Duncan brought up the idea of talking to any ship. And I wanted to catch that idea in a thread before it gets lost.
Talking to any ship is the easy part. The harder part is having something meaningful happen.
There are a couple of easy additions that we could make. A pirate player could demand the dropping of cargo. And the ship could choose to drop, based on threat level of the players ship. Later, the players level of ruthlessness could factor in. If the player is a well known killer, ships would drop cargo sooner.