Where are the larger pirate ships?

[JVonD]

I'm 60+ hours in this beta game and I noticed I only saw like 3 pirates attacks in the first few hours of the game and none ever since. I camp the bases, no ships. Camp a few sectors full of people, still no ships with pirate tags. What am I missing?

[jedi.khan]

In claimed sectors, the pirates mask their ships with other faction's tags. You can usually identify them by the Raider or Plunder in their name. Capital class pirate ships are relatively rare though.

[Venerable_Sin]

You will usually find them by looking at every destroyer in a sector closely enough to see if the ship type matches with the faction's destroyer type. One huge hint they give you is the ship name "so and so plunderer" is one example. I'm sure there are others but I can't think of them.

As far as camping a pirate station, I would say it would be much easier and "time effective" to just cover the region with advanced satellites or a network of regular satellites and set up a notification for when the ship enters the region. You could sit there forever, wait for a pirate destroyer to plunder a faction station and then bring it's loot back to the station you're camping, but you're really doing it in a way that will make you wait forever, since there is only one station you can be at, while they can choose any station to sell to. Setup a network and use your notifications to increase your odds of locating your prey while you're doing other things. That would be my advice if that's the way you want to play your game. :) Perhaps others can expand or improve upon this or offer a better solution for you.

Disclaimer: I've never used my notifications for anything other than early warning noise for letting me know the Xenon have entered specific regions. I would imagine you could do something similar for a pirate. Hopefully this is possible. At any rate, the satellites would increase your odds of finding a delivery run to a station and allow you to be in more than one place at a time.

One thing I like to do when a destroyer accosts one of my traders is: First make the trader flee, then assign an extra ship to "follow target". That way I never lose track of the ship and can take my time getting around to taking it.

[Pandorian]

Plunderer - SCA/VIG , SCA will be in Behemoths or Phoenix, VIG will be in Barbarrossa
Pillager - SCA/FAF , SCA will be in Minotaurs, FAF in Dragons
Corsair - BUC
Marauder - FAF Rattlesnake
Raiding Party

If you search your map for those keywords; Plunderer, Pillager, Corsair, Marauder, Raiding Party ; then you'll find the pirates.