じゃ、何が関係あるのか？ I think you're missing the spirit of "let's talk!"...

そうね。肝心要は質問が答える。

Haha.

パイレーツはいつからレーザー光の目があるのか？ I think I'm probably missing a cultural reference...

(It wont let me use the kanji for そら. Does anyone else have that problem? I could type all the other kanji fine, and I can type "sora" in other tabs, but it shows up as a box if I try it here.)

空 Did it work? If not, I have no idea why!

By the way, I suppose I have some other suggestions regarding your sentences. If you want to write your first sentence as you translated it into English, try this: パイレーツに決まっているのではないでしょう。The way you have it written in Japanese know would translate along the lines of "Pirates are probably deciding," I think. As for the second sentence, since you're writing it as the reason behind your choice in the first sentence, you should end it all with 〜から。

I'm guessing some pirates would be skilled at hand-to-hand combat if they regularly carried sabers and daggers. Am I right?

Grammatically speaking, and I must say I'm not sure about 白兵戦, you want to rearrange your first sentence to end with 〜には苦手でした　or　〜には上手ではありませんでした。

In the second sentence, if you use しか, it both replaces the particle を and requires the sentence itself to end in the negative. Thus, 〜しか持っていませんでした。 However, しか usually means that whatever you're referring to is limited, and since a pirate carried pistols, sabers, AND daggers, I think you should skip this grammar and try to rework the overall meaning of what you want to say. It's up to you, so I won't write in an improved sentence.

Well, not empty-hand, because ninjas carried weapons too,not martial arts, because they're all martial arts of one type or another, so I chose hand-to-hand. My point was that pirates were limited to these three things for close-range, while ninjas, in addition to the empty-hand/whole body training they did, had swords, daggers, stars, nun-chuks, staffs, darts, not to mention skills to utilize whatever might be at hand: rope,for instance.And that the muzzle loading pistols were cumbersome, inaccurate and difficult to reload quickly. Pirates were of course skilled at fencing, but how would that work against Japanese-style swordfighting? I guess we'll never know.

On the grammar, I still have a tough time with word order. I guess I'm confusing adverb/adjective placement; as an adverb it should precede the verb (or the copula)not the noun , so I see your point.
Niwa instead of dewa? But doesn't dewa mean "by the agency of"? Or is it niwa, "in the use of"? the finer points of the particles, like those of the word order, still elude me.And the dewa is still needed for the arimasen construction.
On the shika, those particles again. Pos/neg agreements haven't sunk in yet, either. This is both a list and a yet limited one. Any suggestions on how to better phrase that would be appreciated.Thanks for your help to this point.

Aha. Not に,but には."not skillful regarding hand-to-hand..." I get it.

It looks like you added an extra かつ after 勝つ! Also, try to make the sentence endings match. Because you use 思う in sentence #1, you should use 信じているから in sentence #2. Otherwise, interesting reasoning you have there!

忍者が・・・何を？

忍者が勝つことが黙示的ですから、私の文章が足ると思います。

Since this is a hypothetical situation, it can't have already happened in the past. Thus, instead of かった, go for 勝つ in the present/future tense. I'm also not quite sure about ぐでぐで, but grammatically speaking, since you're writing the second sentence as a reason for your choice in the first sentence, you need to end it all with 〜から。