The other thing worth keeping in mind is that being a privateer in the traditional sense would be an entirely different challenge than what the player actually faced in the game. Privateers traditionally were not paid at all, instead their reward was the loot they captured. Well, we do sometimes see a bit of salvageable cargo after a freighter is destroyed, but presumably most of the cargo is destroyed with the ship. So, for a privateer to function well, it wouldn't do to just fly a Centurion around and blow up enemy ships - you'd have to operate a ship big enough to be able to deploy a boarding party on an enemy freighter. So, it's actually a bigger scale of operations, with different kinds of complications. I'm sure this is something that nobody at Origin ever really considered seriously - shipboard combat would have made Privateer an excessively complicated project. The game solves this with the elegant solution of simply having Confed hand out money for the destruction of enemy ships, but if you think about the scale of the war, this is probably exactly what went on anyway - from Confed's perspective, it would be far more productive for a privateer to blow up one ship after another after another for as long as possible, than to have him fly back to a friendly port to drop off loot after every major encounter.