Well welcome to the wonderful world of pirating sir!
The first and foremost thing you need to do is pick a faction/ a house to pirate in. Most people flock to the Corsairs and Outcasts as their first choices because of their powerful ships and weapons coupled with their massive zone of operations. However you may want to look into smaller pirating groups like the Lane Hackers, Mollys, and the Unioners...which are limited by houses really... Also the Red Hessians are cool.
Where you operate is going to really determine the kind of people you will be robbing, for instance Corsairs and Red Hessians will run into alot of miners in the Omegas which always pay nicely to save their ore... while the Liberty Rouges tend to catch lots of shipping transports in California. If you are going to be pirating in the trade lanes, find a bottleneck where ships have to pass you to get to their destination... and only disable the lane when you see a trader appear on the radar, otherwise they can see the disabled lane in the distance and avoid you.
People will probably suggest you start with a bomber... a nice choice for popping transports and gunboats, but they can cost upwards of 40 million once you have all the equipment and fighters can still kill them... and aiming the SNAC takes time to get used to before you can aim it at fighters. A pirate VHF like a Titan, Werewolf, or Saber would be a good start, as they can kill transports and any law that finds you. Light fighters are also good because they can OUTRUN any transport in the game with their 400 cruise speed. Gunboats work nicely, but again a massive investment and oddly have the opposite problem that bombers do... you can kill fighters no problem but transports can hurt you because you are slow enough for their guns to hit! Also please consider using a pirate transport, nothing hurts a trader like you demanding CARGO instead of credits.
It is possible, you can even be an independent pirate free from the factions, but that has the disadvantage of them maybe chasing you out of their territory. Pirating alone is very possible and doable, but it gets lonely for sure. It is not always possible to pirate with friends and teammates though, so you need to roll with the punches.
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