Lately, pirate attacks on shipping have either become much more severe, or much better publicized - I'm honestly not sure - either way, we hear about it more. A few weeks ago, the Ukrainian ship MV Faina was bringing a load of T-72s, heavy machine guns, and assorted hand weapons and ammunition to Kenya (or Sudan? hard to say) when it was captured by pirates. And just a couple of days ago, the MV Sirius Star, which may (I'm not sure) be the largest tanker ship ever built, was taken by pirates while it had about a quarter of Saudi Arabia's daily output of crude oil (about $100 million's worth) on board. So I want to write about that.
A large part of the problem is that these ships are very, very big compared to the size of their crews - the ships mentioned above are run by crews smaller than 20 people. Apparently, there are a lot of systems that are automated, requiring little attention; I think I have read that the ship can be instructed to navigate itself, either by GPS, or by staying a certain distance away from shore. This makes some sense, really, because if you're out in open water where there are no sandbars or anything, you don't really need to have your hands on the wheel at all times. Right?
Well, here's the thing. Pirates know about this. They also know that, while a large ship's engines might be able to drive it along faster than their speedboats can go, they accelerate very slowly, so pirates who attack very quickly can approach within boarding distance with relative ease.
That's not to say that ships' crews can't fight back. They're not allowed to mount machine guns or artillery on deck, but they are allowed to maintain an arms locker with small arms and personal weapons, and they are of course allowed to use any number of not-strictly-speaking weapons, things which are standard equipment on most ships but which can be wielded as weapons. Fire hoses are a great example. Now, pirates know about this too, so one thing they can do is shoot at anyone trying to spray them; the effective range of most assault rifles and hand artillery is probably a lot longer than the effective range of a fire hose. So the pirates can probably keep the crew's heads down with warning shots as they approach and board, and continue to do so as they board - if the crew have any inclination to fight back in the first place. And if your ship were approached by a boatload of heavily armed men, would you fight?
So. That's the main trouble, isn't it? Running isn't terribly effective because of the long reaction time of a ship's engines, and fighting isn't effective because commercial haulers don't have large enough crews and aren't allowed to carry the heavy weapons to match the pirates' armament.
Here's my idea.
A while back, there was a confrontation between a cruise liner, the Seabourn Spirit, and a few boats of pirates. As the bridge crew used the hull itself as a weapon, to run over one of the boats, two security officers hosed down the others and then uncorked a less-lethal weapon, a high-powered and more-or-less directional loudhailer called a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) that can be cranked up to produce an incredibly annoying noise at 100 decibels at moderate range, 150 dB at close range. Though the pirates were able to get off a few rockets and managed to shoot one of the security officers who had been hosing them down, nobody on board was killed, and the pirates were eventually driven off.
Let's learn from this: crowd-control weapons work on pirates.
Also, high-tech navies around the world have wrestled with the problem of incoming airborne weapons - cruise missiles or aircraft, usually - that might have evaded a ship's longer-ranged defenses. Thus was developed the concept of the Close-In Weapons System (CIWS), an automated gun platform or missile launcher that can strike at objects approaching the ship without human intervention, and thereby reduce the likelihood of the ship being sunk either by missile strikes or by a low-altitude aerial attack with guns or bombs. Some armies are also getting in the game, wanting to defend their vehicles from rockets and missiles, and so there's various system designs that intercept incoming rounds with shotguns (Trophy) or missiles (Arena and Quick-Kill). Now, as far as I know, naval gun CIWS's have been involved in at least two friendly-fire incidents, one in which a ship's defenses opened fire on a false target and struck another ship, one in an exercise in which a ship's defenses destroyed an aircraft rather than the radar target (designed to say, in radar terms, "Look at me, I'm a missile!") it was towing. Whoops.
So: CIWS can be made to work, but there's a risk of false positives.
Now, computing power is cheap these days, and the nice thing about that means that you can have a lot of automation. (Ask those ship crews I mentioned earlier, they know.) Something that's becoming possible these days is automated visual target recognition - give the computer a video feed and it can try to spot elements of the image that indicate the presence of an object of interest. Say, a boatload of pirates. You could also use IR scopes, and starlight scopes at night. Why not bolt a few of these things to ships' hulls, so they face in several different directions and provide 360-degree coverage? You could back it up with radar, both the ship's main search radar and directional radars attached to the visual scanners.
So my idea, here, is to have a console or a few, somewhere on the ship, that is fed the data from the hull scanners, and will report detection of craft approaching within, say, a kilometer's distance with an appropriate notice - audible alarm, visual icons, whatever you like. At the same time, it would allow the console operator to choose to use an LRAD remotely, to hail the craft and warn it away, or where less remote control is possible, dispatch a sailor to use a similar kind of loudhailer. And, should the craft approach within a critical range - say, 600 meters - the console(s) would allow the operator to manually direct an LRAD or similar less-lethal crowd-control weapon, like the mealy-mouthed-named "Active Denial System", sometimes more accurately called a "pain-inducing heat ray". An alternate idea would allow the console to be set to automatically warn off craft with recorded messages and to automatically direct an attack with the crowd-control weapons should any craft approach within range. That's a little more tricky, though, because it's conceivable that a forgetful sailor might forget to turn the thing down from "automatic" to "manual", and the ship would start blasting the eardrums or singeing the skin of tugboat crews and kayakers.
What say you?
(Other diaries in this series include essays on reengineering human life, nanopower, a drug contraindication database, novel prosthetics, virtual worlds, robot safety, ye short fiction, the sociology of fictional places, steam-powered giant robots, thermal depolymerization, nuclear airplanes, psychic powers, transgenic bacteria that make useful compounds, lightning in a jar, neural interfaces, powered armor, sonic weapons, rapid prototyping, putting Mentos and Diet Coke to good use, life on life support, combining farming and electrical generation, pigeon pilots, cuttlefish behind the wheel, the hafnium bomb, and building a better skunk. Don't read these if you value preserving an unwarped mind.)