“It's a own or be owned universe out there. If you just suxorz then stay off the space lanes; you'll just get either get a face full of pwnage from any passing half-twit frood you sass or become the butt of all your squadmates' lulz faster than you can say, 'WTF?'” – Prince Hassan the Zero-First Point Seventh The Art of Never Again, Chapter 727: The 1337th Manifesto |
The Wired Rovers are the closest thing the Freespacers have to true pirates. This fleet is renowned for its pilots, which can only be described as a cross between daredevils and gypsies. They love to customize and soup up their vessels which are recognizable by their very bright and irregular paint schemes. The Wired Rovers jokingly maintain that making themselves easy-to-spot targets only serves to further hone their skills and weed out “lamers” among their squadrons.
They possess a long history of producing many of the top pilots in more extreme racing competitions, such as asteroid belt circuits or relays skimming the edge of black holes. Emphasis on such sports has made them relatively apathetic to death as far as most Freespacer fleets are concerned, so one could say they weren't as staunchly against violence as most of the Free State's peoples are.
When the Call to Arms came they collectively decided that it was a golden opportunity to see new regions and meet new species. To find new challenges, greater components, and custom parts of which they've never before dreamed of. The majority decided to take their ships and form the Wild Rovers, whiles the remaining “lamers” simply left and disseminated into other fleets.
See Fleets for assets and political structuring.
The Wired Rovers have taken up smaller-scale pirate raids into various territories, merely provoking responses to test their skill rather than attempting any serious intrusions. But the high speed designs of their starships, brightly colored paint schemes, and disinterest in violence tends to give many the impression Wired Rovers are more racing pilots than criminals at heart. Indeed they will often challenge ships they prey on to piloting competition in an all-or-nothing gamble for their freight; they commonly believe combat simply squanders lives and resources on both sides of the battle.
Pacifism is a hallmark that makes the Wired Rovers stand out among traditional pirates. As with most Freespacers, they carry heavy pacifist undertones and prefer to avoid killing whenever possible – though that doesn’t mean they won't hesitate when pressed into combat. In any case their ships will often forgo the traditional armament of high-collateral weapons such as nuclear artillery or torpedoes and replace them with precision pulse lasers and other pinpoint weaponry. They claim this actually testament of their skill; “Any barbarian can pick up a cudgel and swing it with brute force, or mash a console button to fire a really big gun. It's split-second pin point gunnery while moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light and under the physical strain of several Gs that takes true talent. And as an added bonus, sub-system disabling usually leaves far more salvage than blowing out half the hull.”
The Wired Rovers operate primarily in squadrons and utilize pack-hunting tactics to maximize the effectiveness of their agility and weapons accuracy. A common example of this is to have a pilot keep the attention of a point-defense system or PA while use their speed and accuracy to move in for a deadly strike before the point-defenses can change targets. Simultaneously fighters may also strafe sub-systems in order to prevent an enemy from fleeting once they realize their defenses are gone.
“What is the difference between a Noob and an Elite? A Noob thinks before he jumps across a chasm. An Elite jumps instantly or doesn't at all; so finely tuned is his sense of spatial awareness that such calculations become more a reflex than conscious thought.” – Prince Hassan the Zero-First Point Seventh Cadet Induction Ceremony for Clone Batch #16 |
To Wired Rovers skill is everything (well, maybe that and their custom ship components). Their hierarchy of leaders, squadron commanders, and crew all revolves around competitions of skill and brilliance. In order to better hone their skills many pilots have to be born and bred in space as most Freespacers are, but deviate from the norm by making it common practice to live in microgravity. This allows them to train their spatial awareness and motion prediction capabilities to an almost instinctive point, not unlike the way terrestrial species instinctively know how to keep their balance when standing upright. Furthermore all this is supplemented with biological modifications prevent space sickness and enhance high-G maneuvers, as well as neural interface upgrades to allow them to reduce their piloting response times. Finally, most pilots often end up logging a few hundred hours of simulator time before they will even be considered by the more prestigious squadrons.
The end result is ideally a pilot whose capabilities are honed and cybernetically enhanced to a razor's edge: she can estimate failure likelihood of components in a given situation, use spatial-temporal reasoning to estimate the position of several simultaneous targets whose line-of-sight is lost, and perform split-second calculations on an enemy's reaction time to determine whether she can strike a target before it can lock her.
Hassan gained his (in)famous reputation as the Prince of Privateers through his fearlessness, relentless self-improving, and obsessive fixation with the performance of those around him. He makes it a policy to lead by example personally, and persistently runs craft far past their traditional operational safety limits. This is done to such an extreme that his serial number has actually been modified to reflect this; the “Point Seventh” actually means he has died – and been recloned – seven times thus far. Rather than being ashamed of this he actually wears it as a badge of pride representing his fearlessness and how dedicated to honing his “leet” he is.
Unfortunately, the high level of performance he expects from himself and others around him lends itself to a degree of ruthlessness. Hassan may prize skilled pilots above all else, but he will not hesitate to abandon incompetent pilots who cannot even hold their own. This lack of altruism makes him “evil” by traditional Freespacer standards and puts him on poor relations with the State. Still, he contributes to the greater good by managing a steadfast force of elite fighter and corvette squadron so his presence is still tolerated by most Freespacers.
“There's an ancient hacker proverb that, to this day, still applies to any sort of decentralized network: 'The Net interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it.' Like any other Hacker Cultists, we believe we are merely speeding up this natural process.” – Datajack Hex 08-0703-857 The Art of Never Again, Chapter 159: Honing the Code-Ki |
These Datajacks are responsible for providing combat support for the Wired Rover pilots directly and indirectly. They operate the Mothership's ECM modules, manage sensor and communication tapping probes, and provide tactical operations support in general. All these tasks are usually done through proxy probes so as to avoid revealing the Mothership location, but they may sometimes may be placed aboard a corvette or patrol-craft in order to operate in the field.
Perhaps the most important role of all is their task to break into corporate and military databases, with the objective to determine various convoys' given flight path, combat strength, and the value of their cargo. This allows the Wired Rovers to pick-and-choose their battles as they see fit rather than just attacking anything that passes by, vastly increasing their success and longevity in comparison to traditional marauders.
All in all the Wired Rovers are believed to possess less than three hundred fighter and patrol craft, split between no more than four separate Mothership carriers.
One of the consequences of the freedom-loving and anarchistic background of the Free State is that their own forces are stubbornly independent. Disagreements over tactics and goals common enough to make mounting any large-scale offensives difficult at best, which prevents the Wired Rovers from becoming a much more serious threat than just marauders. The few times the four Mothership groups do work together, it will usually be out of the promise of a small fortune or a common threat.
In fact, while Hassan may call himself the Prince, he has only earned the title due to respect for his skills and that of his squadrons. While this earns him a large amount of clout among the four Motherships, but each of their loyalties lies more towards themselves than to their “leader”.
Squadrons are composed primarily of aerospace fighters, patrol craft, and the like. These primarily operate in groups of twelve, but will ultimately vary depending on the situation. Phantasm Gunship toting precision weapons such as Starjammer beam weapons and Red Mercury Pulsed Blasters are favorite choice of the Wired Rovers, but their forces also use a large number of civilian craft from other nations as well as antiquidated military vessels obtained off the black market.
The Wired Rovers, believing in individual skill above all else, have little interesting in large-scale warfare. As such what few carriers they have may seem relatively pathetic when put in contrast their highly modified precision craft. Little else than basic armaments and defenses protect these ships since often much of the vessel has been converted into additional flight decks, or cargo bays to store looted freight.
These vessels avoid direct encounters whenever possible, as their armaments are woefully lacking in comparison to most modern vessels. In fact they pose more of a threat as a support platform than actual combat ships; an Entropy's Shroud array, along with high-powered direct ECM emitters, can be used blind starships and cripple the accuracy of large-scale weaponry. This in turn leaves the battlefield ripe for fighter or PA superiority to determine the victor, which in most cases is favorable for the fighter-centric Wired Rovers.
These vessels are also very determinate to a region's control due to the sheer number of craft they possess, as well as their role as a ship maintenance dock, trading hub, cloning facility, training center, industrial facilities, and so on. A single active carrier can ensure a region will be saturated with pirate activity so long as it is operational, but if destroyed will deprive the squadrons of sorely-needed maintenance and force them to retreat. This makes the destruction of a carrier vital to weeding out these marauders, though it isn't necessarily as simple as that. These carriers contain considerable stealth systems and are persistently mobile so will often require hours, days, or even weeks to track down by traditional sweeps. Even then there is no guarantee it won't jump out force and authorities to start the search all over again much to their frustration.