Of course, you could simply check your fire & make sure you aren't hitting clean targets as opposed to wanted ones...
Or speeding out of the mailslot...
I suppose we could pretend that this is enough, and completely eliminates and the derpiness. But that's all we're doing if we go that route....pretending.
If you've never been fined for "blocking the mailslot" while an NPC T9 squishes you against the side despite your best efforts to reverse back(which will usually get you a trespass fine), you're either very lucky or just haven't done it long enough. If you haven't plowed an eagle with a T9 that you didn't even see, ditto. The stuff happens.
Same with a stray shot hitting the astoundingly stupid NPC's. I once acquired a bounty, then a murder bounty, from an occasion in which I was shooting a pirate at point blank range. You couldn't have fit a tonne container between us, my cockpit was mashed against the side of the enemy ship. Logically, there wasn't room for a limpet to try fitting between us, much less a ship. This in no way dissuaded a miner in a T9 from trying, though! A stray shot hit him--bounty. He later died because of natural selection because there's no way something that stupid can successfully navigate an asteroid belt---murder bounty. So long as this is possible, I don't see a whole lot of validity to the "check your fire" logic.
As if that's not bad enough, go 99 meters per second, and get hit by something that knocks you to 101. Congratulations, you're now a hardened criminal because hitting someone at 101 is assault and "y'all saw it, he was speeding" or something. The punishment for your hubris is....well, death, we don't actually have other punishments.
And then there is the whole "gross over-reaction" thing, as if that wasn't gross over-reaction. One stray shot at the wrong time can land you a wopping 400 bounty. A bounty of 400 credits will green light security to drop a billion credits worth of ships on your head, all firing thousands of credits per second in missiles and plasma. They'll throw as much ammo at you as your rebuy cost over 400 credits. An identical reaction as to what they'll do for a two million credit bounty, incidentally, it's functionally the same thing to them.
Bounty hunters in 150 million credit rigs will interdict you--just 374,999 more of you outlaws and this babies paid for!.
As if the stupid reaction to trivial stuff isn't quite enough, it goes the other way too. Sick of 200 million credit security Anacondas and 150 million credit bounty hunters trying to kill you and decide to fight back? Well look at you, mister 4600 credit bounty man! That's right, now your bounty is almost 5k credits, it's gonna take a tonne cannister of silver to clear THAT mess up, I mean you took a human life AND destroyed over a hundred million credits in material, this has to cost alot, and by alot I mean almost as much as one mid class commodity costs, or a quarter of the starter ship! Otherwise you're looking at....well, you're looking at exactly the same reaction as that stray shot cost you. We haven't figured out anything more or less severe yet to make punishments actually fit crimes.
Seriously though, CnP system is really, really bad. A rudimentary AI script that would be unsatisfactory for most web page headers coupled with a one size fits all reaction to failures of that script. I'm sure we can do better.
