Pirate's Can Opener

The region of space known to most interstellar travelers in the Perseus Arm as the Borderspace is wild and, for the most part, lawless. A number of independent planets or small collections of systems exist that are havens of safety, Much of the space, though, is unclaimed - and it is there where roving bands of space pirates roam. A few of these bands may have planetside bases of operations that they call home, but many have no such fixed place. Their homes are their ships.

These roaming bands will typically select either uninhabited or systems with poor spaceport facilities to make their strikes. Freighters, usually with limited jump capacities, often stop at gas giants in these systems to refuel and continue their routes. The over-large jump shadows of gas giants provide pirates with ample opportunity to close on a victim and overpower it.

Pirate Boarding Practices

Most captains whose ships do not possess sufficient armament to deter a pirate raid have the good sense to capitulate quickly. Very few pirates will harm capitulating crews - it's considered bad business. They will, however, not go away if a crew simply refuses to open an airlock door. In this case, the boarding party, which has usually made use of some sort of ship's boat to arrive at and latch onto the victim vessel, will make use of a device that has come to be known as the Pirate's Can Opener.

The Pirate's Can Opener

This device is really just a standard miner's laser drill. Too heavy and bulky to be wielded manually, the laser is tripod mounted and connected to ship's power. The continuous laser beam emitted is not as refined and that of a laser rifle, but it is far more powerful, and makes fairly short work of cutting through most ship's armor. General practice is to cut away along the outer airlock's seams; this ensures that they are cutting into a space that will grant access to the ship's interior corridors to deal with crew and carry off loot. A ship with standard armor will typically have its airlock breached in under 5 minutes when the Can Opener is employed.

Aftermath

Assuming the crew of the victim ship is smart enough to relent and open the inner airlock door once the outer is breached, the ship should be able to function more or less normally once the pirates have departed. In the event the pirates find it necessary to breach both doors, though, then depending on the ship's interior configuration, there may be significant portions of the interior that cannot be re-pressurized once the pirates detach their boarding craft. This could be disastrous for a crew of a smaller ship that does not have multiple airtight bulkheads built in as contingencies.

In any event, the captain of the victim ship will find a rather large, jagged-edged hole in the side of their ship that will require a considerable number of credits to repair when they get to a suitable spaceport.

Defenses

The most common defense against forcible boarding is hardened armor, but in most cases this merely slows the pirates down. Titanium Steel and Crystaliron Armor might double or triple the time needed to cut through the hull, respectively. Molecular Bonded Armor will actually stand up to the laser, but this armor is extremely hard to find and prohibitively expensive for almost every captain in space.

Some ship builders have tried a different approach. A number of "false airlocks" are installed along the hull, behind which are unpressurized areas of the ship; some even open to the vacuum of space. Properly unprotected pirates who breach one of these doors may not fare well. Pirates have adapted, though. Wearing Vacc Suits while boarding is the common practice now, and a bit of reconnaissance of a target ship at an earlier port-of-call can easily reveal which airlock is actively used - and is thus safe to breach.