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Pirate Vulture

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Pirate Vulture Class Cruiser - Front

Description:
Pirate Vulture class Cruisers infuse dread into the crews of ships that have been captured by pirate forces. After overwhelming their opponent's defensive with Marauder class Destroyers, pirates typically jump in Vultures to begin salvage operations. Vultures are equipped with a pair of external cargo bays with massive internal volume, allowing them to retrieve and store large numbers of stolen ship components or cargo containers. Prisoners that surrender to pirate forces are kept in decrepit holding cells, presuming the pirates allow them to live at all. The captains of the captured ships are then invited to the bridge to observe as their vessels are dismantled and looted of all valuables on board.

Vultures are characterized by an odd hooked bow, arcing bridge strut, and six cooling fins on the bottom of the stern. Like all other pirate vessels, a Vulture's primary means of defense is a multitude of collapsed armor plates, giving the ship a segmented appearance. The Vulture's design has proven reliable, and has thus received very few refits since it's original design was constructed. The primary drive engines are an older configuration, and while they are cheap and easy to produce, they possess heat distribution issues that can cause them to overheat and shut down when under stress. To counter this, Vultures have a set of six heat dissipation wings that filter the heat away from the drive engines and out into open space.

Vultures, being scavengers, are at most unarmed, relying primarily on strike craft and Marauder class Destroyers for defense. However, Vultures in dire situations can fall back on a sort of melee combat, using the pair of salvage arms mounted on the bottom of the hull. These arms are multi-segmented grappling appendages, used for retrieving salvaged items and relocating them to one of the cargo bays. Each arm is equipped with a remote controlled wire guided magnetic clamp, which allows the arms to reach debris without unnecessary movement from the entire ship.

Vultures are the largest class of ship used by mainstay pirate fleets, although reports have been submitted of a massive superdreadnought class ship of unknown origin being seen in the deep reaches of uncharted space.

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Notable ships of the line:
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Comments35
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TheOrangeGuy's avatar
Okay. So first: The text implies that theres some level of coherency between pirate fleets and such. Is there some sort of (semi-secret?) overarching pirate organization, loose or otherwise, that all these pirates serve under? Or is it that they simply all happen to use the same kinds of ships.

Or is it that theres a corporation/organization that builds ships for sale exclusively (or semi-exclusively) to criminals?

The text on the Marauder text especially seems to imply this, with the line about "pirate technology" lagging behind that of the USEC.

If that is so: Does this organization lack the resources to reverse engineer USEC technology? Or does the USEC always deploy forces in such great number and/or power that this Pirate force can never capture any USEC tech for study?

About the vulture Specifically:
1) Is that first paragraph in the text a description of a specific pirate/pirate groups procedures or just a typical scenario?

2) You mention the heat fins twice in the second paragraph, and call them slightly different things each time. Just a small note.

3) Correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember reading somewhere that cooling fins and heat sincs don't work in open space. See, on earth, they rely on atmosphere or water to take on excess heat and carry it away. Space, although cold, has far too little particle density to allow for this process, and in fact works better as an insulator.

4) It seems to me that in a place as big as space (and at a tech level as high as yours, thus very very high speeds) melee combat between ships would be not just rare and used in dire situations, but completely impossible. So I find it hard to picture a vulture using its salvagers like that.

Anyways, Aesthetically:

I love the pirate series. I think the colapsable plating breaks up the flow of their lines in a way sorely lacking from your prior work, making them seem more like viable pieces of technology and less like digital models.

Thas all for now.

I don't have internet at my new apartment yet, so it might take me a while to respond to anything you reply with. Sorry =P