As for a ship, the old tried and true Type P Corsair is hard to beat, decent speed and weapons, 100 ton cargo bay to absconed with your ill gotten booty, been used as a Picket Ship, Patrol vessel, Privateer, Armed Merchantman and Pirate ship for thousands of years. They are built all over both inside and outside the Imperium.
Good call. The Type P is a perfect little ship for this sort of work.
There have been a few "boarding shuttle" type small craft in recent issues of Signs & Portents, as well - I'd make sure they have at least one on board....
Realized you asked for mission ideas a while back and we've been ignoring that...
Ten Ideas for piracy type missions:
1. High Guard Ambush - Jump someone refuelling at a gas giant; track them in from the upper layers of the atmosphere or low orbit of a moon then position yourself to intercept as they come back up from a scooping run.
2. Surprise! - Slip in amongst merchant traffic at the edge of the 100D limit, match velocity with an incoming ship (i.e. one with dry tanks) and then run out the guns. Smash and grab and then jump out as fast as possible. You WILL need some sort of distraction to keep any SDBs busy for long enough to pull this off - a distress call from somewhere else in the system and sufficient time for the SDB responding to build up a credible velocity in the opposite direction.
3. Sabotage - Sneak someone on board, either as a passenger, temporary hand, or concealed in cargo ('fast' drug?). Said person or persons obviously need to be either technically competent (disable the ship) or very dangerous (take the ship from the inside). For that matter, the effect could be best achieved with some suitable software - if your patron hands over some TL14+ agent software, then you can probably have the ship's computer eating out of your hand and the crew don't get much of a say in the matter.
4. Where the hell are we? - needs an ally in port; most commercial ships use standard jump data for common routes. If the information in the file were to be...somewhat innacurate?...and drop the ship out of jumpspace near an outer planet, where the players are waiting....well, that's their problem. Yes, they might notice the doped data if they check it but if they were going to thoroughly check astrogation data they wouldn't be buying standard jump files, would they?
5. Stand down and prepare to be boarded - Depends on your ship (a corsair or leopard is good). If you can pull off a convincing impression of a navy patrol vessel (system or subsector fleet) with the right to perform stop and search, you can get them to do the hard work for you. Impersonating a naval ship to another naval ship is next to impossible without access to secure encryption codes but then that isn't necessary here. Expect this to put you at the top of the most wanted list fast, though.
6. Steal from the thieves - finding smuggler jump points and cargo exchanges are going to be worth your while as such people will make a point of being in out-of-the-way, hard to spot places until they're ready to mingle with the regular traffic. Equally, they're less likely to call in the SDBs or report their losses, for obvious reasons.
7. There's a bomb on the bus - given the size of the suicide drone's warhead in Traders & Gunboats, one can potentially conceal a nuke in some of the ship's cargo. There are no specific rules for a nuke going off inside a ship's hull (Solomani 666 asked this not that long ago, as I recall), but (a) even if you use the basic rules for a torpedo warhead, on a >300 dTon merchant ship that's still not very nice at all and (b) the rules are slightly irrelevant because the moment you come within...say 1 light-second?...and inform them they have a nuke aboard they're going to heave over.
8. Play dead - Just that; provided you can be confident it won't be an SDB you meet first, of course. Few struggling merchant captains can resist the possibility of a salvagable starship.
9. Play Patron yourself - Meet with someone. Offer some work. Be slightly mysterious and let them know there's a semi-legitimate job going that involves meeting up with a cargo transport in orbit of the system's ice giant. Station corsair in low orbit of ice giant. Wait for muppets to turn up then rob them blind. Sounds stupidly obvious but variations on it work depressingly often with player groups I know...
10. Just stack it over here, Sir - No-one says that piracy has to involve ships. If you can half-inch some utility pods or hack the highport registry and just re-direct cargo to the wrong warehouse you can pick it up yourself whilst the owner is trying to figure out what went wrong. The bigger and more confused local orbit the better, for this one. Think Rotterdam harbour; if a cargo container's registry number was to be changed or lost you would never, ever find it.
Anyone got any other ideas.
