I actually love playing like this. At first, only military I'll have are STO weapons. That is not "full pacifist", however.

I think it's a problem with the Raiders since they don't raid as much as they assault and then genocide if given the chance. My way of dealing with this is by establishing that Raiders need a significant level of interstellar activity to notice sapients in the Aurora dimension. Just survey ships is not enough. There needs to be colonies in other systems regularly receiving shipments of factories, goods and infrastructure.

As such, once I put down one or two out-system colonies, Raiders get activated for the player. I leave it on for NPRs though as they always have military. If Raiders manage to overrun planetary defences and glass a colony and hulk some freighters it's annoying, but not game ending. And if they attack the homeworld, the greater density of STO weapons kill them.

I'm seeing some character encoding issues in the B5 Shadows name theme - things like: Oblivion’s Flame

In the past, it was common for players to roleplay as a pacifist race which did not start building any military units until first contact, or sometimes until first hostile contact.

However, since the introduction of Raiders, I have not seen this kind of RP setting very much and it seems almost impossible to pull off as long as Raiders are turned on, since unlike most other threats in the game they can immediately appear in an undefended core system, including Sol itself, and take over once they find no opposition. Even Swarm, Invaders, or extremely hostile NPRs once encountered take some time to survey towards Sol before they can effect a game over, and for spoiler threats the distance at which a threat can materialize can be more or less controlled by the number of systems game rule (which isn't as effective for Raiders since they can spawn into any system immediately).

So, I am wondering if anyone has had success playing a pacifist setting with the Raiders active, or otherwise how people are working around this problem. I imagine the option of playing with a limited military is in play, but that's not what I'm interested in here. So far, the apparent solution seems to be turning Raiders on only once some other (hostile) alien presence is encountered and military buildup is underway, which is a bit gamey but I suppose works fine otherwise.

Yessss! Nice to see the B5 related name lists! Hybrid carriers make perfect sense for B5 too... Are we going to see you do a B5 run Steve?

Yes, that is the plan. A B5 run to test multi-system starts and carriers.

Chat GPT Naming Themes

I've added some ship name, system name and commander name themes that I generated using ChatGPT. I've found it to be very useful for generating theme-based names when you run out of ideas

There are 24 ship names based on Babylon 5 and Star Trek races, with between 60 and 100 names per theme. I'll attach some examples.

The 13 system name themes and 11 commander name themes, all for Babylon 5 races, are a similar size. They are more  generic, but suitably 'alien-sounding'

Here are four example ship name themes.

http://www.pentarch.org/steve/NameFiles/GPT Ships - Shadows.txt

http://www.pentarch.org/steve/NameFiles/GPT Ships - Centauri.txt

http://www.pentarch.org/steve/NameFiles/GPT Ships - Narn.txt

http://www.pentarch.org/steve/NameFiles/GPT Ships - Drazi.txt