I play a lot IC, as my home PC can't handle fully modded SS. This made me invest considerable amount of time to re-integrate VNC in 0.7.2 and add two more factions, one of them with quite distinctive features like matryoshka style drone swarms and evolving ships (still a lot of work to do). Given how well 0.8 new features fit all this i will definitely do my best to port IC to it. Still my scrappy knowledge of Java won't allow me to do it fast.
I also wanted for a long time to try to implement piracy in SS. What we have now is not even the behavior of privateers, but something more suitable for military raiders, that depend on being a part of a state army to survive. I want to replace this with several types of behaviors:
- Faction spawned military raiders (current "piracy")
- Privateers, that accept to obey some rules and limitations to receive funding, bounties and protection from one of the factions. Give chance to bribe your way out (dialog options when attacked by one or attacking as one). Being caught in attacking units of the commissioning faction, it's allies or neutral ones leads to being branded as pirate (revoked commission, your standings with main factions synced to theirs with Pirate faction without changing your standing with pirates, also bounty is placed on your head)
- Pirate syndicates. Have to be completely self reliant, so unlike previous ones their main goal is getting income, instead of disrupting trade or destroying enemy logistics. Sell logistical services to pirate fleets. Organize the trade with syndicate insurance policies. Those allow to avoid attacks for some time but are considered contraband and confiscated on main faction scan. Have different priced varieties covering different fleet value ranges that last three months and be brought via com dialog on planets with black markets for a price that is modified by your standing with pirates (and if your standing with pirates is above vengeance). If piracy target has no insurance or it's policy does not cover it's value an emergency one month policy can be brought for dynamic price from attacking pirate (dialog options when attacked or attacking while being pirate faction member). When playing as pirate you get bounty for scanning each fleet that has insurance policy and 50% share in emergency policy sales. Being caught in attacking target with a policy results trowing you out of the syndicate and vengeance with pirates.
- Mad dogs. No rules for those and no rules for handling them. May offer to let you for a price or for a ship from your fleet. Or may not, nobody can fortell what their agenda is. Intercepting non-hostile target as a player without being pirate or having commission gives you mad dog options in menu.
A total conversion with relatively little dev activity may be much better place to refine this, compared to the mainstream.