As an aside, this gives me evil ideas for a campaign where all weapons are hidden, and you don't know what the enemy will fire at you until he opens fire.
Put it in a map with a lot of asteroids, black holes, and nebula, and claim that the interference is too high to get good scans of the enemy.
Call the campaign "Blind Man's Bluff", or something.
Anyway, on with the answers......
The Only ID it gave me was O-CA. One was armed with 4 other Drone Racks...so it was surprising when it launched six at me. The other was armed with a Pair of Disrupters and a pair of Photons.
Ah, I see. I was reading the O in O-CA to mean Orion Cartel, but you really mean O-CA, for Neutral Orion Pirates, not X-CA, for Orion Cartel pirates.
I understand how this happens, and I believe it is a Taldren glitch with the standard shiplist. I didn't mess with the neutral pirates at all, and didn't add any weapons (yet!) to any of the Taldren cartel ships.
Here is how it works: Each ship has twenty weapons slots that can be fillled; ten heavy and ten "other". The "other" is mostly used for phasers and ADD. However, each ship UI only shows a limited set of these slots on its graphic. Freightors only show one or two; battleships and starbases generally will show all twenty. Other ships fall in between.
If you put a weapon into a slot that won't show on the UI, the weapon will still work properly. It will still draw power and it will fire if you select "all weapons"; but it won't show on the UI and you won't be able to select it to fire individually.
I don't know if the ships in question have visible slots that are empty, but I'll look into it. If they do then I may try to fix this bug when I combine cartels next Monday.
In the meantime, the surprise shots will just add a bit more spice to the game. As Evil Dav says, them damn pirates is sneaky!
-Herr Burt