Steve -
I'm pretty sure I (and probably others <G>) have brought this issue up before, and I'm also pretty sure I know why you've declined to make any changes, but I've been thinking about this lately and thought I'd bring it up again, to see if anything has changed.
I have been reading Ringo's "Live Free or Die" lately. Excellent book, I can recommend it unreservedly. IMO, of course. At one point in the book the author goes into a little exposition about how difficult it is to get the "lay of the land" in a solar system, i.e., how hard it is to figure out where all of the planets and such are from a standing start. Especially from a couple of billion kilometers away. In aurora an exploration ship can tell exactly where everything is instantaneously after entering a system, which not only exceeds the bounds of credibility, but, as one attorney I know said (about something else), blows way past the bounds of even incredibility.
It seems to me that upon entering a system the explorer would be able to determine the system primary immediately, but nothing else. It might take months to find all of the planets, even with good survey instruments and scanners, and longer to determine the location of asteroids. Now, I'm not suggesting we take it to extremes of taking years of constant effort to determine the location of every last comet and asteroid, however, instantaneous is problematic.
I suspect that in the past you have avoided dealing with this issue because of the difficulty in establishing partial knowledge of a system, and that difficulty likely hasn't changed. I am currently considering ways to "role-play" this issue, but it would be easier to do if Aurora supported this.
Kurt