• For piracy to work, there needs to be a system that makes it work. Most pirates in the Golden Age of Piracy were actually privateers. They had a letter of marque from some government that allowed them to legally attack, plunder, sink or capture ships from rivalling nations. That means they had safe harbours, a place to resupply and sell their spoils. This is probably the most important aspect.
• Piracy also worked because stuff was hard to track and trace. On the high seas of the 17th century, if you were past the horizon you were gone. That means in practice you had to run for 4-6km, then you were mostly safe. The same would be necessary for space piracy. That means piracy would not work in a “The Expanse”-like universe with only sub-light-speed travel, because we can already today track space probes throughout large parts of the solar system. You’d need something like warp or hyperspace, where you could travel outside of trackable real space.
• A pirate doesn’t need to provide their own Space Ship. They didn’t provide their own ships back then either. They used mutany to take over a ship, then used the ship to capture other ships. The space ships would need to be rather easy to operate though, so that even a crew of low-ranking mutaneers could operate a ship they stole.

I think drone on drone piracy could happen with asteroid mining missions without the need for manned missions. And it wouldn’t need to be that cheap, nations will finance privateers. Imo all you need for piracy is a good moving from a to b and the inability for even overwhelming force to keep the good secure. Space is very hard to secure.

Space parrots?

I’ll remind you that sailing ships big enough for piracy very much cost more than a house. If nothing else, they’re way bigger than a house, and literally house dozens of crew for long stretches of time. A huge amount of modern capitalism was invented exactly because ships were so expensive and risky (insurance, large scale banking, corporations, lots of contract law, risk assessments, time value of money etc)

But yeah. Valuable space freight passing through areas of space with complicated conditions with many safe harbours for the pirates, for one reason or another. Political (government doesn’t care that they pirate against those other guys) geographical (countless small islands/asteroids makes searching for them futile), or otherwise

I think some kind of stealth technology. Not gonna do much pirating if they can “see” you coming days / weeks in advance, space is big and mostly empty. Either that or so much traffic that you can blend in.

This doesn’t really answer your question, but if this is something you’ve been thinking about I highly recommend the “Revenger” series by Alastair Reynolds.

It’s a sci-fi series about a group of extremely lo-fi space pirates. The world in which is takes place is essentially a post space colonization dystopia: civilization is spread across multiple planets and there’s aging tech everywhere - some alien, some not - that people can somewhat use, but not really maintain. Space travel is handled by putting solar sails on old hulls and sailing through space via dead reckoning and gravity pools in the dark.

The whole thing is a bit ridiculous, but world building basically explodes your question and explores it in a really fun way.