Managing station ramming by station traffic control
The problem: station rammers taking advantage of speedy or hasty CMDRs which can indeed learn to slow down to avoid the risk of ship destruction, but despite that there are still cases of other nasty CMDRs in hidden and weak cheap ships, waiting to lure innocent and careful CMDRs in expensive and unwieldy ships into causing a fatal collision, a bounty and a hefty rebuy - especially in the wake of the new bounty and rebuy fine rules in 2.4 whereby innocents falling foul of this could be subject to a massive rebuy and legacy fine.
A possible solution would aim to protect the innocent and law-abiding CMDRs primarily, while also producing a legal framework for deterring would-be criminals.
Possible framework for the solution: station traffic safety approach cone, allowing one ship to dock at a time safely.
How about proper flight control instructions, whereby the station actually explicitly informs you when the letterbox is clear for you and you alone - a fairly narrow cone shaped approach area from the edge of the No Fire Zone through to the letterbox and onto the landing pad where the way for you will be clear. If it's not clear because of another ship legally landing or taking off, you should wait in the queue or wait patiently at your pad until flight control states it's safe to go. (Frontier: Elite 2 had a primitive form of this whereby docking requests would be temporarily denied due to "traffic control busy, please try again later.")
You don't have to obey them, though, if you're trying to smuggle in something away from the prying eyes of the station authority ships, or if you're in a hurry to meet a deadline. However, failure to comply with these traffic orders might incur a Traffic Violation Fine fine if the authorities' ships catch you in another person's approach cone - the equivalent of being caught running a red light, or (as in Frontier: Elite 2) launching from a planet station without requesting clearance. (The station will notify you if you are violating an approach cone, but unless you are actually scanned by an authority ship you won't be fined this way.) Furthermore, to deter people from speeding, the Traffic Violation Fine also applies if you are caught speeding by a completed scan from an authority vessel.
So, onto applying this to the problem of station ramming:
If you're one of these people who likes to ram others in a cheap ship, and if you die by ramming an innocent and law-abiding ship while hidden from the station, the station won't recognise it as a crime against the ship that blows you up because officially they were in the right and you were not. Also note that penalties will ONLY be doled out if the station recognises that two ships were involved at the time of the collision. If one ship, say the hidden griefing ship or an innocent smuggler vessel, destroys itself by colliding with an innocent freighter vessel, but itself was not formally identified at the time of the collision e.g. if you go into silent running and are informed by the station that you have disappeared from their sensors, then the freighter vessel will simply have been deemed to have hit "unidentified debris" or something, and can continue.
Outwith the Approach Cone but within the No Fire Zone, e.g. if crawling close to a station, it's business as usual with fines and bounties for speeders and manslaughterers respectively, so the only safe way to ensure you land or take off safely is to follow the traffic rules. Also as before, if a law abiding ship exceeds the speed limit while in the process of an approved docking / undocking manoeuvre within its approach cone, they will still be reprimanded as before in the event of a collision.
This table hopefully sums up everything. Each individual row considers what would happen if either ship A or ship B, in the scenario columns, caused the collision and/or damage/destruction of the other ship. Depending on whether you are speeding or not, or whether you have clearance for docking and therefore travelling into the approach cone or not, the penalties will vary. Note that technically with this framework, the situation of two legal CMDRs colliding in an approach cone should never occur, as one will be illegally placed, but I include it here for completion, alongside other relatively unlikely but possible scenarios such as an illegally placed but non-speeding CMDR destroying a speeding but legally-placed CMDR. I did um and err over whether a speed-obeying, docking cleared ship causing the destruction of another ship should get a bounty, but I felt that in those situations the other ship would either be in the wrong for whatever reason (mostly trespassing) or be involved in an innocent tangle if it too was also obeying the law, and it would be deemed a space incident.
The problem: station rammers taking advantage of speedy or hasty CMDRs which can indeed learn to slow down to avoid the risk of ship destruction, but despite that there are still cases of other nasty CMDRs in hidden and weak cheap ships, waiting to lure innocent and careful CMDRs in expensive and unwieldy ships into causing a fatal collision, a bounty and a hefty rebuy - especially in the wake of the new bounty and rebuy fine rules in 2.4 whereby innocents falling foul of this could be subject to a massive rebuy and legacy fine.
A possible solution would aim to protect the innocent and law-abiding CMDRs primarily, while also producing a legal framework for deterring would-be criminals.
Possible framework for the solution: station traffic safety approach cone, allowing one ship to dock at a time safely.
How about proper flight control instructions, whereby the station actually explicitly informs you when the letterbox is clear for you and you alone - a fairly narrow cone shaped approach area from the edge of the No Fire Zone through to the letterbox and onto the landing pad where the way for you will be clear. If it's not clear because of another ship legally landing or taking off, you should wait in the queue or wait patiently at your pad until flight control states it's safe to go. (Frontier: Elite 2 had a primitive form of this whereby docking requests would be temporarily denied due to "traffic control busy, please try again later.")

You don't have to obey them, though, if you're trying to smuggle in something away from the prying eyes of the station authority ships, or if you're in a hurry to meet a deadline. However, failure to comply with these traffic orders might incur a Traffic Violation Fine fine if the authorities' ships catch you in another person's approach cone - the equivalent of being caught running a red light, or (as in Frontier: Elite 2) launching from a planet station without requesting clearance. (The station will notify you if you are violating an approach cone, but unless you are actually scanned by an authority ship you won't be fined this way.) Furthermore, to deter people from speeding, the Traffic Violation Fine also applies if you are caught speeding by a completed scan from an authority vessel.
So, onto applying this to the problem of station ramming:
If you're one of these people who likes to ram others in a cheap ship, and if you die by ramming an innocent and law-abiding ship while hidden from the station, the station won't recognise it as a crime against the ship that blows you up because officially they were in the right and you were not. Also note that penalties will ONLY be doled out if the station recognises that two ships were involved at the time of the collision. If one ship, say the hidden griefing ship or an innocent smuggler vessel, destroys itself by colliding with an innocent freighter vessel, but itself was not formally identified at the time of the collision e.g. if you go into silent running and are informed by the station that you have disappeared from their sensors, then the freighter vessel will simply have been deemed to have hit "unidentified debris" or something, and can continue.
Outwith the Approach Cone but within the No Fire Zone, e.g. if crawling close to a station, it's business as usual with fines and bounties for speeders and manslaughterers respectively, so the only safe way to ensure you land or take off safely is to follow the traffic rules. Also as before, if a law abiding ship exceeds the speed limit while in the process of an approved docking / undocking manoeuvre within its approach cone, they will still be reprimanded as before in the event of a collision.
This table hopefully sums up everything. Each individual row considers what would happen if either ship A or ship B, in the scenario columns, caused the collision and/or damage/destruction of the other ship. Depending on whether you are speeding or not, or whether you have clearance for docking and therefore travelling into the approach cone or not, the penalties will vary. Note that technically with this framework, the situation of two legal CMDRs colliding in an approach cone should never occur, as one will be illegally placed, but I include it here for completion, alongside other relatively unlikely but possible scenarios such as an illegally placed but non-speeding CMDR destroying a speeding but legally-placed CMDR. I did um and err over whether a speed-obeying, docking cleared ship causing the destruction of another ship should get a bounty, but I felt that in those situations the other ship would either be in the wrong for whatever reason (mostly trespassing) or be involved in an innocent tangle if it too was also obeying the law, and it would be deemed a space incident.

Last edited: