Draedi: The interplanetary government doesn't mean travel, trade, and resource acquisition is limited to that one system unless clarified after the fact. It only limits the government and its sphere of influence in that system.
Even if everything is limited to that sphere there is still ample room for a nominal interplanetary government to be ineffective in enforcing the sum total sphere of influence. Even in a single system space is very big and there is a huge amount of potential resources and plenty of places you could hide a manufacturing facility like on other planets.
Trying to locate even a large object on the surface of a planet takes a good bit of time and becomes increasingly difficult with time and effort to hide a facility. Methods use today in part rely on examing existing infrastructure that is in place with things like large population centers and traffic to and from said centers. Simply putting something under a mountain does a significant amount to hide a multitude of sins and being underground or under a mountain on another planet certainly makes things significantly harder on anyone trying to locate said facility.
There is also traditional smuggling in general. The more traffic a system has the more difficult it becomes to track anything. Sufficient traffic for shipping of any sort makes it increasingly easier to smuggle quite a few things.
It would still take a fair bit of cooperation of all parties involved to effectively stamp out smuggling and piracy alone and combat corruption and parties interested in those activities being carried out.
Bel: The UN is frequently considered a form of government that is run by an international committee, just not a very functional or universal one.
As for authority it most certainly does have authority and can even direct military assets, enforce-create-mediate treaties, create and enforce international law, create trade agreements, have their own courts, levy sanctions, and serve a number of other functions that the government generally fulfills.
The only real hitch is it requires a certain amount of cooperative effort to be effective and a small handful of nations can and frequently do undermine it when it suits their interests. What it doesn't do is dictate how individual countries are run. Which is part of my point.
China and Russia being countries does not undermine the comparison it highlights the key issue. Namely, there is an international body with the authority to act against certain internationally recognized illicit activities like ones I already described. Again the issue is getting everyone to agree to play by the rules or act against those involved in those illicit actions. The UN can't stomp on a whole country for participating in those activities without very serious repercussions to the point it is effectively avoided.
Something nations like China, Russia, and even the US frequently take advantage of and use their influence and their positions of power to mitigate or eliminate any means of real retaliation.
Given the overwhelming nature in enforcing various aspects of treaties, charters, and other agreements that the UN charter covers it is an apt comparison.
A larger-scale government entity of any variety is going to find the problems of the UN paltry compared to the possibility of multiple inhabited worlds, asteroid belt habitation if it exists, and who knows how many different clusters of human habitations with their own cultures, languages, laws, and politics.
A government representing a whole system would doubtless face a number of similar issues and have nations that behave as the US, Russia, and China do. It would also have problems we likely can't imagine given the issue of scope and scale of the area of responsibility and the vastly increased number of variables a space-faring society with unique population groups would face.
A good existing fictional example would be the Expanse. Between the UN/Earth Government and its own internal issues, the separate Martian Government and its own internal issues, and the numerous belter habitats, the only way to describe it is impossible to manage the mess.
To truly be able to squash smuggling, suppress piracy over a vast volume of space, and do so in a way to be truly effective would require a degree of cohesive cooperation that is frankly an impossibility with humans as we exist as a species. Collectively we constantly return to the same general tendencies that have been part of humanity for literally thousands of years.
Throw in things like Fighteer's noted corruption and the tendency of piracy to be funded by nations competing against each other and a huge amount of space to try and control and patrol and you get an ability for smugglers and pirates to operate.
Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Jul 8th 2020 at 6:40:57 AM
Who watches the watchmen?Okay, all of that iS true, but the key thing is, this is a company. Not a nation. In real life there's no way on god's green earth that Lockheed would sell an F-35 to ISIS or, hell you don't even have to use ISIS, Russia or Belarus.
Such a scenario is so foul and egregious that it might be the one time where the US government, if they found out such a thing, would literally have the FBI's HRT/SWAT on every facility the company has on US soil and arrest almost every employee en masse.
Failing that they couldn't take military action (laughable, but lets go with it) this interplanetary government could literally just sanction them into bankruptcy.
The days of the East India Trading Company are largely over, and they're not ever coming back.
New Survey coming this weekend!Such a scenario is so foul and egregious that it might be the one time where the US government, if they found out such a thing, would literally have the FBI's HRT/SWAT on every facility the company has on US soil and arrest almost every employee en masse.
Not all nations have the same standards as the US. A number of Chinese companies have found themselves in political hot water in recent years owing to doing business with pariah states or non-state entities.
Having good AI in place of pilots is always an option. No need to worry about squishy meat sacks when your spacecraft is pulling hundreds of Gs in maneuvers and can react on timescales that literally make human pilots look like snails.
Edited by ericshaofangwang on Jul 9th 2020 at 6:11:11 PM
This is the internet. Jokes fly over in private jets, and sarcasm has bullshit stealth technology.Jas: They get training from said professional pilots. Not just aircraft but experienced trainers and pilots got supplied as well. There is also the mercenary pilot route which oddly has happened in the past. But with modern craft the more complicated systems frequently had trainers come with them.
Who watches the watchmen?IIRC it turned the CWIS on them.
Most people forget that for an aa gun it flings milk carton sized explosives down range...
Until it mulches there boat and all the survivors.
The last part is why I remember it, it caused a bit of an incident since they didnt rescue the survivors, they liquified them with the deck gun... which is a warcrime... the french navy insisted however pirates are not covered by the conventions of war, and that they needed to send the message to not fuck with there ships in a way that picking the pirates up and returning them would not
Edited by Imca on Jul 9th 2020 at 3:52:48 AM
You folks forget a lot of the original pirates were basically mercenary warships and often tangled with military and armed merchant ships. Nothing stops that from happening in space.
Using small fighter craft for raiding though is a bit trickier. Namely the need for a boarding action.
Now if you are doing commerce raiding, ie destroying trade and merchant ships, you don't have to worry as much.
Who watches the watchmen?De Marquis: Commerce raiding, taking prizes, attacking treasure ships, and even harassing enemy ports which included fighting any escorts or guard ships which are military vessels. Kind of part and parcel of pirate, privateer, and commerce raiding history. The majority of pirate ships were surprisingly heavily armed for ships of their size if they were not outright refitted warships. It was also common for civilian ships to be armed with cannons and have their own armed crews.
The English used privateers as part of the opposition to the Spanish Armada. The US used privateers as part of our navy in the revolutionary war partly because we didn't exactly have much of a navy back then. IIRC we had more privateer vessels in service than commissioned vessels.
They wouldn't exchange broadsides with a ship of the line but escorts were another matter. Privateers were naval mercenaries and were not limited to pure commerce raiding.
Taira: Wasn't there some insurance group that started hiring out a private navy to help deal with the Somali pirates?
Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Jul 9th 2020 at 12:18:21 PM
Who watches the watchmen?Well, as recently as WWII we had the infamous battle between the German merchant raider Kormoran and the Australian light cruiser HMAS Sydney, which sank the latter with all hands. And it wasn't unknown for pirates to sail and go up against full-fledged warships back in the day. Bartholomew Roberts, one of the most successful pirates of the Golden Age of Piracy, took a Portuguese man-of-war at one point, and was killed while actively engaging the British fourth-rate HMS Swallow in combat.
Generally, though, pirates and merchant raiders wouldn't storm in with guns blazing. That's a good way to damage the cargo and scare away the target before you could get in range. More often they'd be camouflaged as something more innocuous, slowly creeping up to the target until they could raise their true colours and force the said target to surrender without fighting. Pull out your guns from too far away and the target might escape; too close, and they might panic and open fire regardless of the consequences. And that's an approach that typically favours lighter, faster vessels - though ones very heavily armed for their sizes.
Edited by eagleoftheninth on Jul 9th 2020 at 11:26:03 AM
One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.Not officially anymore, though in some countries it's still technically legal to do so if they wanted. The Declaration of Paris of 1856
formally abolished the practice but some countries didn't accede to it.
The United States is not a signatory to it but we follow the idea in spirit. The Chinese are not signatories to it either.
Mercenaries are soldiers you pay to go into a warzone. Privateers are basically pirates being told "Go do pirate things against these people we don't like". One is a soldier still, just for the dime of the highest bidder, the other is still a pirate who is given a pass to be a pirate so long as they don't attack the person who gave them said pass.
Mercenaries and privateers overlap, but the principle difference is that mercenaries are almost always hired as part of a larger army, and serve under the direction of a client. Privateers on the other hand operate almost entirely independently—they are given a "letter of marque" empowering them to confiscate the cargoes of ships of a particular nation or nations, and then sent off on their own to find targets as best they can.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.

He said "interplanetary" so I'm assuming this is one system. As such it's gonna be a MUCH easier task finding said facilities, given enough time.