Badger was an old workhorse for United Sol navy, released in year 7060. The space vessel was classified as a frigate. Its successor was USF Stiletto released in 8537.

While classified as a frigate, Badger was on a lower end of the scale and the ship was perfectly capable of being controlled by one person. Thus, some referred it as a heavy fighter.
Its maximum crew capacity was 5 and had basic hygiene options, making prolonged space stay gruesome but not impossible.

The vessel had four laser turrets, two on front and two on back. Interestingly, its rear turrets had far better coverage than its fore turrets which could only rotate slightly sideways. This made Badger a hard ship to chase down because it battled better from rear than front. Lack of front turret mobility was compensated by them being in direct line of sight for its pilot.

While the design of this vessel was severely outdated, pirates still used this ship even in year 9599 due to several factors.

One, the ship was ridiculously cheap to manufacture. It was basically a hollow steel cube with an engine, a cockpit, and several other things attached on it. Anyone with little engineering knowledge was adequate enough to be able to build Badgers.
Most importantly, perhaps, was that Badger did not require sophisticated assembly lines to build. All one needed was a large garage with basic tools.

Two, there were custom blueprints that modified the frigate to be specialized in one task. Because the ship was very easy to build to begin with, many people drew customized versions of Badger on the net. Armored version, sniper version, mining version, speed-merchant version, and etc. Many specialized versions were available, all of which were attaching modifications on top of its hull, making it easy overall.

Three, the blueprint was free-for-all. It had been released to the public as a royalty free item, meaning there was no legal consequences with messing with it.