Hey, I recognize that guy! Last time I saw him he was stuffed full of Diamonds but seemed to be having Powerplant trouble. I helped offload him to ease the strain on his power plant and then went for help.
I wondered where he had got too!
(And yes sadly the NPC rarely do anything interesting. I've followed most of the different types and not seen anything good.)
NPCs will appear and interact with you, and after a time of not interacting they just High-Wake to a nearby system and fly out somewhere distant where they can de-spawn.
Gary didn't de-spawn because he was being observed, so he would just restart his previous behaviour until he was left to disappear and be deleted from the simulation.
You can see this by just observing bounty hunters and system defence forces that scan you, then fly off and eventually high-wake away to a random system, then low-wake out of super-cruise near a distant planet or star from the system entry point to disappear once the low-wake signal times out.
So, following wakes isn't going to help
much because the NPC's just pick random systems as their removal point after being spawned. Now what I haven't observed is an NPC waking into a permit-locked system, and if that is even possible. I would assume that it's something overlooked by FD, and that any NPC can just jump to any system and permit locks only apply to players, BUT -- If an NPC does infact follow permit-lock rules, and is waking INTO the Col-70 Bubble, there may be a chance we can follow it in, and prevent it despawning to the point where they might try high-waking to the next system to despawn in. We might be able to ride this all the way into the bubble.
What we also might want to keep a track of is any potential convoy signals and what cargo they are hauling. We already know that in certain areas of space, there's a chance that a convoy carrying a UA can appear. Convoys being random events, there's no easy way of telling if there's a special cargo being transported in the col-70 area that just has a very slim chance of showing up. We would need to record that information to determine it, that's even if we find some special cargo. From what I've seen in the thread, it seems we're just getting normal haulage so far.
The UA discovery is interesting, though. Worth noting its distance from Merope.