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[Avio Yaken]

As always im not sure if this is the correct place to put this thread...

But im curious as to how big the pirate factions are (Guristas, Serpentis, Angels, etc etc)

Level 4s majority of the time pit you against a small fleet of battleships and battle cruisers with frigate support, which could make up a body count in the  3000s depending on the mission (estimating off the minimum crew for theses ships from https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/New_Eden_crew_guidelines)

And we got plenty of people who do nothing but run missions all day tearing up theses faction's operations,  yet they can still flied all theses battleships and men to defend theses deadspace pockets with the same exact doctrine as before

So how massive are theses pirate factions really? And how much money do they have to replace all theses ships...

[Karmilla Strife]

I imagine they're about as large as other factions that occupy an entire region of space, such as the Khanid Kingdom or Ammatar Mandate. They hold sovereignty over similar extents of territory and are able to project military power throughout the cluster.

[Aria Jenneth]

I imagine they're about as large as other factions that occupy an entire region of space, such as the Khanid Kingdom or Ammatar Mandate. They hold sovereignty over similar extents of territory and are able to project military power throughout the cluster.

This, pretty much, though I'd say they're substantially stronger than the two examples given. They're major interstellar powers in their own right, if not quite empires.

[Lyn Farel]

Don't bother with crude numbers Foley, they don't make much sense imo... Better to remain vague with a lot of handwavium on that specific point...

I imagine they're about as large as other factions that occupy an entire region of space, such as the Khanid Kingdom or Ammatar Mandate. They hold sovereignty over similar extents of territory and are able to project military power throughout the cluster.

I would tend to disagree with that. While pirate factions are indeed described as huge and small empires into themselves, what makes me say that they do not play on the same scale than empire faction is that they mostly inhabit nullsec regions where development is probably piss poor, similar to colonies, bare for a few main planets like Utopia...

To me, in terms of economy, it's insignificant compared to the empires power, even the mandate or the kingdom. They remain pirates, and their strenght may lie elsewhere, or else they would already be involved in huge space battles with the empires.

[Silas Vitalia]

The Pirate factions are way, way underneath the 'big four' in terms of territory, forces, and ability to fight the empires in any meaningful sense.  They are nuisances at most, not existential threats.  The Blood Raiders are never going to attack Kador and take a high sec system; they would be summarily pimp-slapped back into null, even if they did some all-out ultimate gamble attack and managed to flip the system temporarily.

As stated above their 'sovereignty' is way out in the middle of nowhere (development, resource, and population wise), so owning 15 systems of Angel or Serpentis space in null is probably the same as a single system in lowsec or a 1/4 of a system in high sec for the good it will do you 'empire' wise. 

You can reference any number of the news articles involving the empires going after the pirate factions militarily, generally kicking their butts pretty handily with only the commitment of a relatively minor assault fleet.  For example the Amarr 7th Fleet by themselves completely wiping the Raiders out of the Bleak Lands in a series of articles a few years back.

TLDR none of the pirate factions can directly challenge the 'big four' in any meaningful sense, aside from constant raiding and stretching of their resources.  The pirate factions are likely capable of a direct assault with limited gains, only to have their asses kicked immediately afterwords if they stuck around.


Minor quibble:

Khanid Kingdom eats pirate factions for lunch, or at least at a similar rate as the big four.  Don't forget they fought a huge civil war with the Empire proper and managed to keep them at the borders.  They say that might be more due to the new Emperor after Khanid took off needing to consolidate forces, but the Empire did try and invade the Kingdom on several subsequent occasions and they were beaten back, along with about 400 years of a not so cold 'cold war' along the border between the two factions until the recent thaw (after Jamyl).  A lot of the old Khanid info dumps had to do with them needing to trade with the Caldari for high tech military gear (mostly missiles and shielding) to try and one-up the Amarr on their border since they didn't have nearly the Amarr Navy numbers, hence the need for all the 'high tech' T2 ships to combat the Imperial Navy lolblobs.

EDIT: As most of Kingdom is in lowsec I would ammend that they likely have a much higher level of pirate 'harassment' than high sec Empire.  At least that's the way I've spun a lot of my lore being a Kingdom RPer.  IE if you join the Royal Khanid Navy as a baseliner you are probably definitely going to see action, and probably against Blood Raiders.  If you join the Imperial Navy you could end up in a million different postings against a huge number of foes.

[Morwen Lagann]

Level 4s majority of the time pit you against a small fleet of battleships and battle cruisers with frigate support, which could make up a body count in the  3000s depending on the mission (estimating off the minimum crew for theses ships from https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/New_Eden_crew_guidelines)

Hi. You're probably off by one or two orders of magnitude. Never use the "minimum" crew numbers for a combat situation - ever.

[Avio Yaken]

Just seemed to be the safest number to work off of

Sorry :/

[Morwen Lagann]

It's not, and the wiki page says so pretty clearly:

Minimum Crew is the bare minimum number of personnel required to operate the vessel with only basic functions (i.e., assuming no modules fitted).

[Avio Yaken]

It's not, and the wiki page says so pretty clearly:

Minimum Crew is the bare minimum number of personnel required to operate the vessel with only basic functions (i.e., assuming no modules fitted).

Well ok im sorry il try to be more accurate in the future, just overlooked something, my bad

[Silas Vitalia]

You can't use the mission numbers as anything accurate in the game world either, it just doesn't work.  That's why a lot of RPers keep it 'vague' when talking about their mission work.  "I had a tense mission with x faction" instead of "lol i killed 45 battleships and 50 battle-cruisers farming missions today"

[Lyn Farel]

the Imperial Navy lolblobs.

In before republicans "Imperial Navy lolblobs OP, please nerf".

[Silas Vitalia]

the Imperial Navy lolblobs.

In before republicans "Imperial Navy lolblobs OP, please nerf".

haha

Well the Imperial Navy sometimes does the 40k Imperial Guard strategy: Throw bodies at them until they run out of ammo

[Morwen Lagann]

the Imperial Navy lolblobs.

In before republicans "Imperial Navy lolblobs OP, please nerf".

It'd probably be considered fair play after what happened to the Hurricane.

[Esna Pitoojee]

The various pirate factions are not all created equal, either. The Cartel, for instance, has large fixed holdings that they absolutely must protect. The Guristas and Blood Raiders, by contrast, are more decentralized forces that seem to rely more on hit-and-run style tactics and are more protected by their home territory's distance from 'core' empire space and contacts in their 'parent' nations than direct firepower. At the absolute far end of the spectrum is the Serpentis, who almost entirely rely on the Cartel for protection.

With that said, I think it's also important to note that defensive holdout capability does not equal long-range striking capability; the Cartel is apparently capable of "keeping the DED at bay" from its home regions, but this does not translate to the power to project the same force into hostile territory. They merely need to make any large-scale incursion into Curse too costly and resource-intensive for anyone to consider doing alone.

[Blue spy]

I imagine it would depend a lot on the faction.

Serpentis and the Angel Cartel are closely linked, and I would imagine could be assumed to be the largest of the pirate factions. The occupy Curse and NPC Fountain, the former being an immensely massive interstellar criminal conglomerate and the latter being a cutting edge research giant. As far as the lore is concerned they both have access to cutting edge technologies that give their ships a large competitive edge over the more restrained designs of the empire. They both have their own 'navies' and 'armies' although how much control those at the top of the Angel Cartel have over those at the bottom is dubious; while the military arm of Serpentis wouldn't have access to the colossal manpower required to fight any empire directly. The biggest asset they both probably have to draw upon is their combined reach in New Eden. I doubt empire intelligence gathering efforts come close to building a network to the scale of what a top-level archangel warlord would have at his or her disposal. If the Angel Cartel needed somebody gone, a facility raided, or anything stolen it's likely they could accomplish it without having to mount any kind of big military operation.

The Sansha's by contrast are a lot more capable of actually fighting a 'traditional' war; with a command hierarchy that isn't full off opportunistic bastards. It's well within the capability of the Sansha's Nation to disrupt and drive an empire into chaos on its homeborders, and the nature of how its managed makes it a ruthless entity to actually fight conventionally. However it suffers for that in soft power; I doubt the nation has the access that the Cartel has, and it pays for it by only really being able to operate as a military power.

I don't know much about the lore of the Guristas; I would assume that they're smaller than the Cartel and have more of a surgical focus. While the Angel Cartel is a conglomerate of a load of different interests the Guristas are more like a pirate band that grew immensely above its station. So while smaller in number it's probably more capable as a traditional 'pirate' entity than the Angel Cartel and benefits a lot from the mobility that would come from not having to defend the massive amount of real estate the Angel Cartel is probably stuck with.

*Edit

The Cartel ships for example that you see; aren't necessarily funded by the same Angel Cartel that you see in Curse. They might pay lip service to it; and benefit from the association that being affiliated to the Cartel brings, but they operate as elements to a franchise and not subordinates within a hierarchy. It's likely they have their own local organisation that they report to; which is still leagues apart from being anywhere near being under the strict control of the Angel Cartel. Sort of like how an old feudal kingdom would work. If the Angel Cartel could ever come close to summoning most of the people that operate under its label the combined threat would probably be terrifying. But the likelihood of that happening is slim.