Taskforces that are on deployment would need to stop belonging to you. Not belonging to you would allow for them not sharing intel, and not giving you their event log entries as they occur. Perhaps by a dummy race that takes ownership of all ships not currently parked at a population?
Additionally they player cannot be receiving the regular event log updates for this to work, but we do still want to have those entries when they come home, so use a separate event log table for task forces. The player never sees this during increments in the main log - you'd have to access the task force or ship history to see it - each ship keeping its own history, task forces simply merging all the contained ship's event logs into one.
So by this point, if we had all that. The ships stop belonging to you when they leave a population, so you can only know what happened to them when they return somewhere, if they come return. So your last order, or a conditional order, had either be to have them come home. Or for a population to go to them — sending a guard force ahead of a colony ship for example.
We need to two more things.
- a diplomacy flag allowing access to that ship history for task forces that aren't yours.
- a diplomacy flag allowing giving orders to ships that aren't yours.
We'd need these so the dummy race can prevent us instantly knowing what those ships know as they learn it, yet still allow us to control those ships and give them orders as if they were ours (....which they are....) when we have contact with them.
Neither flag used by regular NPR's/civvies and are always set to no, the dummy race automatically and permanently sets the two flags to yes with you.
Now they do not have to dock to learn what happened, or give them new orders. But they do have to be in a populated system with transponders on to announce themselves to you, or inside your sensor coverage and identified.
The place this gets really weird and I lack a working concept is diplomacy/intel. The dummy race should probably be seen as you for diplomacy/intel purposes. Should the pseudo race controlling your ships be left to handle your diplomacy(via AI scripting) in such case, and what your "military" decides to do, you the civilian leader are stuck dealing with the results of?
Could you imagine functional multiplayer, with this?
If this sort of modification ends up possible to achieve, or already is, I am going to lose ungodly amounts of time to messing with q4x.....I am so screwed.