Depending how you view the future, lawlessness willalways be present in society. There'salways going to be a shadier, nastier way of doing business, and that will almost certainly follow humanity to the stars. Thus, sci-fi authors will includeExpies of modern and historic un/organized crime—be they space mafia, gangs, or—in our case--pirates.
It's not as anachronistic as it might seem. After all, pirates themselves[1] have made aReal Life comeback in Somalia and South East Asia, and it's a lucrative enough "business" that it's taken a multinational military response to fight back. Surely an established society in outer space with significant trade and commerce would suffer similar problems!
... Well, maybe. The major problem with space pirates preying on space commerce is that space isvast. The challenge of catching commercial shipping in open space is orders of magnitudes more difficult than catching them on the open seas. Sometimes, this is cleverly worked around and justified.Most of the time, however, it isn't.
As with Pirates in general, there are two kinds of Space Pirates in science fiction:
The normal version are violent criminals with a spaceship, who attack other spaceships, just likepresent-day pirates (or, in fact, most pirates of any kind). Once you have shipping between different solar systems/planets, pirates preying on said shipping are bound to show. Simple as that.Done this way, piracy actually makes sense, provided there's an enabling factor. That could be anything from the technology of the setting creating trade lanes (via aPortal Network, predictableFaster-Than-Light Travel routes thanks toNegative Space Wedgies, or timed space flights between planets to reduce time spent between planets, as inReal Life), to using a variant of the method employed by modern pirates (say, smaller ships striking at commercial shipping in the orbit of a planet).
The adverts for Nestle's "Honey Stars" often feature these.
Anime and Manga
Outlaw Star is full of the first type. As a rather interesting variation, they are Chinese and use Tao-magic. They seem to be modeled after the Triads.
Captain Harlock, aLoveable Rogue space pirate who has also appeared in other works ofLeiji Matsumoto. The second version. His ship is aMilitary Mashup Machine with a submarine prow, a battleship body and a galleon rear. TheLeijiverse also has Emeraldas, who sails the Sea of Stars in a frigate attached to a dirigible.
Buichi Terasawa'sCobra is also the second version. He is slightly less altruistic and noble-minded than Harlock, being mostly in it for his own interest, but he is also a hero, and has some morals and is better than an organized Guild of pirates that are his archenemies.
Ryoko fromTenchi Muyo! is the first type. SpinoffTenchi Muyo GXP also. WithTarant Shunk around, it will be for fun.
Cleo and his crew inGlass Fleet are more or less space pirates.
TheGundam Seed spinoff seriesGundam SEED Astray reveals a surprising number of pirates operating at the fringes of the SEED universe.
The mangaCrossbone Gundam has the main characters fromGundam F91 opposing the Jupiter Empire under the guise of space pirates, even going so far as to take on the name of the original antagonists, the Crossbone Vanguard. They employ all the standard pirate tropes, including spaceships that look like sailing ships (complete with broadside beam cannons) and a robot parrot (apparently for no other reason than that they can), but are actually preventing the Earth from being attacked by the Jovians.
It gets even crazier. The titular Gundam has X-shaped thrusters (though they're actually practical), a beam cutlass and daggers instead of the standard saber, a beam gun shaped like a flintlock pistol, a targeting lens shaped like an eye patch and an extra antenna on its head modeled after a feather. Apparently just sporting the Jolly Roger insignia on its forehead wasn't enough for Hajime Katoki.
This actually gets aLampshade in the side mangaSkull Heart, where we're shown the Crossbone Gundam shortly after it's finished, and one of the pilots, Umon Samon, suggests adding the familiar pirate elements (like a skull and crossbones on the forehead). The Gundam's pilot Kinkaid Nau teasingly asks "Isn't that a little much?", to which the other man says "Well, if going to be space pirates, we might as well run with it!"
As a minor note, Umon had been inspired by a Dom pilot he fought at the Battle of Solomon in the One Year War, who used a skull and crossbones as his insignia.
AndGundam AGE also gives us a group. They're known as Visidian, they pirate Federation vessels, and as of the Kio arc, they have their own Gundam.
Oban Star-Racers has Lord Furter, a comical example most notable for his incompetence and non-threatening appearance, even though both he and his crew seem to think he's the most bad-ass thing ever. He's also self-aware. "I'mboarding your ship! That's what pirates do, we board ships!"
Sol Bianca, also the name of the ship that serves as both the home and the interstellar headquarters for an all-female band of notorious space pirates.
The main characters ofVandread are female examples of this trope.
Bodacious Space Pirates (akaMōrestu Pirates), as might be deduced from the title. They are definitely of the second variety, with the tons ofShout Outs to other similar shows, includingCaptain Harlock.
Comic Books
The Starjammers of theX-Men comics. Their leaderis nicknamed Corsair, wears a headband, thigh boots, and a handlebar mustache, and fightswith a blaster pistol in one hand and a cutlass in the other. They're a huge mashup of pulp space opera and swashbuckling tropes. Corsair is from Earth, and probably decided to look like a traditional high seas piratejust for the hell of it. His alien crew also look the part, but mostly to a less extreme degree.
TheSilver Surfer encountered a group of space pirates while tracking down one of the Elders. Him and Nova even get dressed up as pirates to blend in among the various species that make up the group in an attempt to infiltrate it.
During his first abortive return to the main X-titles in 2000, Chris Claremont introduced a vast number of new characters. They were given the umbrella term "the Neo", and most of them were possessed of an extremely fragile glass jaw (since they tended just to turn up, say their names and give a description of their powers in typical Claremontian fashion, and then get punched into oblivion, never to be seen again). Amongst the Neo was a faction of slave traders called the Crimson Pirates, one member of which actually had a giant comedy cannon on his shoulder. No, really.
InWonder Woman, the "Silver Serpent" saga featured anall female cadre of Space Pirates who travel from planet to planet to steal that world's technology, recruit a small group of the females for membership and the remainder of the planet's people for food stock.
Despite the name, Star Pirate, fromPlanet Comics, did not do much pirating. Blackbeard, from the same comic, fits the Space Pirate motif better.
The Uralian Space Pirates, fromCrusader from Mars.
Space Smith, fromFantastic Comics, often fought Space Pirates.
Wonder Comics featured many Space Pirates, including Tara the Pirate Queen.
Rex Dexter, fromMystery Men Comics, fought Space Pirates in his first appearance.
This was basically Terra-Man's schtick inBronze AgeSuperman comics. Aliens kidnapped him as a boy from the 19th century American West. He eventually broke free and became a pirate in the aliens' own society. When he finally returned to Earth, he found that spending years traveling at relativistic speeds had let 100 years pass him by, so that his 19th century mannerisms made him a literal space cowboy. As Superman once observed, Earth wasn't really of much logical interest to a planet-hopping thief like TM, but TM took offense to an alien being called Earth's greatest hero, and so christened himselfTerra-Man and kept returning just to pick fights with Supes.
Jeb and Tommy fromStar Raiders are implied as such, though the reader never sees them actually commit any sort of piracy.Tommy even sports an eyepatch...
Darkhawk wears armor meant for an army of space pirates.
The Ice Pirates was aSo Bad It's Good '80s sci fi adventure film where the protagonists were...you guessed it...interstellar pirates looking for water.
Space Mutiny had pirates (recycled footage of Cylon warships) with at least one inhabitable system as claimed territory. Keep in mind this is a setting where space travel is less than light speed, necessitating multi-generational ships. Except when they forget and it isn't (it's that kind of movie, watch theMystery Science Theater 3000 version and be amazed. The Agony Booth dida recap that tried and failed to make sense of the tech level).
Star Wars references to "Corellian Pirate Ships". And Han Solois a smuggler.
Space Truckers has the protagonists go "off-road" in order to avoid being stopped by the authorities but end up getting captured by a giant pirate ship, which literally swallows them. These pirates were of the second,Recycled in Space type, complete with cybernetic false limbs and a skull-and-crossbones flag.
There aren't really any space pirates inExplorers, but when the aliens' ship is engulfed by another, much larger one, Wak claims that space pirates are to blame.
Literature
In theRevelation Space universe byAlastair Reynolds, pirates lurk in the remains of the Glitter Band (a vast ring of space stations). The pirates, the "Banshees", are thoroughly unromantic bastards who grapple onto freighters to kill the crew and sell anything onboard. The Ultranauts, the crews of the massive slower-than-light freighters, often have elements of space piracy, as they'll just as often loot as save a ship in trouble.
The impossibility of space piracy and the trick Julian Forward uses to make it work is central to the plot ofLarry Niven's "The Borderlands of Sol".
InPoul Anderson andGordon R. Dickson'sHoka stories, when the Hokas set out to emulate a Space Patrol, Alex has horrified visions of their being tried for piracy. He's not even sure that hanging isn't still in effect as the approved form of punishment.
InPiers Anthony'sBio of a Space Tyrant series, pirates of the second kind show up as a form ofRefuge in Audacity, since the authorities won't believe (or don't want to admit to) ancient-looking pirates operating in space.
Lucky Starr confronts space pirates in the juvenile novelLucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids byIsaac Asimov.
Consider Phlebas (the firstCulture novel by Ian M. Banks). The crew of theClear Air Turbulence are ostensiblyPrivate Military Contractors, but are actually just aRagtag Bunch of Misfits raiding whatever they think will be vulnerable. Seeing as they're carrying out their activities amidst the chaos of an intragalactic war, that tends not to be very much.
Averted in Terry Bisson'sPirates of the Universe, despite the title, which actually refers to a theme park ride. Although the main character's coworkers might be considered SpacePoachers.
The setting ofThe Rock Rats by Ben Bova involves space pirates,space cowboys, space corporations, and space privateers/space pirates for a cause. They're all violent, though in different ways.
InLois McMaster Bujold'sVorkosigan Saga, Miles' Dendarii Mercenary Fleet gets hired to rescue hostages from hijackers. Also, in the later books, the Barrayaran Fleet is put to use as bodyguards for Komarran merchants. This is a win-win for both parts, since the Komarrans get protected by an army with a reputation for ruthlesness and the Barrayarans get to give good military training to their soldiers, without needing to declare war on anybody.
TheVatta's War series, byElizabeth Moon, features pirates as well. In this case, they are usually only a major problem if you venture off the charted and patrolled space routes. This changes when the Pirates form a large organized fleet, leading to the creation of first an ad-hoc fleet of privateers, and lateran alliance of different navies (including what amount to a large corporate security space force and aPrivate Military Contractor with its own fleet of warships). The formation of such alliances is only made possible with the development of technology for ship-to-ship faster than light communications.
InC. J. Cherryh'sAlliance Union works, the Mazianni started as the Earth Company's navy. When the Company decided that the war against Union wasn't cost-effective, Conrad Mazian and his captains felt that they'd shed too much blood to just be called back, and that they'd continue the fight on their own—and if a merchanter ship had resources they needed for that aim, they'd hand it over if they knew what was good for them.
We'll contest each star Union wants This is war and not some bureaucrat's game And we hear you're calling us pirates now-
Well, screw you all, we'llearn the motherless name!
On the other side of Earth, theknnn might qualify, if they had enough concepts in common with oxygen breathers to be able to formulate the idea. They used to force their way onto stations and take what they want; after lengthy negotiations through t'ca/chi intermediaries, now they take what they want and leave something behind. Among oxy-breathers, the kif, who see every action as a bid for dominance, turn out to make excellent pirates.
Islands in the Sky, the sci-fi juvenile byArthur C. Clarke. One of the apprentices on the space station thinks a suspicious spacecraft might be involved in piracy—an idea denigrated by everyone else as large corporations can afford to maintain spacecraft, but not criminals. They think otherwise on discovering the ship's hold is full of ray gunswhich turn out to be props for the first movie being filmed in space.
Honor Harrington. Among the nastiest things they do isthrow people into space as a means of execution, which is widely regarded as an unforgivable atrocity. Space piracy is the major raison d'etre for military power in times of peace, and plays heavily in the various works of fiction. It typically serves as a place for new characters to "start off small" in deadly, but relatively low-stakes, combat (prior to the war with Haven, anti-piracy operations in Silesia were the primary source of combat training for RMN personnel). They also tend to come up as disposable pawns in Mesa's latestEvil Plan. Space pirates arenever portrayed the least bit sympathetically. Piracy is universally a capital crime, and for excellent reasons.
It may be worth noting that many of the pirates operate under an agreement with a local polity. In Silesia, it is not uncommon to turn over a batch of recently captured pirates to the local government, and then six months later the same pirates have a new ship and are back in action. The local government is basically taking a bribe to ignore the piracy, or has funded the pirates to plunder shipping from richer nations (I.E. Manticorian shipping would carry batter goods that the government can buy through normal means) and will turn a blind eye to rape and murder to gain such benefits.
Some privateers (which, historically, were separated from pirates by rather thin margins), however, get better treatment. Like Admiral (Royal Naval Reserve) Thomas Bachfisch, one of Honor's mentors. After he was beached byfirst Janacek admiralty, he retired from active duty, and managed to obtain the Letter of Marque, starting, effectively, a privateer shipping line. Equipped with fast, armed, merchantmen (actually, surplus Andermani Navy transports) it operated inSilesia, where their improved speed and protection allowed him to charge a premium and engage in a little pirate hunt of his own. Not mentioning his side work as a Manticoran intelligence resident (Admiral Givens of the RMN intelligence service being the source of the pressure to give him a Letter of Marque) in Silesia.
Piracy is also a career of choice for military units from non-existent governments. After the Saint-Just dictatorship is defeated State Security forces go into piracy and merch work. Some get hired by Mesa, while at least one set of battleships finds a small planet to set up a local lords. In fact the first armed ships in the Honorverse were pirates with space navies being created to counter them.
InPeter F. Hamilton'sFallen Dragon the mega-corporations on Earth which funded the establishment of interstellar colonies are beginning to decline, so they now make a profit by 'asset realization' --turning up in orbit and implying they'll blast the colony if the colonists don't hand over various manufactured goods, leaving information on the latest Earth technologies as compensation, then returning several years later to do the same thing again once the colonists have upgraded their technology and gotten back on their feet.
In hisThe Night's Dawn Trilogy, pirates prey on asteroid settlements, poorly-defended early-stage colonies and commercial shipping routes. The primary reason for the Navy to exist is to combat these pirates. It's a good example of this trope played relatively straight in a space-opera that balances its "hard" science fiction elements (much of the science behind the advanced technology is explained, the human societies are detailed to anabsurd level) with soft (the fantastical horror of "the beyond"). Hamiltonloves doing this.
He also shows how pirates would work in practice—they're interstellar traders who covertly supplement their income with smuggling and piracy, rather than permanent raiders operating from a secret base.
The Fat Men inDaniel Pinkwater'sFat Men from Space act as a variation on type 1, closer to aHorde of Alien Locusts in that they invade a planet, steal the junk food, then force the inhabitants to prepare more of it until the raw materials thereof are at dangerously low levels before they leave. They return inSlaves of Spiegel, where theyabduct the greatest junk food chefs of the galaxy to compete in aCooking Duel.
Pirates are major villains in theWarchild Series. One of them, Falcone, could even be considered theBig Bad...as much as anyone in such anambiguous universe. Lowachee never goes into detail about how the pirates find their victims. Most of the ships they prey off of, however, are running through the notoriously hard-to-police DMZ.
The pirates'modus operandi deserves special mention here, too. Falcone, their de facto leader, was an exSpace Marine. He left because he thought the government of EarthHub was a little too civil, and saw a lot of opportunities to make his own empire out in deep space. He also believed absolute loyalty could be achieved by raising his "protégés" from early childhood. Of course, no one told him that ritualistic child abuse would maybe, possibly undermine what he was trying to do. In the end,he dies at the hands of one of his ex proteges, and before this moment, spent much of his life on the run from a different protege. The man made his own enemies.
TheStar Wars Expanded Universe has more than a few, most of them overlapping with information brokers and smugglers. Some Space Pirates are slavers. Since most interstellar travel in Star Wars has charted routes and it's considered dangerous to split away from them, and Space Pirates actually tend to strike planets and ships going to and from planets, it's basically justified. A merchant who had found a way to avoid the pirates lying in wait around a planet unfortunately bragged about this. By the way, if you're wondering why Han Solo wasn't able to use his reward for saving Leia to pay off his debt to Jabba the Hutt? A space pirate stole the money from him.
TheWraiths, aware that theBig Bad was hiring pirates to harass his enemies, succeeded atThe Infiltration by posing as a pirate band called the Hawk-Bats which focused on a system in Imperial territory, doing things like breaking into a hangar to steal TIE fighters, preying on merchants, and, once, robbing a bank. They had so much fun doing so that Wedge felt it necessary to remind his men that they weren't, in fact, actual pirates.
Some Star Wars pirates play more to the cliches than others. For example, the space pirate Raskar loves every swashbuckling trope there is, and even carries a "lightfoil" (a relatively low-quality, short-hilt lightsaber otherwise mostly popular among Sith-wannabe noblemen of the Tapani sector) despite unauthorized ownership of anything that could be seen as "Jedi paraphernalia" being a death penalty offense in the Empire.
Ideologically motivated pirates are what led to the Trade Federation being allowed to build an army inCloak of Deception, a lead in toThe Phantom Menace.
Averted in Eric Frank Russell's "And Then There Were None": interstellar travel is so prohibitively expensive that a would-be pirate has to become a millionaire first.
H. Beam Piper took this trope one step further in his bookSpace Viking. That's right. Vikings,In Space!
Though we never see any up close, Space Pirates are the background in the classic "Heinlein juvenile"Citizen of the Galaxy. The protagonist destroys a ship full of them, and later learns that he was originally sold into slavery by pirates who killed hisfabulously wealthy parents.He decides to devote his life to fighting the pirate-slaver complex, then has to decide if he will do it in the military or by using his family's money and influence.
The Pirates Of Zan by Murray Leinster. The protagonist is from a planet whose sole occupation is space piracy. He tries moving to another world and going legit, but when things go badly wrong he has to resort to the traditional methods of his kin. Serialised forAstounding in 1959 as "The Pirates of Ersatz" with its famousZeerust cover of a space pirate climbing aboard a rocket with a slide ruleclasped between his teeth. (A portion of this cover can be seenhere.)
In Andrey Livadny'sThe History of the Galaxy series, most Space Pirates come from thedesert world of Ganio. Oh yeah, and they're all ArabsIn Space.
Type one shows up in the first part ofTriplanetary, and have no qualms with filling the ventilation system of a passenger liner with nerve gas.
As theLensman series goes on, however, the Pirates of Boskone start to shift more and more toward the role of Type Two. At least, until theLensman Arms Race wipes them out with faster-than-light antimatter planets.
The Ben Bova novel Privateers had an interesting variation on this. Set in a future where the Soviet Union gained a "Star Wars" anti-ballistic-missile system first and nuked Paris, effectively dominating all the world except the United States (which is thrust into a massive recession by refusing to knuckle under) the novel revolves around American cosmonauts (all space travelers were called as such because the USSR dominated space travel) trying to restore American power and liberate Europe from their communist oppressors by highjacking soviet asteroid mining facilitis. Sadly Worse than it Sounds.
In David Drake'sRCN Series novels, space piracy is a problem occasionally dealt with by Leary and his crew, and at one point Leary enlists a pirate world in order to counter a vastly superior Alliance fleet.
Jack Crow, the first-person protagonist inArmor by John Steakley.
There and Back Again by Pat Murphy has a few different versions, including a ship whose crew explicitly call themselves pirates, and whose captain takes on the pseudonym "Blackbeard". The novel is set in a galaxy with aPortal Network, and the pirates all tend to hang around the entrances of wormholes to avoid the scale problems mentioned in the trope description.
E.E. Smith'sLensman series is very big on space pirates, the battle against which forms a central part of the plot. Played straight in that the pirate ships are crewed by "the dregs of space", attack merchantmen for their cargo, board through airlocks (or in armour, through holes in the hull), and slaughter their opponents hand-to-hand.Subverted in that they are (later seen to be) more or less an integral part of the Boskonian military, and thus representative of an intergalactic spacefaring culture (albeit a highly dysfunctional one), rather than freelancers or organised criminals in the accepted sense.
Andre Norton called them Jacks, presumably short for "hijackers." Their actual methods of operation weren't detailed, but they often had connections with theThieves' Guild.
The Skrit Na ofAnimorphs are basically a whole race of them. They aren't specifically in either type, though...maybe a bit of type one without the violence and death. They go around kidnapping creatures to either add to their own collections, sell or get ransom for and whatever items they can sell or trade.
InTour of the Merrimack: The Ninth Circle, the titular Ninth Circle is a group of space pirates.
As you might expect,Anne McCaffrey'sPlanet Pirates series includes space pirates. They evade the scale problems by mainly hitting settlements and ships near planets. They also go a step further in many cases, beingPlanet Looters who will enslave and/or kill the inhabitants of a colony world, then settle their own people on it. Hence the name of the trilogy.
The first kind of space pirates appear in the serial "The Space Pirates".
The Captain of "The Pirate Planet" in the serial of the same name. Cybernetic eye and robot parrot (the Polyphase Aviatron).
Captain Wrack of the Eternals in the serial "Enlightement".
The ending of "Curse of the Black Spot" in which a crew of regular 17th century pirates end up taking over an abandoned space ship. We are never told if they remain pirates or use their new ship for legitimate purposes.
Captain Kaliko and her oil-rig raiders in theTotally Doctor Who animation "The Infinity Quest". Baltazar in the same story fits the trope to some extent, if only because he has a robot parrot.
The novelThe Resurrection Casket features robotic space pirates, and some extremely reminiscent, not to sayrecycled, names and/or characters. (Let's just say it involves a young lad named "Jimm" and "Captain Glint's treasure" and leave it there...)
Blurring the line between both types (and the line between Space Pirates andSky Pirates) is theNew Adventures novelSky Pirates!
The TV showLost in Space had two episodes with space pirates: "The Sky Pirate" and "Treasures of the Lost Planet".
There is actually a children's TV show onThe BBC calledSpace Pirates, although the pirates in question are actually an unlicenced radio station. This doesn't stop them having a captain with a skull-and-crossbones hat and a robot parrot.
The Reavers fromFirefly, whose typical method of raiding involves raping victims to death, eating their flesh, and sewing their skins to their clothing. The luckier ones get it inthat order. Really, they areSpace Vikings if all of the awful rumors about Medieval vikings had been true.
Vikings were basically pirates when they weren't engaging in honest trade. Reavers are justExclusively EvilUsual Adversaries with space ships.
As well, the crew ofSerenity herself are referred to as pirates on occasion.
There are regular pirates as well, though they generally just let you come to them (with some prodding from/of an accomplice).
The Reavers are revealed to field a massive fleet, which can take on an Alliance battlegroup.
"Our Mrs. Reynolds" episode had a couple of non-traditional space pirates as theMonster of the Week.
The raiders ofBabylon 5 are of the first kind. They were a recurring threat for the first half of the first season, but bit off more than they could chew when they tried to raid the station directly and were wiped out.
InStar Trek: The Next Generation episode "Gambit", Picard and Riker go undercover to infiltrate a pirate/mercenary crew. Supposedly this episode wouldn't have been made while Gene Roddenberry was still alive as he had always vetoed the "space pirates" idea.
The Maquis inStar Trek: Deep Space Nine commit piracy in the course of their terrorist activities; though they mostly keep to smuggling and gunrunning they have hijacked ships more than once.
The Orions are sometimes referred to as pirates, though they straddle the line between actual Space Pirates andThe Syndicate. Of course, since they are a fairly wide-spread race with no central government that may just be different groups.
The Barban, the main villain group ofSeijuu Sentai Gingaman are these. The leader and theMooks showed up inPower Rangers Lost Galaxy as "Captain Mutiny" and "Swabbies", but only for an arc instead of being the main villains (The rest were given no connection to Mutiny's crew).
The heroes ofKaizoku Sentai Gokaiger, the titular Gokaiger, absolutelyrun with this. Their suits are designed to look like jackets and their helmets have the traditional pirate hat built into them (except theSixth Ranger, whose has a bandana instead). Their main weapons are cutlasses and flintlocks (and a trident for Silver), they have a robot parrot, and Red'sHumongous Mecha is a giant galleon which serves as their living quarters and the core of theirCombining Mecha. Even their team logo is designed to look like a fancy skull and crossbones.
This all gets an amusingLampshade in the episode where the Gokaigers have to find the Gingamen. Upon hearing that their enemies were space pirates, Gokai Green decides to bring somedoughnuts as a peace offering, and at the end of the episode Ginga Red says the idea of heroic space pirates is still kinda weird for him, but he can see that the Gokaigers are good people.
In the Tokusatsu seriesChou Sei Kantai Sazer X, Space Pirates play a very big role as the villains. In 2005 a bunch of them attacks and take over earth. In the year 2500 their descendants have established anempire throughout a large part of the galaxy.
Double the Fist presents to us the man who discovered Australia, Captain James Cook, as an egotistical Space Pirate who barely flinches at the sight of the ballistic Fist Team.
Farscape had the Zenetan pirates, as well as the Sheyangs. The first were humanoids with well-armed, sleek little ships and an energy-draining capture net called the Flax. The Sheyangs were fireball-breathing frog-like creatures with lots of plasma cannons.
Music
Heavy Metal band Arcturus used to dress as pirates onstage while singing about astronomy and space travel.
Tom Smith'sThe Last Hero On Earth brings us the pirate ninjas from Dino Island. They stole their schtick pretty much in its entirety; what do you expect from pirates?
Tabletop Games
Plenty of examples fromWarhammer 40,000. Type one space pirates include Eldar Corsairs who raid the lesser races' shipping and settlements to survive, Dark Eldar who raid for captives and playthings (or more specifically,souls), Chaos warbands including some traitorous Space Marines such as the Red Corsairs. And even perfectly average human pirates, mainly around some of the more unexplored and backwater sectors.
Ork Freebooter bands are type two space pirates, and like hats and bandanas and fly the Jolly Ork. Examples include flash git Kaptin Badrukk, while the most recentDawn of War II expansion gives us Kaptin Bludflagg, who cuts through scores of Imperials and aliens, culminating in a battle with a daemon prince and an inquisitor on the same day, all so he can claim the inquisitor'sNice Hat.
In Graham McNeill'sUltramarines novelNightbringer, a Dark Eldar pirate is raiding the vessel carrying the Space Marines.
The40k spin-off RPGRogue Trader has space pirates (human or otherwise) as one of the most common enemies, and the rules let you go pirate if you wish. The Rogue Traders count to some extent as well, beingprivateers able and expected to launch full-scale planetary invasions. One of the supplements to the gameline, Hostile Acquisitions, explicitly gives the players the option to become a Reaver or a Swashbuckler archetype.
Spelljammer setting forDungeons & Dragons has The Pirates of Gith, an entirerace of Space Pirates, a third offshoot of the Githyanki/Githzerai. Additionally, the game also has plain ol' human Space Pirates who act pretty much identically to regular stereotypical pirates. Furthermore, the entire point of the setting is flying around in wooden sailing ships in space, and in the introduction to the setting the author mentions that they designed the setting's rules with the thought of a pirate standing on the deck of his ship--in space--as a guiding image.
Piracy is alive and well in theBattleTech universe due to the relative ease of capturing most recharging JumpShips, though actual independent pirate and bandit groups are seen more in the Periphery beyond the reach of either the Clans or the Great Houses. They don't so much attack civilian shipping as they raid poorly defended worlds directly, though.
Piracy is part of theTraveller universe, and pirates vary widely. The most notable variety are the Vargr corsairs which have considerable force behind them and are considered a respectable profession by other Vargr who are willing to shelter them. This makes them kind of like Barbary Pirates in space.
The Steve Jackson Games card gameSPANC: Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirls features space pirateCatgirls who take part in nefarious capers to win the most loot. Some of the capers are just there for cuteness, others are space-opera specific, like the Stuck Airlock.
The Galactic Marauders from theChampions sourcebookAlien Enemies.
Star Fleet Battles has the Orion Pirates, a whole race (in a game where 'race' means a playable faction) of space pirates, of the first type (although the picture in the write-up shows a humanoid with a patch-like prosthetic eye, so some apparently affect elements of the second type). They also do mercenary work (particularly when prolonged war has stretched normal militaries thin, and convoys tend to be better protected) and have even been known to run cargo for actually legitimate businesses and governments on occasion.
Toys
Big Barda is re-imagined as a space pirate in theAme-Comi Girls line of PVC statues from DC Direct.
Video Games
Elite, one of the earliest space trading games, featured pirates who would attack you between hyperspace jump-points and your destination. Or you could become a pirate yourself.
Escape Velocity and its sequels has a lot of pirates. EV has straight up pirates, EVO has the Renegades and Strandless, Nova has pirates, marauders (weak pirates hated by everyone, includingother pirates), the Guild (a more organized group with a semi-legal veneer), the Association (technically; they are the Pirates mentioned below as being one of the major mission strings, only they aren't so much pirates as semi-legal free traders thatPay Evil Unto Evil withactual pirates and smuggle stuff becauseThe Federation's laws are blatantlyMega Corp-slanted) and Houseless (AuroranRonin pirates). It's also notable that you canbe a pirate in any of the EV games. EVN even made it one of the possible primary mission strings. You could also attack, disable, board, steal from, and evenhijack (basically everything the pirates themselves do)the pirate's own ships without getting a bad rep for it. They had some serious cash, too...
Space piracy is a viable, if risky, career choice forEVE Online players.
Or that's what the creators want you to believe. In reality, most "pirates" describe piracy as rather unprofitable as the occasional loss of an expensively fitted ship is not made up by the equipment dropped by the low-level players that actually fall for pirates. These "pirates" go on to explain that theydo it for the lulz andnot for the money. The fun ofblowing up any random passerbys. The closest thing to Moneymaking via violence in EVE may be thePsycho for Hire "mercenary corporations" who demand money up front. This sort ofbehaviour is theexpected default inEVE Online.
The primary reason for this is the practical impossibility of capturing ships in the game. The pirates are pretty much limited to blowing their prey up and then scavenging the debris for anything of value. Most of the valuable cargo is destroyed in the process. The only piracy is even viable in the game is because you have no fuel, maintenance or living costs so your only expense is cheap ammo.
Hilariously enough, players seem to have no problem roleplaying themselves as either of the two varieties.
Demanding pay-outs tonot blow up the valuable cargo ship is viable though, although if you wait very long doing this the reinforcements can show up...
The raiding of ships is justified, however. Legitimate travelers, including merchants, use "trade lanes" to get from station to station quickly. These can be disrupted mid-route so pirates can set up an ambush.
Showed up justonce in theFree Space series. However, every user-made campaign now hashordes ofutterly suicidal space pirates who willjust keep coming despite the fact that you've already killed the dozens which came before, and the cargo you're protectingprobably wouldn't tally up to the cost of replacing their really expensive destroyed fighters. Also, those space fighters they were flying? Better quality than a full-fledgedrebellion could afford to procure.
Lampshaded inDerelict. The Tau Ceti pirates are able to field a Deimos-class corvette (this would be the equivalent of Somali pirates having a US Navy Destroyer) and Mackie immediately exclaims, "Where are theygetting this equipment?"It turns out the well-equipped pirates are actually mercenaries funded by theMorgan Mining Company to stir up trouble in Tau Ceti. When the Shivans start killing everyone, theactual local pirates, who have been almost entirely inactive in the wake of the mercenaries stirring things up, are recruited by the GTVA to help with the manpower shortage. The alternative makes them more than happy to go along with it.
The Turanic Raiders ofHomeworld. Also, while they are the only pirate race, both the Kushani and Taiidani sides use pirate-like ways, namely, hijacking. In the first series, the peaceful-sounding "Salvage Corvette" is often used for hijacking ships by making them incapable of resisting, towing them back to base, and let the landing party do the job. Thanks to the brokenness of this system, in Homeworld 2, the salvage corvettes are replaced by Marine Frigates (Hiigaran race), and the Infiltrator Frigate (Vaygr side). This time, they either latch onto said hapless ship (Hiigaran's preferred method), or launchboarding pods (Vaygr's way of sayingBadass),in the middle of battle. Both frigates are lightly armored and lightly armed, but very invaluable in the heat of battle. Their tendency to get targeted first could also be useful as bait, as a couple of these frigates will send any AI player to engage them even if that means turning their backs to theWave Motion Gun wielding enemies nearby.
Space pirates are your main antagonists in the early stages ofInfinite Space and provide fodder forRandom Encounters throughout the game.
Chapter 8 inKid Icarus: Uprising has Pit boarding the ship of Space Pirates to retrieve 3 Sacred Treasures. For a bunch of pirates stealing constellations, you might think they would be more important to the plot, but this is the only chapter they appear in.
You'll be fighting some variation of this trope and/orprivate millitary companies whenever you aren't following the plot inMass Effect. Notably, however, Mass Effect's Space Pirates don't seem to attack ships (and various militaries have a hard time hitting their ships en masse, too) - they attack sparely-defended colonies, then run away before the military can respond, generally taking their loot in the form of enslaved citizens.
In a variation on this trope,Metroid's Space Pirates are a large, organized army rather than small bands of individuals out for plunder. Their motives are always portrayed as sinister, but it's always implied that they have some larger goal at work, even if it's unclear what it is. InMetroid Prime 3: Corruption, Space Pirates are seen literally usingboarding craft to crash into and raid a fleet of capital ships; that's the first time they do something piratey on-screen, although the whole series started raiding a Federation ship that had Metroids on it, and before that, Samus's parents were killed in a raid. Besides the wholeTake Over The Universe thing, this is played close to the modern real life version.
In PS2 gameRogue Galaxy the heroes are space pirates.
In the 'Seasons' expansion pack forThe Sims 2, space piratesare the highest position on the 'Adventurer' career track. And yes, they wear pirate hats.
The Space Pirates in4XReal Time Strategy gameSins of a Solar Empire will periodically send out attacks against the players. They'll attack whichever player has the currently highest bounty on their head. They can, however, be disabled. The pirates are a combination of the two types. Their actions indicate that they are the former type,but their ships indicate the latter Please note theSpikes of Villainy and holographic jolly rogers.
In theDiplomacyExpansion Pack, you can offer missions to pirates outside of their normal "raiding schedule".
There is a bit of a bug in the game. At the start of a raid, the pirates pick a colony belonging to a player with the highest bounty. If said colony is captured by another player while they're flying to it, they'llstill attack it.
The pirate ships are actually modified TEC frigates and cruisers (lacking special abilities and shields, but with the ability to steal money from their victims), which makes sense, given that the TEC, story-wise, is the largest and most diverse faction and the story has the war taking place entirely in their space. Luckily, they can't field capital ships.
Spore. Alert: Hostile UFOs are attacking planet Nortaxesir! Alert: Pirates are stealing your spice on planet Nortaxesir! And on planet Oremastiz! Planet Quaralax too! And guess what? Your allies with a much vaster empire than you need your help killing a half-dozen animals that are carrying a deadly disease!
A little know (and proabaly for the best)FMV Light Gun game called...Space Pirates.
The Palm OS gameSpace Trader has these in droves. The player can even become one, if they want, but it comes with some side effects (like losing 10% of your profits when you can no longer sell your goods in person).
Space pirates show up inSword of the Stars, where they are the bane of your merchant fleets. Oddly enough, these pirates will use ships and technologies belonging to a random faction used in the current game—often factions you have yet to encounter—and will show up in situations that make no sense at all, like thenodespace-only using humans attacking your 'regular' FTL tarka or morrigi fleets, or having your hiver fleets (which use a planet-to-planetPortal Network) attacked in orbit of your own planet.
Random nothing - those areother players. They look like random encounter ships because (according to the fluff) raiding parties fly without colors to avoid diplomatic fallout (you can even harass AI allies and they won't figure it out, even if you're the only faction of a race in play). It also states that Humans and Zuul use regular relativity engines when trading and raiding as trade posts in a sector are guaranteed to be connected by node lines (and in the case of Zuul, a dedicated node ripper would be prohibitively expensive).
The manual also takes pains to explain the logistics of space piracy: first, trade is conducted within one of a regular grid of sectors, so raiders know roughly where to look. And only a part of the attacking fleet will ever participate in a raid, as they spread out to catch something and only some can arrive in time; on the other hand, the entire defense fleet will naturally be present. Also, the Hivers cannot raid since they lack any FTL and will never catch anything, but their traders can only be intercept in orbit as they use hyperspace gates to get instantly from colony to colony.
Tachyon the Fringe has many pirate groups, most of them located in the lawless Fringe (which makes up everything outside of Sol). The most famous of these are the Blood Clan pirates, led by Redship Rory, famous for painting their ships with the blood of their enemies. The Scavs are pirates but tend to be friendly with theBora, as they hateMegaCorps. The Void Runners are more mercenaries than pirates and frequently work for GalSpan, although they don't shy away from piracy. The Demon Pirates are piratesIn Name Only, as they are crazed religious fanatics living in the strange fog of the Twilight region, killing any passerby.
Pirates of the first type served asmooks in theWing Commander gamesPrivateer andPrivateer 2: The Darkening. The former even has a mission series operating from a pirate base, as a drug smuggler.
The Babylon Project expands on the raiders ofBabylon 5 mentioned above, allowing you to play a campaign where you're warring against them, or play a campaign where you're one of them.
Karlina and Jayson inWarp Force, who freeze a planet in order to store more water as ice and sell it for profit, killing most of the animals designed for warm-climate while doing so. They speak inpirate accents.
Star Ruler has these. They pop up from nowhere and raid your systems, blockading them if you enable that option.
Vega Strike has pirates as a faction. They use outdated ships and are supported mainly bydisplaced would-be colonists. Nobig plunder—their cargo is more or less the same as on equal civilian ships, and vessels like Plowshare carry things like "water, butane, pron".Player Character may do the same, but it's not worth trying, since this causesbad relations with the attacked ship's faction and its friends, expanding through fights with them until shot at sight by almost everyone.
InHalo, although it hasn't been shown in-game, the Kig-Yar[2] are said to have been space pirates before joining The Covenant. Part of the novelContact Harvest takes place aboard a Kig-Yar pirate vessel.
The pirate clans in theX Universe have gotten to the point where they've becomeN.G.O. Superpowers, with capital ships and space stations constructed out of kitbashed derelicts. Rather than trying to exterminate them (they respawn at their home base), advanced players generally work to befriend them by selling themspaceweed and space fuel. Ditto the Yaki, who are space pirates for all intents and purposes, though they use a motif ofYakuzaIN SPACE!
Master of Orion 2 has pirate activity as a random event—it interrupts freight traffic in some system and goes away if enough of military presence is brought to the place. Also, explorers discovering a new system sometimes stumble onPirate Booty.
That wasn't space; it was an entirePARALLEL UNIVERSE!!! (one with very odd properties for the flow of time itself).
Not to mention that they were kidnapping people and sticking them in their hold fortime. It's also made clear that there are about a million easier ways to do it, but 1) pirates are anti-social, so they don't want live in the villages necessary to survive normally, and 2)they're all a bunch of nerds acting out pirate fantasies.
What's made clear is that there aretwo ways to do it, neither of which are necessarily easy as both have their problems. Even the ones who choose the community-building method aren't above piracy on those not with the in-group.
The webcomicStarslip Crisis parodies the second form of this trope with Infra-Redbeard and his crew. They fly around in an open-decked ship with solar sails, fight with Atom Cutlasses, and otherwise fill every pirate cliche while just happening to be in space.
Cutter Edgewise himself was a former Pirate Science officer. These man the Rum Sensors.
Thestory arc started in November inZap! involves pirates that appear to be a mix of this andSky Pirate kidnapping two main characters.
In a print-exclusive tale, providing someBackstory for Sgt. Schlock.
And again in the online comic itself. The comic even hung a lampshade on the economic and physical problems inherent in this type of venture.Of course, they turned out not to be pirates, but guerillas fighting the current government.
Earlier, there was a fleet gone rogue, but it didn't last long either.
Therewas some sort of pirate community mentioned, but they are more likely to be outlaws of all trades who happen to own ships, rather than dedicated to ship-on-ship action; it's the default destination forEsspererin heretics, but still no more than a footnote.
Crimson Dark: Vaegyr Ward hates being called a pirate. As he points out, he has letters of marque, so he's a privateer. Also, pirates proper tend to be meaner than him.
InAbsurd Notions, in a roleplaying game being played by the characters,space pirates turn up whose mannerisms correspond to exaggerated mannerisms ofsoftware "pirates". Namely, a ship preparing to attack opens communication with "j0, SUXX0RZ!! xDR3Dx3DDx 0WNZ U!!! 5UR3ND0R N0W!! 4LL j00R W4R3Z R B3L0N9 2 US L0L!!1!!!". Lampshaded by Asimov, Isaac's character, who responds with "I think I miss the days when piratessaid 'Arrr'."
Type 1 space pirates are said to have occurred inSSDD, and is why there was an ancient CORE station orbiting Uranus at the start of the SSDF arc. But once the mineral resources of the outer system dried up piracy ceased to become profitable.
King Hippo relates a story toCaptain SNES about the time he raided the space pirates who built Mother Brain... theCaptain N version. They came complete with Space Booty and Space-Yarrs.
Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire has "thePistol Packin' Polaris Packrat"; also, one cyborg ex- asteroid pirate turnedSpace Marine sergeant, who became rather unpopular for the time (very brief) he lived after this discovery. Also, that guy on the starpirates.net banner who boasted before Buck—but he was bad.
The main characters ofThe Endless Night are Space Pirates, and the podcast mainly focuses on their exploits as they raid and pillage across the galaxy.
Mighty Moshin' Emo Rangers, a fan parody ofPower Rangers and emo culture, has an episode where the Emo Rangers battle the Rave Pirates from outer space, who have come to infect earth teenagers with their "New Rave"
They've become quite the problem inNexus Gate since space travel became a reality.
Space piracy has been TRIED inThe Journal Entries (more than once, and even on-screen), but between any random merchant ship possibly having just about any damn kind of weaponry (including one with a combat android that boarded an attacking vessel and sabotaged its' reactors to explode), the way various space navies tend to go looking for any space pirates (mostly because they're bored and curb stomping pirates is fun), and how much it COSTS to go searching for merchants to try to plunder in the first place, they tend to die without successors.
Western Animation
Long John Silver the 23rd in theDuck Dodgers episode "Shiver Me Dodgers".
An unnamed space pirate (with three peg legs out of four, parrots on three of his four shoulders, and eyepatches on two of his three eyes) menaced the Planet Express Ship onFuturama with galleon-style spaceships and cannons, vowing to send them to "Davy Jarg's locker" if they don't electronically transfer their space-doubloons, and realizing too late that his children are his onlyreal treasures. What made it even funnier was Leela's explanation on what Space Pirates are: "They're like Pirates...butin space!"
Sonny Blackbones and the pirates inGalactik Football. They're really more heroic space outlaws but they do have at least one member who likes to say 'Arr!' No parrot, though they do have a football team.
The Clone Wars offers a more traditional version with the Weequay pirates led by Hondo Ohnaka (complete with a monkey-lizard standing in for a parrot), who is as likeable as he is cunning. He managed to take Count Dooku, Anakin Skywalker, and Obi-Wan Kenobi all hostage, while still being friendly towards them. Even more alarming, the trio (and the audience) weren't and still aren't completely sure how he did it! If that's not enough, he was able to briefly duel Anakin with an electrostaff, on a moving tank pilot, no less.
TheMegas XLR episode "Space Booty" (yes, that is the actual title) had a group of Space Pirates led by aCaptain Harlock expy. This being Megas they also had a buttload ofHumongous Mecha for Coop to smash.
Cannonball of theTransformers Cybertron toyline is an actual space pirate, complete with skeleton paint apps and a black swath of paint over half of the top of his face in mimicry of an eyepatch. Alas, he was not to appear in the series.
↑Now referred to by many governments as maritime terrorists