At the moment all civilian ships have a transponder that displays their position and it is always active. With the addition of NPRs this presents the player with a dilemma. NPR scouts and survey ships will spot those freighters, colony ships, etc. if they are in the same system and either attack or summon assistance. On the other hand, if civilian ships didn't have transponders, you would only be able to detect them when they were in sensor range and you wouldn't know if a thermal contact was a civilian ship or an alien invader. I am interested in opinions on how to handle this.
Do I:
1) Leave things as they are and accept that players will have to provide warships to protect civilian shipping against alien raiders.
2) Remove the transponders for civilians and let players start worrying about every thermal contact and presumably start building local patrol ships to check them out.
3) Give the player a general Empire wide command for civilians to start/stop using transponders (with a delay of perhaps 5 days to avoid this being switched on and off at will)
4) Add some type of intelligence to civilians to disengage transponders if an unknown contact is detected in the same system. If a transponder is off, a civilian would then check each new system it entered and if no contacts where known, it would switch the transponder back on.
5) Add a command for the player to tell all civilians not to use transponders in certain systems.
Any opinions or alternative suggestions welcome.
Steve