Thirty-five years into a v6.4 game, I have more than 400 ships in my civilian lines. This is far more than my empire needs to serve its economy. Turns have slowed significantly, and this is an NPR-less game where I still haven't explored beyond Sol.
I know that 6.4 was supposed to mitigate this issue by forcing shipping lines to scrap old ships more aggressively. Unfortunately this hasn't seemed to go far enough - almost every five-day increment generates interrupts from the civilians building more ships, and the total has continued to increase despite the increased scrap rate.
I've read that it's possible to commandeer civilian ships by grabbing them with tractor beams, but I can't figure out if that's still possible. Civilian ships don't appear as targets for tractor links in the F6 screen.
Is there another workaround that I can pursue to delete or scrap these speed-killing civilian ships? Will I need to resort to self-guided missiles to blast them out of the sky?