Living

Piracy

Taking cargo off a ship that is still flying — and why it takes two of you.

Piracy is a career and not a class. Nothing in the game marks you as a pirate and no hull is issued for it — what makes you one is the record you write, and everybody can read that record.

Boarding

A boarding clamp takes cargo out of a ship that is still flying and still has a pilot in it. It is the one module in the game that answers every question a weapon answers — range, band, the arrival window — plus three nothing else asks: whether the target is disabled, whether this band allows anything to be taken from a pilot at all, and whether you held still for the whole channel.

The channel is the cost. Interrupt it and it resets rather than pausing, and your own weapons are locked out for the whole of it. A boarding is a decision to be defenceless for a while in front of somebody who would rather you were not there.

It takes two ships

A warp scrambler and a boarding clamp cannot be fitted on the same hull. One of you holds them still and the other one boards. It is a rule with its own refusal, not a budget you might one day squeeze past.

Where it is allowed

• Not in a Portus or a Litus. Nothing may fire on a pilot there at all.
• The Vadum allows the fight and refuses it a record. Nothing you do there is a crime, against anybody, including your own faction.
• The Altum and the Abyssus are where cargo may actually be taken from a pilot.

Witnesses

The server counts who was close enough to see it. Robbing somebody in front of an audience is not the same act as robbing them where nobody is looking, and the difference is recorded rather than argued about.