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Comment by washedup | Hacker News Reader

My biggest question is how they plan on securing these ships. Pirates would likely see this as a huge opportunity.

Piracy is often profitable because of ransoms paid for crew as far as I know. The article seems to directly address this. With no crew on board, how would the pirates stop the ship from just continuing on to port with them on it? I suppose they could threaten to destroy the ship or something on the ship but that's no different than the situation now.

New generation of pirates would hack into the main computer and divert the ship to their port?

They can do that now.

One of the few, and more unusual captures in which that wasn't the case:

"Pirates captured a Saudi-owned supertanker loaded with more than $100 million worth of crude oil off the coast of Kenya, seizing the largest ship ever hijacked"

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/world/africa/18pirates.htm...

It was still released after an estimated $3 million ransom. If it had no crew, how would they have been able to achieve this ransom?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Sirius_Star

The $3 million ransom was a small price for a ship and cargo worth, together, a quarter billion dollars. Even for an unmanned ship, the owner has plenty of reason to to pay ransoms that are a literally pennies on the dollar compared to losing the ship completely.

Pirates could attache mines and threaten to blow them up unless paid. Actually I don't know why they haven't tried that yet.

This was my initial thought. Then I realised whatever sensors are on-board these things would likely detect incoming pirate attacks (of the physical kind) from miles away (think satellites). At which point nearby naval forces would be alerted.

Hell, you could go a step further and equip each one with it's own drone to defend itself in case of attack.

I wouldn't be surprised if that's the goal!

> these things would likely detect incoming pirate attacks (of the physical kind) from miles away (think satellites). At which point nearby naval forces would be alerted.

If it were so, wouldn't such systems be already installed on manned boats? There's nothing here that is tied to the boat's capability of self-steering.

Who would they take hostage?

This also. Without hostages the pirates are open to a world of hurt. Here's to hoping the Somalian pirates won't need to be as desperate by the time these ships set sail.

Without hostages, if they can override the piloting, they have a bunch of cargo with no lives attached.

And with little reason for the local navy to not come in guns blazing.

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