You have to give them the interstellar jump tech to research.

The reason they do not use wormholes is that Pirates do not scout them out. As such, the Pirates do not know where wormholes lead to; thus the game/AI will not be able to make a "path" for their ships using wormholes. Edit: This assumes that they still do not use wormholes; I haven't tested this personally.

I used logic. The pirates don't have a scout ship, so they don't have something that would search the wormhole, which means the AI won't consider it in calculating paths as they don't know where it goes. Even if the AI had a scout, who knows whether if it would be used properly, as the Pirates make their fleets for raids.

Even if they had phase gates, which is something you can give pirate bases on pre-made planets (and set the planet base to have no Explore stages), this wouldn't solve the issue of no scouting.

1. Don't need to do it.
2. Don't need to do it if they have the research.  I'm not convinced they get to use artifacts like the other factions.
3. Modifying their existing ship should be adequate.

Pirates don't have a scout ship in terms of function (read that as ships that go out and scout), however, they do have a scout ship in terms of there being an actual scout ship.  In the game, it's the Rogue that is classified as a pirate scout... There's just a few problems with that.

The first is that in it's role types, it only says:
typeCount 1
frigateRoleType "Raider"
It should say:
typeCount 2
frigateRoleType "Raider"
frigateRoleType "Scout"
(Or maybe just change raider to scout which could fix issues I'll explain in a second)

The second problem is that it's abilities read like this:
ability:0 "AbilitySabotageAntiMatter"
ability:1 ""
ability:2 ""
ability:3 ""
ability:4 ""
It should say:
ability:0 "AbilityExplore"
ability:1 "AbilitySabotageAntiMatter"
ability:2 ""
ability:3 ""
ability:4 ""

The third problem is that the explore ability is not active by default, but as that doesn't prevent other AI's from sending them out, it shouldn't prevent the pirates.

The fourth problem is that the pirate scout is an attacking scout, unlike the other races, so as soon as it finds a gravity well with anyone else in it that it wants to fight, it will.  And more times then not, it loses.

The fifth problem is that the pirates can't replace destroyed scouts.  However, giving a structure at the pirate base the ability to either make scouts buildable, or just bring scouts in as a bonus gift at a timed interval would remedy this situation.

Making a modded structure to produce pirate scouts with a timed ability wouldn't be to hard.

Also, Zombie Rus created an ability to automatically resurrect a ship when it's destroyed.  Would be great for pirate scouts.   Giving them no weapons would also avoid the attacking thing.

This. You can however code a unit to never fire unless manually ordered to; simply set defaultAutoAttackOn to FALSE. 

Works fine in my mod, not sure how you set it up, but playing with spawning on death is tricky.

I used the straight version from your post.  I haven't actually used the ability yet as I am still scrambling brain cells on how to add a pirate cap ship.

I only get a single start up error now but it doesn't crash or minidump the game.  Thanks for responding.