games

YES! You have these variously libertarian to neoliberal space capitalist societies living in incredibly close proximity to massive bands of spacers and pirates- the governments cannot even provide security, not just for independent colonists but even their own important facilities. This should be a really interesting backdrop, but they just don't seem to talk about it. It's clearly a societal meltdown and the pirates should have some kind of politics. You could have good pirates and bad pirates, and the bad pirates could be getting funded on the DL by rival governments.

Right, and this is exactly the same as One Piece.

Theres a really glaring thing - you have Pirates and you have Spacers, the latter of which are supposed to be just nutjobs or cults or something. But they don't actually do anything different from the pirates, in any way. It seems like something was cut, and they just wound up with two slightly different looking bad guy human types.

It's pretty obvious that one group was supposed to be good pirates with a clear political basis in anarchism, whereas the other group was supposed to be bad pirates, complete and total marauders, 100% bad in every incarnation of them.

I think representing these as 2 factions was a mistake and the better idea would have been to have "pirates" and do it One Piece style with some of them being objectively good while others are clearly terrible. Create a kind of ambiguity and an understanding for the distrust people have for them, and create a tension for the player because they don't know what kind of pirates they're dealing with until after they take the risk of seeing if they're good or bad. The alternative is blasting them on sight every single time, which turns you into the same as the World Navy.

I'm not sure what you would do with the Spacers if you go down this route. They feel like they shouldn't be a clear independent faction but rather a subfaction of Pirates that do not always make it clear that they're members of that subfaction.

Ultimately this is all a bit of a mess but there is a twinkle of something good here with somewhat minor changes to structure. One Piece is absolutely the right work of fiction to look at for inspiration in repairing it though, it's very similar.