Pirate Mercs

[Boston]

ya I think the idea is that once they get rolling they want to get a couple of Gatling guns. But for now they just want to get there and get started making some money. Im all for em and if it works out I'd do it in a heartbeat. Would pay for the rest of my build in no time.

[wardd]

sharp shooters on a stabilized platform and some rpg launchers they seem cheap enough

[Boston]

Idea is to out-range the bastards. They typically use RPG's so a 30 or 50 would work well. Idea is also to sink em and take the survivors, policy move, the offending boat goes down which takes away a large percentage of the incentive to keep fighting. survivors will be taken naked from the water no exceptions.

You should hear these guys talk about how they bag and tag in the various services in which they have served
its a trip

[Luckless]

"Stabilized platform"? On a small ship? Military frigates don't even have such a thing.

And RPGs are a few hundred dollars a round, highly inaccurate, and would be next to impossible to hit a small boat at any range.

Gatling guns and similar complex weapons are expensive and prone to malfunction. The beauty of a quad .50 or .30 cal setup is that if one jams,... you still have three machine guns blazing away.

Thinking more about this, if you could find a port to base yourself out of where you can legally posses such weapons as a civilian: 1 Dual/Quad .50 cal roughly midship, raised to give full 360 fire arc. A fore and aft dual/quad .30, and then a few auxiliary 5.56mm machine guns in quads.

You might even skip the .30s and go straight to the 5.56mm to reduce logistics and only require two types of stored ammo. Use the .50 cal as the main weapon, and the 5.56mm batteries as backups for if you get multiple targets closing in and not taking the hints from the .50 cal.

5.56mm can be had for a lowly $0.20, $0.15 a round if buying in bulk with the right suppliers. Maybe less. 20mm you're looking at a ten to twenty times per round, and even .50 cal is still up there.

And if you have room, fixed star flare/smoke mortars could be useful.

Boston Send me an Email with your Merc Buddies Email Address. I may have some tools for them at

WickedGoodOutdoors@Maine.rr.com

"sink em and take the survivors" - I like that but you need to recover some weapons or have it on video. Yes, anything one does has to outreach an RPG.

IMO, you cannot use .223 (5.56) unless you want to hit them on the top of the heads from 500 meters. This a close range tool and I wouldn't even have it aboard.

[wardd]

m-1 m-14

[Boston]

the real question is if they can pull a boat together

they got the weaponry pretty much under control

[powerabout]

do a mulitple vessel registration from dodgy countries and have all the docs on board so you can just change every day.
Register as a pleasure boat under 300 tonnes so no rules and no captain license required
hoist the pirate flag and you'll be immune and invisable like all the other pirate boats...because clearly no government is looking for any of the pirate mother ships are they?

[Luckless]

Originally Posted by powerabout

hoist the pirate flag and you'll be immune and invisable like all the other pirate boats...because clearly no government is looking for any of the pirate mother ships are they?

You do realize that there is a multi-national naval task force operating in the region, right? There are between 10 and 20 ships of various grades patrolling the region at any one time doing the exact things you seem to assume they're not doing.

As for the 5.56mm, I know from members of the armed forces that it offers a high level of effective suppressive fire outwards of 800m. Ganged in a Quad setup you can easily get a 2000/round per minute rate of fire that will leave anyone in a small open boat with strong desires to be else where.

In general even a single .50 with a decent arc of fire will be more than enough to deter most pirates. (They're foiled by friggen fire hoses lashed to the sides of ships!) But I would still suggest a dual .50 for reliability reasons, if not a full quad. 5.56mm is still great for being able to put one hell of a lot of rounds down range without bleeding your pocket book dry.

[powerabout]

Luckless
boats are attacked 500+nm off the coast from 20' tubs, they are being serviced by mother ships which no-one can seem to find.
Us in the merchant fleet are convinced someone/country big and powerful is involved as its a complete joke that they cannot stop it or find a couple of ex Russian stern trawlers that they have already identified.
(All vessels had a tlx 6 months ago with full descriptions of the vessels.)

Diago Garcia is just down the road with every US tool known to mankind.
The Russians found a ship in the Atlantic after a few days...the Arctic Sea
Your saying no satellite or AWACs can find a vessel in the Indian ocean that is always around the same area...no attach vessel ever gets followed back to the mother ship....why is that?
Indian ocean too shallow for a submarine?

We keep hearing about attacks being thwarted and.....and....???
Most if not all the Navy vessels are just taking it in turns to escort merchant vessels in a very small corridor once you head east from the red sea, after that you are on your own hence the piracy continues.
The sat phone calls are all made back to London once there is a successful attack yet nobody caught yet?
They are doing f*ck all to stop it, Navy convoys are just lip service clearly being strictly controlled in what they can do.

[Luckless]

Do you know how many legitimate work boats are found in that area? It is one of the busiest parts of the world's oceans!

And do you know how hard small boats like the ones involved in these are to track? Most satellites still function on a a half meter or larger sample size, and boats that size can be hard to pick out from general interference on radar at range. Finding a large ship in a vast, open ocean is easy. A small boat or two in a cluttered region? Not so much.

It isn't like you can say "Hey! That fishing boat has been in the same general area for the past week! Clearly they're pirate and not,... fishing."

Federal Gold Medal match - 5.56x45mm NATO (.223) 77gr 2750fps - drops 10 feet at 800 yards and eight feet of hold-over for a steady ten knot wind. With a muzzle energy of 1295 ft-lbs. there is but 240 left by the time you lob that little thing in at 800. Sorry, that won't even penetrate a turban and skull as it comes down on top of his head. A soldier packs a small round only because it is small and he has to pack it.Why would you want to play around with it in this situation? A little gustiness on the water and you'd really be talkin' "spray and pray".


I suppose what I meant to say is, "to each ther own". G'day

[Boston]

ok I think Im going to recommend to them that they just crew as a security team on one of the large cargo haulers and suggest they leave off the whole boat idea other than to just transfer to another vessel once they get out of the danger zone. To many issues and not enough money for the more aggressive approach is what Im learning