Ah true. Just thinking out loud here but do you think it would be better to require at least a minimal engine to be able to transit? Even a fighter engine would be enough.
Up to you. I've always thought of it in terms of the station-keeping drive nudges the station through the wormhole (that another ship/jumpgate opened), but one (you
) could easily change the technobabble to forbid that and require a "real" engine to transit.
The way I usually work it is to have 1000 ton jump scouts, and they hold open the wormhole for the picket station (carried in a larger tender) to transit. So this rule change would force me (or not - see below) to only picket the far side of wormholes with engine-less stations when I have a big enough jump ship available to allow the tender to transit.
In reality, if you change the mechanics, what I would probably do is make a house rule that has the old behavior, then kludge it by using SM mode to change the location of the station to the other side of the wormhole. In a past version, I can remember having to do this because I couldn't get the transits to work - it was a bit of a pain but not horrible.
So now that I've thought it through, I think from a game play point of view this falls into the same category as the "standard transits" - there's not a compelling reason to put the restriction in from a gameplay point of view (the limitiation was originally intended as a warning to keep people from doing things they didn't want to do, right?), and it causes a micro-management pain for people who want the old behavior as a house rule.
How about this: Change your fix to be a pop-up warning, rather than forbidding it. After all, engine-less ships have speed 1, not 0, right? (I now remember a case where I had a picket cut-off in a system by an enemy fleet, and it started running away from the WP at speed 1 in hopes of getting out of sensor range by the time the WP was checked out by the bad guys - this was actually some fun role playing). If you do want to put the restriction in, then I would make minimum speed 0 rather than 1 (except for the fact that then you'd get a ton of divide-by-zero bug reports due to places you'd missed
).
John