[Retric]

Every rocket launch a range safety officer (RSO) keeps track of the trajectory and is ready to hit the self destruct button if needed. Insurance pays out if you hit it as that’s been agreed to ahead of time, the same would apply here or you wouldn’t sink the ship.

As to DDoS, sinking isn’t any more of a risk than someone taking over control of your self driving boat and aiming it at the coastline. From a pure safety standpoint you need some method of remotely disabling the ship.

[salawat]

A rocket launch is generally done much less frequently, premiums to insure would be through the roof due to the smaller risk pool, and don't involve cargo lots measured in the thousands of TEU.

[Retric]

The value of a single rockets cargo can easily be worth more than a container ships cargo. The average TEU at Port of Los Angeles is worth ~43k USD and the words largest container ship is only 24k TEU, that’s up to 1 Billion in 2021 USD and plenty of satellites have been worth more than that.

The ships can be worth quite a bit when new, but their also depreciating assets with only a few percent of that in scrap value. Only using the least valuable ships in areas that can be pirates seems like an obvious optimization.

[salawat]

You have the absolute oddest set of risk management practices I've tried to wrap my head around, but to each their own I guess. I don't see the sense in trusting a global supply chain that's built on JIT principles to a paradigm where your first reaction is "welp, scuttle it". Those TEU's may not be the most glorious things, but they are the inputs that keep modern civilization going. To do otherwise... Well... It just rings foolhardy to me. Might look good on the ledgers, but doesn't make good sense or shake out in the real world.

[Retric]

Piracy is an extremely rare event, and keeping it that way is important for ensuring the global supply chain works.

At the same time actively preventing piracy is expensive. Having a significant armed security force on a boat is effective, but paying for them when 99.999% of the time when their not needed isn’t cost effective. Making it clear that attacking a ship is pointless on the other hand is a great way to avoid getting attacked in the first place, but you need to be willing to carry through.

[salawat]

>Having a significant armed security force on a boat is effective, but paying for them when 99.999% of the time when their not needed isn’t cost effective.

Who cares? You seem to be assuming that security force does nothing else but sit around in case of piracy. In reality, we call these people "mariners", they are trained specialists at maintaining the hardware with which they ply their trade, they know the customs and rules to follow in diverse ports of call, and they are there to provide boots on the ground and hands on tools if something goes sideways.

There is a huge difference between bodies on the boat, and no body on the boat. You cross that line, and leave no bodies on the boat to look after things, and you now have a floating puzzle full of other people's stuff, owner's of which are not necessarily going to be happy that you decided to drop their load to the bottom of the ocean to "prove a point" where you can't even guarantee that the entire point wasn't the pirates making sure some shipment didn't show up in the first place.

Hell, if it wasn't you, the shipper, making the scuttle decision, and was actually the local Navy on justification of "no negotiation", fine. Though that really just punts the issue to international waters.

No one will blame you or foster ill-will for doing everything you could and failing anyway. People will have hard feelings if you come up and say, we blew up all your stuff because those damn dirty pirates. They paid you to get their stuff from A to B, you decided C was better.

All of this "let's go unmanned" just really seems to me to be a solution looking for a problem, and not being shy about creating a few more while we're at it.