1.- It would defeat the purpose of the MUD being an exclusive limited resource
That is a fair point, but keep in mind there is already another Boggled mod that allows players to fabricate their own AI cores. It could be argued that "game enhancing" and "game breaking" can be just two points of view on the same thing.
2.- Pirates are morons, how in the world would they even know what the MUD is in the first place? If anything they would just discard it as scrap.
Yet they have battleships and unique hull designs that they apparently invented on their own. I'll grant you that the typical grog-swilling scallywag is probably illiterate, but they couldn't exist as an operation if the people at top didn't have brains.
3.- Pirates have several colonies, even in vanilla starsector without mods, so the argument of "they are not too big on starting new colonies" is completely wrong, even if it was not the case, pirates are one of the two factions keen on constantly making bases outside core worlds. They are raiding bases, yes, but they are still colonies.
Allow me to be pedantic for a moment and reiterate that I said they weren't big on
starting new colonies. I said nothing about already existing ones. Even in Nexerelin pirates dp
not create new colonies. They do not send out colony expeditions or claim new worlds. Nor have I ever seen them launch an invasion fleet. They do raids, that's it.
This is just to name a few reasons about why doing this would make absolutely zero sense from both a gameplay and a lore standpoint.
We can debate the gameplay angle, sure, but let's not bring lore into this too much - the entire mod is pretty lore breaking as it is,
as almost all mods are. And I'm OK with, the same way that I'm OK with Moff Gideon owning the Darksaber even after Disney declared the EU non-canon, because sometimes you just gotta let the fans have what they want. Sometimes what people call "breaking lore" is what I call "adding to it."