The most important thing about Piracy in a post-scarcity environment, you aren't doing it because you need to, you're doing it because you WANT to. Naturally you can play up as many pirate stereotypes as you want, do all the looting and plundering your heart can conceive, and have a jolly time til Direct Action or the Ultimates get paid to take care of you. Or you could do the "Dashing Rogue" thing and steal for a faction, cause, or form of non-peaceful protest, hell, be a Privateer, maybe a Hyper Corp or someone similarly powerful is paying you under the table to do some "Freelance work". I am unaware if there are any rules for breaching and or forced docking, that will certainly come up, unless you want to make a derelict and then clean up afterwards. As for hooks, rumors of a wealthy frigate, courier, or transport travelling a long way from home. Maybe a Celebrity is visiting a nearby hab, perfect for a quick snatch and grab, then ransom the ego and keep yourself their morph as a trophy. The [s]world[/s] universe is your oyster.

Well, to be honest, in the places where piracy is common (Earth Orbit, Main Belt, far outsystem) I could actually the very "traditional" avenues of piracy. To build a post-scarcity economy, you need unrestricted access to sufficient raw materials, unrestricted fabricators and power. Now, this is easy enough if you have, say, enough people working together (I/E, Anarchists) or you have a way to subsidize your efforts by selling or trading your excess materials (Extropians or other independent asteroid prospectors). If you don't though, it may be way easier to try and steal what you need from other people who have it. Actual pirates are refugees or criminals who have managed to weasel access to a spacecraft and have enough gun to go take from people who don't have enough. Having this discussion a couple times before, tactics probably involve picking a sufficiently under-defended hab or ship position yourself to cripple or kill it and say "Throw your stuff outside and don't make any sudden moves" and if they don't, they'll vac everybody and clean up the scraps. Pirates don't pick fights they can't win, morph and ship upkeep costs are too high for that. The only notable sample equipment for a Pirate given in the NPC file is a modified Courier - an anti-matter powered craft. This means dodging customs or defense forces is relatively easy. You're twice as fast as a destroyer, and x4 as fast as most civilian vessels (which means you can catch up to slow moving cargo haulers easy). The real trick is navigation and efficient use of fuel. False flag ops or ransom operations work if you've been doing this long enough you don't have to struggle to eat every day (or plug in your batteries or whatever) and can bring some flair to the only skill set you have. Given the high skill points level of players, a campaign would probably be at it's most interesting at this stage. Everybody has a good skillset and knows what they're doing - but doing pirate things is the only thing you know how to do (broadly). How do you keep it up - especially when, as pirates are want to do, you keep blowing all your excess resources on hookers and blow?

They float around PC space between major communications hubs, steal data off the net, send it over to their quantum computers for cracking, and flip all those blueprints out to the free market! (With porn ads to cover fuel, of course.) Arrr... If you're talking about pirating ships, the answer is 'with lots of math and patience'. In general, pirating a ship is a losing proposition. Sure, it can be lucrative (we're post-scarcity for most stuff, but you better believe lithium, uranium, anti-matter and the like are still worth some major scratch, and those aren't things you can easily manufacture). But it's the same issue as space combat. Everyone can see you coming from AUs away. The best you can hope for is to get the course of your target prior and establish your intercept course with a cold burn early, then coast until you're close enough to jam sensors and make a mad dash. But that means a looooong wait and high failure rate, plus you really want an AI-piloted ship, not something piloted by unpredictable transhumans. And you're almost certainly going to do this in the outer rim, since anywhere close by, you'll be in range of bigger telescopes and bigger lasers who will make you spend all your hard won resources on dodging the po-po. There are a few exceptions here. This list isn't exhaustive, but it's worth some thought. First, use insiders. The Eye did an adventure set around this, where pirates were hired onto the ship as crew and took it over en route. Second, intercept it close to its beginning or ending (if it's friendly to you). Atmospheres, horizons, and moons give some degree of cover. Around Mars this isn't likely to work out well for you, because their defenses will cook you, but Mercury? Or Neptune? The important thing to remember with all of these is that space is *really* big. That means it takes a long time to get from anywhere to anywhere else. The Apollo program, with those high delta-v rockets still took three days to make it to the Moon. You can just imagine coming up on your target and waiting half a week before you reach your intercept--and that's for local traffic!

There seem to be a few ways to be a pirate. You can go for ships out on the long haul between gravity wells with a ship that's faster than the one they have and take the ship when no one can stop you. This takes a fairly big fuel budget though, and you can only steal small cargoes in a ship like that, so most piracy of this kind is probably for small valuable cargoes that aren't something so valuable that it'll be well guarded (like antimatter or fissionables). I'm a little unsure of what kind of cargo this would be, so this is probably kind of rare. Of course, you could just try to take over the whole ship and send it somewhere new, but this makes the timing much more important. It should also be possible to sneak a pirate crew on board somehow (synth cargo?) and hijack the ship while in transit, sending it to a new location, the tricky part about this plan would be timing the takeover correctly so some military picket ship can't pull the same stunt the pirates in the above paragraph do. There's also Ego piracy, placing reasonably stealthy buoys on common egocast routes to capture and copy the ego inside, this could even be done somewhere behind the receiver, probably quite close, and is possibly a decent chunk of the ego trade. Perhaps the most profitable kind of piracy is port piracy, greasing the right palms, and hacking the right systems to make port authorities look the other way while certain pieces of cargo end up in the wrong secured warehouse with some missing ownership documents. This is probably the most common, but the least like shipborne piracy which is a little disappointing. Near port piracy could also be a thing, using small craft to take over a ship close to the port, but that seems too difficult and unreliable to be common to me. Because of the costs and risks involved there are probably not a whole lot of freelance pirates, a lot of them are probably financed or given safe harbor by one faction or another, with the understanding that the pirates will go after other people's stuff and give the benefactor some of the loot. This is probably one of the ways the various factions prey upon one another will their deniable ops only cold war. A lot of the acts of piracy are probably spun as defections (and sometimes they probably are) from one side to another. Most (spacecraft) pirates are probably kind of similar to age of sail pirates: ex-military professionals who've found a better paying or more interesting way to use their skills.

I see tons of easy play in the boarding action of shipping vessels. I am also generally of the mindset that any sort of vehicle combat is going to be a pain. Unless you're running it cinematicly the crunch comes down to who fails first, they usually die a round or two later. So unless you're giving your prey Moxie and refreshing some / all moxie for the PCs after the scene expect the fight to be where everyone burns it. Ideally any prey they willingly choose to go after is not going to be armed so you don't have to deal with ship based combat at all. I'm not sure what the space navy policies are on ship mounted weapons but in properly policed space there is zero need for armament. Any sane pirate is going to avoid doing damage to their prey. Mechanically, and in design approach for the pirate crew I think approaching this in a similar manner to that of Somali small boat pirates would probably be ideal. A primary 'mother ship' (captured freighter, etc) and wolf packs of small, low mass fast burn craft with decent ECM/ECCM, means you aren't putting everything into one basket. The players roll Pilot a few times to see if they're successful in closing, docking, and anchoring to the side and then you can play out the opening to SW: A New Hope. Ultimately I see piracy as a great way for deniable contract work. Hypercorp X wants Y's quarter less in the black, hire contract workers. Inner system AGI's want out of the deletion zone, hire a pickup from space Coyotes. Space pirates can wear many G-rep Hats.