When you see massive transit ships they must have a huge amount of investment in security and they’re mostly steel, they’re so tall and big, must have quite a few crew on board, and surely have lockable containers inside, and the pirate ships are motor boats with a handful of individuals, how does that little boat with a few people take over such a large steel container with so much money behind it?
EDIT: such interesting replies! My question is now, eli5: with everything you all have said, why aren’t there more pirate ships?
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A destroyer has somewhere between 100 and 150 people whose job is to fight by using the ship’s technological systems. It is not a good target. Pirates try to avoid these.
A bulk carrier, which can very often be larger than a destroyer, probably has only 20 guys or so, 30 at most. Its entire job is to get from one port to another with the cargo safe. It doesn’t need to have a lot of people operating the best sensors and communications systems that its owner can afford to keep track of everything going on around them. It just needs the stuff to know where it is, where it’s going, and the locations of potential hazards to avoid crashing into stuff. Its crew isn’t going to consist of a bunch of guys mostly 18-25 who have all bonded through shared background and experience who are eager to fight. The crew of a bulk carrier will probably be some older guys, mainly Filipino but from all over the world, might have never met each other before boarding the ship, and who are not looking for a fight even if malnourished 16-25-year-old Somalis wouldn’t be able to win boxing matches against them. And they don’t typically carry weapons of their own for a variety of reasons, while those malnourished Somalis in a small boat each have a Kalashnikov.
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