Are these people heavily armed with something other than just hand held guns, like torpedos or large caliber ship-mounted guns? If not, once the whole hostage situation is resolved, isn’t there a fairly simple response to this problem?
The U.S. Navy sometimes uses decommisioned ships for target practice and instrumenting them to collect data on shock events like underwater detonations. These days it’s a huge effort/cost to “clean” the ships before they can be sunk due to concerns with PCB’s and other harmful items. I think you see where I’m going with this. If you’re going to spend money on training, might as well do it the cheap way.
One of the major problems with arming ship crews is it creates an entirely different situation when the crew has access to a weapons. While you’d expect them to be trained and such, not everyone is suited to handling weapons, and that isn’t exactly a forethought when signing up to work on a ship. Engineer gets mad at the cook, dude looses it, grabs the 12 gauge, you get the picture.
And also if the pirates know weapons are onboard, they’ll be much more agressive when they attempt to board. As bad as it is right now, the pirates do a lot of showing off, but generally don’t really hurt any body. If they board a ship and come under fire, you’ll have a lot more dead bodies.
I think the best strategy would to be to go after the pirates themselves. All these news papers go to “pirate coves” and cities and ports and shit, I wonder why no one has gone and jacked they’re boats or weapons or anything like that. They can claim to be pirates all they want, but no one will be sweating when their ass is trying to swim out to your ship.