[andyjdavis]

I suspect there would be enough of value that could be stripped off the ship and removed to make it worth the pirate's time. Bear in mind that it doesn't matter to pirates if they cause millions of dollars of damage to extract a small fraction of that for themselves.

Cripple a hugely valuable ship and destroy much of its equipment and cargo to extract a few hundred thousand dollars worth of stuff that you can take with you? Sounds like a reasonable deal for a group of pirates. Hell, they might as well try and sink the ship once they are done with it to make it hard to gather evidence and determine exactly what was stolen.

It would take some time for people to do the math to determine what components of ships and common cargo have the highest value Vs their portability but someone would figure it out eventually.

[dogma1138]

Sink it with what? they attack it with fishing boats and AK47's you'll need a literal ton of explosives to sink on of those ships. They can't offload the containers and other than the money in the captain's vault there is nothing of value other than the propane tanks in the galley (that and the med bay is the only thing they raid).

[andyjdavis]

I said "try to sink it" not that they would necessarily succeed. That said if they are on board and have unlimited access to the entire ship it may be possible to sink it without any explosives. Not all ships even require explosives to be scuttled.

>They can't offload the containers

I never suggested that they would. Rather I suggested that they would ransack the ship and cargo looking for valuable components or equipment that is transportable.

[codeduck]

5kg of plastic explosive will be more than enough to sink a ship.

[dogma1138]

No it won't, have you ever handled explosives?

[mjlee]

Wedge the watertight doors open, disable the salvage eductors and you can sink a ship by cracking a single sea water intake pipe open.

I'm on mobile so I can't provide a link, but look up the Argentinian Type 42 sunk in harbour or HMS Endurance for examples.