And secondly many times the fleets in the system usually get to kill the named pirate, before I even get to them... Is there anything I can do against that?
I also seem to miss a list of where and what ships spawn at each faction, so far it seems that the tri-tachyons has the most advanced hulls, but I don't know if that holds any truth.
If you're using the Knights Templar add-on, it may be the culprit. It's buggy and tends to cause the AI to spawn upwards of 5 times the normal number of fleets.
That's the 'crusade' event from KT firing (by default, every ~90 in-game days).
Everyone (vanilla and SS+ 'integrated' factions, anyways) spawns a whole lot more fleets in response to the KT sending out their forces on a rampage to a specified system (the Intel tab says specifically which system is targeted by the KT).
It got to the point to where I had to reduce a setting from the KT mod's settings.json ("crusadeScale") to something like '0.1', and/or else set the frequency of said event to 360 days ("crusadeAverageFrequency":360), to allow my saves to successfully load past say, 4-5 months of in-game time.
Alex has hinted that a fix to halve the required memory for loading saves is in the works for v0.65.2a when it comes out, but fundamentally... compared to earlier versions, 32-bit end-users can't expect to load up a ton of mods with few consequences like we used to.
The long-term solution is switching to a 64-bit operating system+64-bit Java; not that much of an issue (albeit a bit time-consuming) for users without that much older software/games/customized settings on their current setup, but for those like me, who have quite a few older/legacy apps that will plain
just not work on a 64-bit OS, without going through the hassle of learning to setup and run a virtual machine for 32-bit compatibility?
That's a problem. And will eventually be resolved by going into a dual-boot setup, with the older stuff on a 2nd drive. Don't have the free time or money to go through with it for quite a while, though.