Belt rat

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Belt rats are local pirates you can encounter when in an ore belt(mining).

General

They can show up in all ore belts, whether regular or mission
- No belt rats appear in 0.9 and 1.0 security systems.
They come in flights of 1 to 3 frigates (highsec)
A system always has the same pirate faction
- Which pirate faction occupies a certain system can be found on places like EVEEYE or Dotlan.
  - Dotlan's system information page for instance says Hek has Angels.
  - The way EVEEYE indicates the NPC Pirates seems to indicate that the pirates are the same for a whole region?. It shows as an icon in the top bar.

Officer spawns are special pirate faction rats that are rare, but more common in systems with a low true security status and the home region of that faction. Each faction has four different officer rats of varying difficulty that you can recognize through being named. See Faction Modules#Officer
Commander rats are slightly stronger than normal belt rats for the given area, but drop faction modules on destruction. These will have special prefixes in their name that will indicate their status (e.g. Shadow Serpentis)
Hauler belt rats are different from the ships in NPC Mining Operations as they do not trigger a response fleet or have an accompanying fleet while having lower rewards.
COSMOS constellations have special type of belt rats. These do not require mining activity to spawn. They have a separate naming pattern The Angel version for example are called "Cyber something" while the regular are called "Angel something"