Keen recently fixed vanilla pirate drones not chasing the player in the most recent dev branch (01.149 DEV), it seems that the drones in this mod are now static and will not pursue the player. I'll assume that they are using a custom script (from reading the previous change notes). While I'm not a programmer, hopefully the mod drones can use Keen's scripts and behave like they do.

Sorry if this has already been brought to your attention, but I don't see another post detailing the problem.