Hardcore probably wont work in OP whther you choose priates or not since priate appear in most mission scripts. Hardcore is a PvP mod and best described as a greatly enhanced version of SFC2 (philosophically) using SFC OP as the base program. Since the Single player scripts in OP are "pirate centric" I would think trying to play SFC OP using Hardcore is going to net a whole mess of errors or problems.
However Older versions of Hardcore did have the pirates at their BPV's. I think I might have one on my old system but I am not sure it will work anyway...no promises on that.
I now use the "brute force method" of switching mods. I recreate my SFC folder for as many mods as I want and then just rename the folder (which takes about 10 seconds) to the proper game folder when I want to play a specific mod.
I have a pristine version of SFC OP set at 2.5.5.2 as my base mod. Anytime i want to add a mod I load the mod to that then export it out under a new name for future use, renaming a dup;licate "base" mod or any other mod to the "Starfleet Command Orion Pirates" folder name.
This method is the best method for running mods I have found with one drawback...it uses gobs of disk space.
Not a problem for me since I now have a 250 gb harddrive but thpose with 40 or 80 gig may see the difference.