch hams at them bahahahahahaha sorry but that shit is funny as hell
i think he also suggested a little twist on the trap shooting they do on some cruise ships involving high powered rifles

i for one think both of these ideas are awesome i would have no problem killing or assaulting with ham anyone who tries to fuck with me and or my family or just any other civilized human being for that matter

[aumbrellaforainydays]

i've heard that the extra cost and liability of having armed guards is what prohibits all them having them on board. no weapons, no shootings. but for pirates they used a very high pitched noise blaster at the pirates to deter them....

but i guess you could just throw large animal parts at them and that would work just as well... plus the pirates are happy since they have dinner too.

hunting pirates aint easy, especially if they are sitting on their guns pretending to be fishermen. but the UN, i think, mandated to use any means necessary to stop pirate attacks. so far, a few nations have sent their finest Privateers, to send these pirates to Davy Jones' locker.

[Yellowbeard]

I'll chime in here...

The main aim of most of the pirates isn't the cargo, which in the case of crude oil would be VERY difficult to fence in Indonesian waters, nor the ship, which would pose a similar logistical problem (I mean, how do you hide a 1,100 foot oil tanker?), but the crews; namely the captain and chief engineer.

On any large cargo vessel, these two individuals are very well trained and highly experienced, making them non-expendable to the cargo companies. A supertanker captain or chief is worth US$50,000, and the shipping companies have been quietly paying these ransoms for quite some time.

But, as piracy in the Malacca Straits and the coast of East Africe has become a cottage industry, the shipping companies are looking into increasingly ingenious (and sometimes violent) methods of piracy protection.

The cap'n's .02





peace

[TVCasualty]

From my reading the piracy off Africa began when Somali fishermen saw their fisheries being ransacked by foreign vessels taking advantage of the lack of central government along with the lack of ability to sell their fish due to no functioning Somali economy. That was awhile back, now they're addicted to the cash and principles of national sovereignty aren't as much of a factor.


So the liability of having a few scoped rifles on board is higher than losing the whole thing to pirates or paying tens of millions in ransom? If I were in international waters sitting on a gigantic ship that can only go 9 knots at top speed and sits really low to the water AND is holding millions and millions of dollars worth of cargo, I'd be packing! Or possibly heating cauldrons of (vegetable based!) oil on deck for medieval-style defense. Hell, I'd try something: Powerful lasers to blind them, a trained pod of killer dolphins to capsize their speedboats, arrows w/ sticks of dynamite tied to them, anything! Even cardboard silhouettes of people holding assault rifles and RPG's hidden around the ship as a bluff might help...

Pirate season is almost over, btw. Literally. There will be more storms as winter progresses, and they really need calm seas to pull off boardings. So, there will likely be a surge in hijack attempts now and in the immediate future. One German cruise line already flies all their passengers over this stretch of water...

[Beast]

Pirate season is almost over, btw. Literally. There will be more storms as winter progresses, and they really need calm seas to pull off boardings. So, there will likely be a surge in hijack attempts now and in the immediate future. One German cruise line already flies all their passengers over this stretch of water...

Not much of a winter at the equator....

Interesting they are using the sonic motivation sapper to try and stop the pirates. Interesting that its not working. Kinda like spraying mace at a pissed off drunk guy, not all that effective, just puts em into more of a frenzy. After the first time or two of blinding them with a laser, it wouldn't be long b4 they were wearing welding goggles or other polarized lenses... Really, a couple hard point mounts on each side of the cruise ship for some FN 240 gp machineguns would be all they'd need, plus the guys to operate them, and I bet it'd cost alot less than one of those fancy nonlethal sonic interrupters... I dunno, maybe paying ransoms is cheaper... makes for an authentic cruise experience as well.



------------------------------

Really, the only thing that's going to stop these attacks, is finding gainful employment for the Somalis. Fixing their broken/nonexistant government would be a good first step, but its not that necessary. With global corporations, it shouldn't be too hard to set up some offices and begin ops:

My first thought would be to bring in some Disney execs and imagineers, and get them in touch with the pirates. If the pirates could dress and act more like the Pirates of the Carribbean, that'd be a great start. Train them to do various exciting lil skits while robbing the cruise ship, yet also ensure that they don't harm the passengers and perhaps hand out some promotional merchandise as they leave... Just think of the boom to the tourist industry, fight pirates on your cruise! You think the Pirates exhibit at Las Vegas brings in a crowd, just wait!!

[Yellowbeard]

Originally Posted by TVCasualty

possibly heating cauldrons of (vegetable based!) oil on deck for medieval-style defense.

A novel (and simple) defense that is being used on some ships is (very) high pressure fire monitors, which are already onboard, being remotely operated, so as to simply blow the pirates off the deck.

Interesting note: Those familiar with cap'n Slocum's solo circumnavigation in 1896 spent his nights in the dangerous Straits of Magellan peacefully by sprinkling ordinary carpet tacks on deck to ward off bare-footed natives. Worked like a charm.

[TVCasualty]

Originally Posted by Beastmaster

Not much of a winter at the equator....

But there's enough of one to make the seas too high for boarding the ships (hopefully).

The Gokova's lieutenant, Mehmet Elyurek, thinks the high number of attacks seen in recent weeks will begin to tail away as winter weather sets in.
"They need fair winds to board these ships," he said. "High seas will disrupt their operations.

Pirate vessels can be seen from miles away from the ship's bridge
"I think they are probably seizing as many ships as they can, before it's too late."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7741706.stm

[DasBoot]

i'm not a violent person - but like others have said - a few 50 cal's hangin off port / starboard and one off the bow and stern should be more than ample - you wouldn't even need trained people to operate - computer controlled - just give it the target that is a threat and the tracking and guidance system takes over...

all these guys are no different than your common thug - i say give them a go a reincarnation

[TVCasualty]

Originally Posted by DasBoot

i'm not a violent person - but like others have said - a few 50 cal's hangin off port / starboard and one off the bow and stern should be more than ample - you wouldn't even need trained people to operate - computer controlled - just give it the target that is a threat and the tracking and guidance system takes over...
all these guys are no different than your common thug - i say give them a go a reincarnation

International maritime law prohibits converting commercial vessels into military ones, which is probably the source of the red tape preventing the use of proper weaponry. It's not clear where that line between commercial and military is, however (would a .50 count? Two of 'em? What about a few AK's?).

Also, some of them are common thugs and that number is increasing all the time, but the situation is far more complex than that. Many of the pirates think of themselves as Somalia's Coast Guard, and in fact piracy began there about 10 years ago when the government collapsed and foreign fishing trawlers basically raped the Somali fisheries with impunity, thus destroying their livelihoods. I guess their recent history makes a lot of them "uncommon" thugs, since fishing disputes hardly justify the hijacking of random nations' merchant vessels and private luxury yachts, though it might help outsiders understand their motivation and thus come up with a viable solution.

[TVCasualty]

Ok, how about we just roll back the clock on this thread?

I didn't want it to keep straying off into unproductive territory and I didn't want to close it or have it get closed, so I thought the way to go might be to roll it back to the point just before any of the personal and off-topic stuff began.



So, to get back on topic I'll add that the fishermen are only part of the piracy team. They pilot the motherships and know the local seas and how to approach the targeted ships; the boarding parties are run-of-the-mill gunmen/thugs, and then there's the tech guy who takes care of the GPS and radio/phone equipment for the pirates and knows how to use the technology on board the ships they attack (radar, GPS, sat. phone, etc.).

[Beast]

Fishermen provide the boats. Their cousins who they previously left at port to chew khat all day while they were out fishing are who they bring along for the rough stuff.

Just because Somalia has little in the way of schools and infrastructure, does not make Somalis animals. They are still human, and learning is what we do, even if not forced into a classroom to recite times tables. You think you have 'street smarts' from living in the ghetto? Its nothing compared to the education received on the streets of a 3rd world country, and Somalia is among the worst of them. Not to mention the terrorist recruitment and training that goes on there regularly, courtesy of the local Al Quaida branch.

The problem with being boarded, I believe, is that they are threatening by radio to put holes in the side of the ship with their RPG's, if not allowed to board. Then they approach. So sonic denial, water cannons, all that stuff is pretty moot unless you're willing/able to engage them outside of RPG range.

So, I guess the local Navies are going to have to step it up a notch. I wonder if, in a couple hundred years, there will be Disney movies about the "Pirates of the West Indian" and a ride at the disneyland park on the moon and stuff?

[DasBoot]

right-on TV good call.


Piracy is rampant in the Indonesian waters as well - sailors have the hot-spot map - places to stay away from - although i guess sometimes it geographically hard to avoid areas controlled by pirates... which is why Somalia is in the news.

[aumbrellaforainydays]

i believe its a problem of disparities. incomes.

how many billions of dollars of third world produced goods float through the suez canal? i'll bet a lot. of course, as noted earlier its hard to resell the cargo (unless they're tanks).

meanwhile, in somalia fisherman have to compete with neighboring fishing trawlers that literally scoop up their livlihoods. so what is a somali to do with no economy to make a living and with such vast amounts of wealth floating over their seas?

grab a RPG, a few ropes, a radio and go make some real money. what is US$50,000 in somali currency? a small fortune.

its history repeated all over again. back in the carribean where first the spanish and portugese controlled the new world, then the british and french who looted it even more. wonder how many ex-slaves came into the piracy fold? i would of helluva liked roaming free, even with high risk of death or capture, as long as i wasnt a slave toiling for somebody else's wealth. A PIRATES LIFE FOR ME!

[dead_diver]

Hanging is too good for them.

[claykrys]

from yahoo
ATHENS, Greece – Greece's Merchant Marine Ministry says pirates have seized a Greek-owned cargo ship in the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia.
The ministry says the St. Vincent-flagged Titan, with 24 crew members on board, was seized late Thursday night. Three of the crew members, including the captain, are Greek.
The Titan had been sailing from the Black Sea to Korea with a cargo of metal when it came under attack, the ministry said.
Last month, pirates in the same area seized another Greek-owned cargo ship with a 22-member crew.
Pirate attacks are frequent off the Somali coast, and have continued despite the presence of a large number of warships to protect commercial shipping.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090320/ap_on_re_eu/piracy

[claykrys]

They got a U.S. ship today. Earlier I had heard that the crew had regained control of the ship but the Captain is being held hostage by the pirates.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa...ked/index.html

[ponyboy]

Originally Posted by potatocore

let's go fight the pirates! seriously, there has to be some kind of private industry that goes at these guys... hmmmm.

ya lets go get em...they might have weapons of mass destruction!

[claykrys]

Three of the pirates were killed and the forth is in the custody of the military. The captain jumped off the lifeboat and before the pirates could capture him again, three of them were shot. The forth was taken into custody.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7996087.stm

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/04/15/somalia.pirates/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

[TVCasualty]

Saw this in a BBC article about piracy and thought it made sense:

If the navies of the world need some advice on ways to stop piracy off Somalia, they could look to Lord Palmerston, British Foreign Secretary in 1841.

"Taking a wasps' nest... is more effective than catching the wasps one by one," he remarked.

Basically, piracy is best stopped on land.

The concern expressed in the media about how the pirates are going to be the ones retaliating for the sniper attack is absurd; if a gang seizes both you and your ship at gunpoint by threat of RPG attack, it seems to me that they are the aggressors and anything they do subsequent to you defending yourself is an act of continued aggression on their part. I mean, how dare you defend yourself against a direct threat against your life!

The excuse pirates use (that they're defending Somali fisheries against foreign exploitation) became a bunch of bullshit when they began taking ships so far off their coast (hundreds of miles in some cases).


I had an idea for a defensive weapon that could be deployed on ships that wouldn't violate international maritime law; at the approach of a boarding party, a boom (like on a crane or lift bucket) is deployed under water from beneath the ship that extends about 20 feet from the hull and holds numerous high-pressure air hoses. Some sort of hydrodynamic control surface mounted to it (an underwater wing) could be used to hold the boom perpendicular to the ship while it's running full speed ahead, like an underwater outrigger. As the pirate craft maneuvers over the hoses, a huge amount of compressed air is shot through them, dropping the buoyancy of the water enough to cause the boat to instantly become swamped.

There's probably a much simpler way to accomplish that than what I just described, but the gist is to use air to sink their boats from below.

[aumbrellaforainydays]

anyone see the new southpark? its dumb, but its relevant here.

[chlorello]

In 1794 the US Navy was born when congress voted to create a navy "adequate for the protection of the commerce of the United States against Algerian corsairs". Those corsairs, (aka Barbary Pirates), were organized by a kind of government-mafia based in Tripoli, just like the modern pirates are organized from Somalia. It was African pirates then and it's African pirates now.

One interesting thing is that, strange as it seems, the pirates are actually helping the shipping insurance companies make money. That's because the insurers have imposed extra charges on shippers who sail in pirate waters, supposedly to compensate the insurers for the extra risk of loss. But the surcharge is bringing in much more money than the insurers are paying out in pirate cases, so the insurers are actually making money from the piracy.

[catdaddy]

We got these things called LAWS rockets, see?

The idea is, they aren't a personnel weapon, so you don't get drunk crewmen shooting each other or passengers or whatever stops us from arming passenger ships...

You sink the pirate vessels, they run out of boats, problem solved.

See how simple some things can be?

[TVCasualty]

I think some of the problems with using firearms or other weapons involving an ignited propellant in this context involve a combination of crews who aren't trained for combat, potentially hazardous cargo, and laws at the various international ports.

Being in a firefight while on a ship containing tonnage of explosive, flammable, or toxic material like oil, fuel, industrial chemicals, fireworks, and all manner of other stuff that is routinely carried by cargo ships is a risky proposition, and one of the threats that helps the pirates seize ships is that they'll shoot their RPG's into them, which could cause a major disaster if they scored a lucky hit.

A lot of ports don't allow an armed ship to dock, which is another issue preventing the arming of merchant ships. There were sound historical reasons for this, but times change faster than laws.

The physical solution might be simple, but as usual it's all the bureaucratic and legal stuff that gets in the way.

I'm still going with compressed air. A pirate skiff would instantly sink if it tried to maneuver over sufficiently aerated water, and it's a method that leaves no evidence since nothing actually touches the pirate boat.

A directed EMP-pulse could also kill their motor, navigation, and communications which would be a good use of that mobile crowd-control microwave oven developed by the military, but again that would probably be incompatible with some types of cargo.

[aumbrellaforainydays]

not unless the pirates start making submarines, like they're doing in south america to bring cocaine in. its simple, find a boat, take everything out above the hull, seal the top with a fiberglass top, put a water intake/outake thingy in and voila!

it seems that somehow somalians are getting boats from somewhere. i assume theres not much for trees or lumber in somalia. you could always hijack other boats. grand theft boat: somalia. that would be a dull game.
steal boat, sail to other ship, yell and wave RPG in air, hijack ship, sail ship and boat back home, offer ransom, then capture more ships! i guess we can get creative and throw a destroyer in there for fun. not sure how much damage an RPG would do to a steel destroyer. but the USS Cole got a hole in it.

[TVCasualty]

Originally Posted by aumbrellaforainydays

it seems that somehow somalians are getting boats from somewhere. i assume theres not much for trees or lumber in somalia. you could always hijack other boats.

They're getting the boats from each other. The people who try to remain fishermen get their boats jacked by the pirate gangs, but that tide is turning now that the fishermen have been forming militias to fight back. One group caught a bunch of pirates recently.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8022820.stm

[claykrys]

Some pirates thought they were attacking a commercial vessel that turned out to be the French navy. Believe it or not the French did not surrender.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33225718...ica/?GT1=43001

[Scratch]

In the old days, wasn't the punishment for
piracy hanging? Turning the pirates over to
Kenya doesn't seem to have much deterrent
affect.