So I was wondering how pirates finds targets to plunder. How I imagine it is that most traders and such hyperspace to their location. And as far as I know only highly advanced ships, like an Interdictor, can pull ships out of hyperspace.
Do the pirates wait at certain 'crossroads'? Where traders have to shift hyperspace lanes. Those spots sound like pretty well guarded areas by law enforcement.
I really have no idea about this and could use some help.

Pirates sometimes tow large asteroids into space lanes and wait for their gravity wells to yank ships out of hyperspace. So that's one way

Sometimes they'll hang out near worlds with fairly high space traffic but smaller defense forces, and try to pick off ships entering or leaving the system. Space is big. You can't guard all of it.

A trick that some pirates tried once in a Star Wars book (can't remember which off the top of my head) was that they called in a fake emergency on one side of the planet, and while the defense forces scrambled to defend against the non-existent threat, the pirates prepared their raid on ships coming from the other side of the planet.

Hyperspace trips aren't always one jump. Depending on the length of the trip, it could be a handful of actual jumps to get to the final destination. These jump points are gravitational calm spots in the galaxy, that allow the ship to drop out of hyperspace, realign with new coordinates, and jump again. On the common traffic lanes, these are well known spots, and it's not unreasonable to have pirates camp these locations to see who comes out of hyperspace.

Pirates can also employ slicers to get data about shipment routes and timetables, and plan accordingly for ambushes.

Pirates can also employ methods to interrupt the lightspeed travel, by using hyperspace inhibitors (if they have the money for it), or big hunks of rock like @awayputurwpn mentioned.

They could also potentially use people with Force sensitivity, who are skilled with Foresee, to predict the future for ambushes.

They might also have "agreements" with the local customs agents, to be given heads up about rich targets, for a cut of the profits.

Those are a few offhand examples I can think of, on how pirates would operate their thievery ways.

Put crew on targets undercover and hijack ships from within.

Here is an indispensable resource for running a pirating campaign: Pirates and Privateers.

Chapter 2 "Raiding", provides answers to your question, and lots more.

I've always looked at it as hyperspace travel was a series of smaller jumps through known locations and routes. Several would probably be through systems where you have to drop out on one side, fly to the other and then jump again. Or even having to stop and then take a couple of smaller jumps to go around a large enough obstacle. If any of these locations was in an out of the way place, pirates could be waiting. Otherwise the options above work well too.

Give Black Sails a watch. They sometimes use contacts that give them leads. This could be someone the group pays for info. A company person looking to pay off a gambling debt. A dockworker that overheard something. A disgruntled employee that wants a cut. You can think up all kinds of ways to get the info.

The asteroid is one of the best ambushes. My group has stowed away, we had one time where the tank just assaulted the ship in port (consequences follow), or use a good deceiver to find a way (my personal fav).

David Weber had a long aside about this in one of his Honor Harrington books. The nature of space travel is different than Star Wars, but the concepts still apply. Yes, space is immense. However, useful routes from one system to another have smaller volumes and predictable points. The major ones are the main hyperspace routes, but those routes exist between each system. A pirate can simply trawl along points where the majority of ships passing will stop and jump then then.

A pirate will also need to make a risk/reward calculation based on how well patrolled a route and how heavily traveled. Ideally they'll find somewhere with lots of merchants and very little military presence. I'd imagine that the edges of corporate space and the edges of Hutt space are popular.

25 minutes ago, Genuine said:

A pirate will also need to make a risk/reward calculation based on how well patrolled a route and how heavily traveled. Ideally they'll find somewhere with lots of merchants and very little military presence. I'd imagine that the edges of corporate space and the edges of Hutt space are popular.

Exactly. I think we can take a page form what modern-day pirates do in this regard. There's a lot of piracy off the coast of Somalia for a couple reasons: lots of traffic, and a very weak (or non-existent) government to patrol the waters. In Star Wars, we have to account for the fact that there is a powerful galactic government in place, but some regions have a much smaller Imperial presence and lots of commerce zipping through nonetheless, like the two regions you mention.

After reading through this thread, I have to disagree with most of the answers. There are some good tid bits, like the fact that you hang out at a port and figure out who has what and when and where they are shipping. Because in the Star Wars universe, knowing who, when, and where is vital for a pirate in order to pull off a successful interdiction.

According to RAW, once you enter hyperspace, you can stay there until you need to come out. The only way you get bumped out is if you interact with or fly too close to a gravity well. So the four things that you need for a successful hyperspace transit are 1) A working hyperdrive, 2) working engines, 3) A right and proper hyperspace route calculation, & 4) sufficient consumables to endure the trip.

As a Star Wars pirate, you have two narrow windows of opportunity. You can interdict a ship as it breaks orbit and before it is able to calculate its jump to hyperspace. Or you can meet it on the other side as it approaches its destination.

So in those tiny narrow windows of opportunities there are exactly three ways that you can stop a ship and raid it.

1) Employ weapons to damage either the Hyperdrive and/or the Engines. (Also, knocking out the power plant would work, because neither the engines and hyperdrive can operate without electricity).

2) Employ ion weapons and overwhelm the System Stress of a ship. THEN raid the ship before the crew can reboot their systems.

3) Lock onto a target ship with a larger ship with a tractor beam, (which is a tactic favored by the Imperial Star Destroyers).

After you stop the target ship, have the pilot maneuver to dock with it's docking hatch. Next either have your slicer open the hatch or have the mechanic cut their way through the hatch. Deal with the crew and then you can either ****** the cargo or the whole ship (if you have time to repair your damaged).

But to start, hanging out at a port and acquiring shipping schedules for prospective targets is the best first step. You can also opt to trawl a space lane for potential victims, but that will be less effective. Hanging around in that small section of space is suspicious looking

I think the idea of moving an asteroid is not feasible, even in a "super-science" environment like Star Wars. First grab a couple of Star Destroyer scale engines (each costing the price of most small cargo ships) mount them to a rock in space that you think you might move in a way that allows you to steer and maneuver the rock. Next, find a sufficiently large power plant & piloting accommodations. Calculate a burn that will have the asteroid either fall out of orbit or escape to your preferred interdiction point.

Next, hope some official or amateur astronomer doesn't notice the shift in orbit of your preferred rock and doesn't notify the local government during the SEVERAL MONTHS trip from orbit point A to orbit point B.

The other thing that the locals could do, short of raiding your operation with a small fleet, is to notify the Scout Survey, who can update the local hyperspace lanes in a couple of days to "correct" for your moving rock.

Yeah, the more I think about the asteroid idea the more silly I find it.

For general edification, here's a link to the space pirate tactic mentioned above:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/The_Barricade

1 hour ago, Mark Caliber said:

According to RAW, once you enter hyperspace, you can stay there until you need to come out. The only way you get bumped out is if you interact with or fly too close to a gravity well. So the four things that you need for a successful hyperspace transit are 1) A working hyperdrive, 2) working engines, 3) A right and proper hyperspace route calculation, & 4) sufficient consumables to endure the trip.

As a Star Wars pirate, you have two narrow windows of opportunity. You can interdict a ship as it breaks orbit and before it is able to calculate its jump to hyperspace. Or you can meet it on the other side as it approaches its destination.

Your own description disagrees with the last quoted paragraph.
Actually even the first one is misleading. You need to come out when interacting with a mass shadow, which means that anything in your way will pull your out. This can easily achieved by tucking up some big rocks in the way.

As a pirate you can screw with 3) by blockading hyperspace routes, be it with obstacles, mass shadow generators or potentially even gravity mines, which are furthermore an excellent tool to blockade a point of interest.
Speaking of PoI, while you can indeed travel in one go via a single long jump, it can often be beneficial to take a shortcut in normal space instead of flying the long way around trough hyperspace. Not only because those routes are harder to patrol (smugglers) but as well because you can save considerate amounts of time that way.
The Balmorra Run for example runs through the Kaliida Nebula and is a significant shortcut instead of flying around the nebula to reach the Kaliida Shoals Medical Center in the Ryndellian sector. Points of interest like those are not uncommon among hyperspace routes, sure you can go along with a longer route without real space stops, but in that case you really need to avoid any mass shadow along the way which can increase the length of your route substantially. At the other hand such real space routes are a perfect opportunity for pirates. (FC page 77)

Another Star Wars-specific way would be for a talented slicer to mess with the ship's hyperspace calculation. I suppose it could be done remotely, but a stowaway or turncoat astromech would be the most effective. Depending on how granular you want to get, the astromech would merely need to rig the display to show that the desired hyperspace coordinates were input and ready, while actually a different set of coordinates were entered to take the ship to a completely different destination - presumably an ambuscade.

In my experience the droids in my game would end up doing something dark...

"Lets reprogram the hutt battle droid statues to help us escape"

Despair rolled.

"In Hutt news a massacre at the Hutt palace of... "

enough said.

In the Non cannon Xwing Series of Books, A Star destroyer on Escort Duty, Let his Convey Jump first. Calculated there likely exit points, and found one to be off. It than Jumped along the same course at a higher speed and was able to catch up. Effectively ambushing the Pirates (Rebels) while they ambushed the freighter. So A pirate ship could just follow through hyperspace and hope they have a faster engine, and the plotted exit from hyperspace, is in a location that is suitable for a boarding.

3 hours ago, XGrifterX said:

In the Non cannon Xwing Series of Books, A Star destroyer on Escort Duty, Let his Convey Jump first. Calculated there likely exit points, and found one to be off. It than Jumped along the same course at a higher speed and was able to catch up. Effectively ambushing the Pirates (Rebels) while they ambushed the freighter. So A pirate ship could just follow through hyperspace and hope they have a faster engine, and the plotted exit from hyperspace, is in a location that is suitable for a boarding.

This is part of why I find it frustrating that virtually every ship has a hyperdrive of 3 or less. I'd like to see more in the four to six range so that you could do stuff like this.

Another idea would be simply to sit and watch ships jump from a system, calculate their destinations, holonet to your faster fleet further ahead on that route and have them jump to that location as well.

5 hours ago, Ahrimon said:

This is part of why I find it frustrating that virtually every ship has a hyperdrive of 3 or less. I'd like to see more in the four to six range so that you could do stuff like this.

Another idea would be simply to sit and watch ships jump from a system, calculate their destinations, holonet to your faster fleet further ahead on that route and have them jump to that location as well.

There is an attachment for that, even a ship with 3 can go down to 1. if your mechanic can tune your hyperdrive well enough. And if your ship starts with 2, you can go down to 0.5 even, which is 6 times faster than a hyperspace rating of 3. ;-)

Yes, but thats the same as saying everyone ges a race car but some just happen to be faster than others. With a wider range of default options you have more story options. More chances for people to be amazed that you did the kessel run in 12 parsecs.

1 hour ago, Ahrimon said:

Yes, but thats the same as saying everyone ges a race car but some just happen to be faster than others. With a wider range of default options you have more story options. More chances for people to be amazed that you did the kessel run in 12 parsecs.

Parsec is still a measurement of distance not speed. So do a proper astrogation check to impress the ladies.
My astromech might plot routes through the **** deep core with her usual triple triumphs. Even with factor 3 we would be still faster than a regular factor 1 ship

And btw, everything that is not .5 ain't a race car. ;-)