Before we get any captchas in the game, I'd hope that we would get an onscreen keyboard for VR. However, I have signed the agreement as BGS/Powerplay botting is IMHO the ultimate form of in game skankiness. A lower bar, easy for a human to work around, but mildly difficult, but not impossible for a bot, would be to simply shuffle the menu items around. A human would see this and automatically select the right item, where as a script of keytaps, such as "one tap down to commodity market, space, 17 clicks down to chosen commodity, space, 256 clicks right (buying cargo), space, back, back, two down, space(to get to launch)" would get derailed. That being said, I have no doubt that the most determined bot scripters would simply move to Optical Character Recognition to "read" the screens the same way that humans do.
While there is undoubtedly a need to block bots, there needs to be checks in place to make sure it doesn't stymie honest players, or detract from their fun. This could be a tricky balance to achieve given the easier and less challenging therefore less frustrating a capctha control is, the easier it is to program a bot to get through it. On the otherhand, the more difficult, and thus more resilient such a captcha is, the more it will annoy the players. To find a sweetspot for this, I'd reckon you'd need to have the likelihood of encountering a captcha, and the severity of the challenge presented by that captcha scale to the level of suspicion that the antibot has that the "player" is in fact a bot.
The more repetitive,a task the "player" does, and the more regular the cadence with which a "player" does that task, the more likely they are indeed a bot. While this could be interpretted as meaning that someone doing cargo runs for a community goal, or genuine A->B trading would be more likely to be flagged up as being a bot, I'd argue that human behaviour is so inherently organic as to difuse that scenario. While an F1 driver can run on the ragged edge of their own bodies limitations, while also running their vehicles at the limits for a couple of hours straight, with a consistency that is accurate to a few hundredths of a second lap after lap, I'd reckon that most of us space monkeys arent that finely honed.
By simple virtue of being a slovenly space simming gamer rather than a finely tuned highly honed top tier athlete/driver/pilot, we will be varying in our "lap times" for even A->B runs by tens of seconds, if not minutes per loop. Such wide variances should discourage the bot-hunting algorithm from springing a captcha challenge on us. Another thing to help deter the captcha algorithm from bothering you could e as simple as dropping in on signal sources, those would require a bit of interpretation, as in if I'm loaded to the gunnels with high value cargo, am I likely to drop in on non human signal source or a weapons fire deteacted threatening signal source, I'd be far more likely to drop in on degraded or encoded emissions. But if I drop in on an encoded signal source and don't scan the data beacon, or on degraded / high-grade emissions and don't scoop the mats that I have space for, that's suspicious and could add to my bot-suspicion score.
Additional gameplay could also be introduced as a masked captcha challenge, drop in at a station and find a large navy ship, suhc as a cutter/vette/conda/capital-ship in instance with the space staton, with a horde of fighters barking orders. Those orders, or specifically your compliance with them would be the captcha, and the orders might be simple things for a human to do, but difficult for a bot to do and could include instructions such as:
- stop immediately & prepare for detailed scanning
- hold position X.Y km from the station and await further instruction
- stop your approach and move to 1km from the stationary type-9 and await further instructions
Those simple challenges could be made more difficult for the bot if your docking pad assignment was suspended while you followed the orders you were given. Eventually, you'd get "ok - you may proceed to the starport." and a landing pad (re)assigned to you. Breeching those orders would be seen as a hostile act by the navy and the station, triggering the fighters + the large ship + the station to duly light you up.
Sounds like something a botter would say... 
