Leaving the ship behind is NOT a silly idea. It may be worth more than the
cargo, but the cargo doesn't take a year or more to build. Let's say you have
a subsector that builds 300 merchant ships a year. This come out to 25 a month.
It will take 25 successful pirating missions a month to get all the ships built
that year. Spread that over about 15-20 inhabited systems, and you get a
system being hit about 1 to 1.5 times a month -- not a very high number. Also,
taking the ship has other problems -- you have to have a place to keep it
until you get rid of it, and you have to split your crew to man it, and you
still have the problem of selling it. I could see them taking the ship if (a)
their ship was too badly damaged, (b) if the crew was splitting up, going
seperate ways, and needed another ship, or (c) the pirates were real
scum-of-the-earth. The disagreement we have here is based on the perception of
pirates -- I use the early ones (about 1650-1700) as the basis for mine:
relatively honorable, and not intrested in the personal wealth of the crewmen
or passengers (unless of course such a person was worth a great deal of money
in ransom -- like a princess). Even when such pirates took the ship, they made
sure that the crew and passengers were put on a small boat (longboat or
smaller) and provisioned well enough so that they could reach land. The early
pirates were not common murderers or robbers. Not taking a ship mean that they
could steal from it again (and often did).