Okay... sounds complicated lol.   If only life were as simple as flipping a boolean to TRUE but I supposed that's too much to ask .   

Alright well, I guess I've got my work cut out for me.  My line of thought is creating a planet where say-- every 180 seconds, neutral ships will respawn unless neutral ships are already there, in which case nothing happens.  It'd be an area where one could level their capital ships fighting away from normal battles. 

Alright, I've another question to bother you with, one that may, depending on the answer, make this idea of mine a hell of a lot simpler to execute.  Is it possible to keep pirates in the game but turn off the ability of AI factions to blow their cash on them?

Hmm, it would be harder to test if they were still there. The pirates have no limit on their ships either, at one point a bug that caused some pirate raids to never be carried out lead to pirate bases having hundreds of ships. You could do what you want, but you could end up with some very large fleets at these areas.

What you could do is make these ships you fight there spawn another ship after a delay when they are destroyed, but that requires even more abilities.

I am not sure. I have plans for a future mod that would change the pirate system so that this would be the case, but again it requires some fancy new ship and ability work. I guess what you could try is in the gameplay.contant file, there are some line that control how many credits it costs to purchase a pirate raid (and how many ships you get). You might be able to set these to zero and not spawn any ships to effectively disable them. For the regular bounty missions, you can also control what ships get sent, but I'm not sure if there is a similar line to control how much the AI spends on bounty.

Hmm, well I suppose I'll find out.  I may just let the pirates act as the "respawning" vessels for this map I'm creating by letting them spawn as they normally would then attack the planet.  Once they attack a planet, if no resistance is provided, they tend to stay there (I think.  It was that way in Diplomacy) so it'd be a crude way of "respawning" units to sit on a planet.  I can also control the number of pirates, what ships they use, and their strengths as well so it could work out.  But it would be very annoying for this game type (and utterly useless for my purposes) for the AI to bid for the pirates and waste their money unnecessarily.  I'll give what you guys have provided a shot.  See what happens. 

No, pirates will return to the pirate base once everything has been destroyed at the pirate planet.

I believe you are mistaken, and if they didn't it was a bug. The intended behavior is that they return to the pirate base when they have no more targets at the planet they are that. Note this may mean they get stuck their attacking tradeships and the like, since more arrive before they can destroy them.

Pirate behavior is pretty hardcoded beyond those constants in the constants file.