In my attempt to master early game Unfallen, i have tried to understand the spawning and behavioral patterns of the pirates. I did a lot more 30-60 turn playthroughs, rather than complete games, often recording the pirate spawns time and position wise.

Through this experience i have found myself confused and concerned by the way the system seems to be working. 

NOTE: I play at endless pirates and i understand that this is responsible for most of my troubles. At the same time some of the issues have nothing to do with difficulty and therefore i still wanted to create this discussion.

To sum up the info i have collected:

1. Spawning happens on turn 11, with some rng regarding position, never less than 2 jumps from home systems.

2. Respawn can happen as soon as turn 17, usually by 21 at the latest. A similar patten continues for the next few dozen turns.

3. First pirate fleet spawns 1 turn after 1st lair spawn. Next spawn is 8-11 turns later

4. The strength of these fleets slowly scales up to 500, but after turn 25 you can expect 1100-1800 strength fleets to start popping up.

5. Each first lair spawn's strength relies on the lair level, but also has a indipendent variability. So a second level lair  for example can still spawn a pretty weak-and easily destroyed fleet.

But their power increases with each generation.

6. In general the pirates fixate on Unfallen vineships, but rarely siege systems for more than 1 or 2 turns at most, usually runinng back and forth between colonies.

7. The fleets dont move far from their lairs, usually 1-2 jumps at most.

Concerns:

1. Sometimes the spawn rng places 2 lairs close to each other, creating insane pressure on the unlucky faction/player.

2. I have seen fleets get extra ships indipendent of the lair fleet spawns. I actually saw a fleet with 3 small pirate ships, obtain a medium hull with 9 turns remaining n the lair fleet spawn timer.

3. Respawns that happens the turn after a lair is destroyed is so demoralizing, it makes you feel you ar being punished for clearing it, especially when the lair spawns at higher level, needs a lot more manpower than what you have on the current fleet, and a new fleet spawn is unavoidable.

4. I have seen lairs spawn pirates when a hack-sabotage supplies is applied-the fleet spawned on that very moment, not even a turn after.

Suggestions:

1. Make lairs less rng both in time and positioning, to account for concerns 1&3

2. Give pirates objectives and rewards for completing them, or penalties when factions prevent them from doing so. 

3. Make lair destruction have a possibility to give rewards, like modules, temporary effects or technologies, depending on its level.

4. Make lairs apply temporary or permanent but ranged based effects on neighrboors the longer they exist.

The above will make pirates more than an annoyance you can ignore outside of pirate marks, vastly reduce the danger difference between those 2 situations as well as bad rng impact, Incentivise players to actually seek them out and destroy them, and in general make the overall experience feel a lot more immersive and interesting.

This doesn't seem to be any better a year later based on my playing. I just watched a Let's Play by GUD since I was curious to see if a streamer has talked about this, but... he plays the game on Fast Speed. You can see from his video that pirates aren't balanced for speed.  So they're much easier to play against on Fast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcIVUEkhRhk

So here's your workaround for an easier Unfallen early game: play on fast :-/

That being said, you didn't mention the idea of paying off the pirates.  If you can get your hacks through and get some dust, this seems to be the best way to deal with them as Unfallen.