I do play a pirate from time to time. From the practical standpoint, I can tell you that (when playing as a pirate) I don't give a Leestian tree grub's difficult-to-locate patootie about the points towards an Elite rating or the bounty. Neither of those puts any extra rum in yer grog. Scooping escape pods is more where the real money is. Big ships can have quite a few escape pods, and it's not at all impossible to make thousands of credits scooping them up and dropping them off at the main station. Now so far as being a criminal, why, you don't even have to be the one who shot up the ships they're escaping from. You just have to get there fast enough to net those little minnows and zip them back to the station. So the Escape Pod locater OXP is something I'd consider an essential piece of gear.
If that seems maybe a bit too cleanie-weenie for ye, well.. Think of it as ransom rather than insurance payments.
If you're a light touch on the trigger, you have the best chance of the crew and passengers jumping into the pods and abandoning ship so you can slip up and scoop their pods. But also, if the prey ship stays intact and there just happens to be a Dredger in the system (the Deep Space Dredger OXP), then you can use a salvage drone to tag the ship and escort it back to the Dredger for even more payout. Of course, you need a clean legal status for that.
Now, if I were to see maybe a big Lynx transporter and some big cargo ships in an unescorted convoy crawling along, I might fly on past them. I'd go a couple scanner lengths along the spacelane to make sure there weren't any Viper patrolling that could interfere and then double back to attend to that fat convoy. It'd be a point of profit and pride to not actually kill anybody, since there's no insurance payouts for a hold full of corpses. Sure, I could pop the hulls of those ships and get a few points towards and Elite rating.. But that sort of rating is thousands of kills away, and salvage pays good money right here and now.
Other than that, well there's shiny creds to be made "running blockade", though that's more of a privateer or contrabandisto (points at El Viejo) sort of work than actual piracy. If a system just happens to have some need for medical supplies or weapons for collectors, sports and self defence, then it can be profitable to make runs with that sort of merchandise.
Most of what I've explained here requires keeping a clean legal rating at least most of the time. The Anarchies OXP has some options for that as well as many other loverly things for a pirate or privateer or rebel against the corporate p0olice state to explore. It does add some stricter rules and makes it a bit harder to keep a clean rating, but it adds enough advantages to still be very worthwhile for the creative potential brigand or freebooter.
Now, my point in all this, is that you can't really even call all those space-for-brains NPCs you get jumped by as you're cruising along "pirates". Bah. They're just a bunch of addlepated wastrels that probably have been sniffing the laser coolant and grabbed the wrong joystick, if you know what I mean. A real pirate wouldn't be likely to fire on a single Jameson in something like a Cobra. A small ship doesn't have enough of anything in the cargo bay to be likely to be worth the bother, and if the Jameson can fight at all... Well, even having to use a single missile on them would pretty surely eat up any possible profit from attacking them.
Piracy/privateering/freebooting isn't really about being trigger-happy in an "iron-ass" ship. For pirating, I fly a cargo ship (Griff Boa proto) that only has a single laser. It's almost "stock", and is a long way from "iron assed". Sure, it has turrets, but those are mostly good for keeping off hardhead missiles. I need the big cargo bay, some passenger berths, and my wits more than I need a war-wagon.
Now if you want to talk fair, what I'd like to see is a Viper having to survive to turn in a report. It kind of takes the fun out of the old saying: "Dead Vipers file no reports."
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