Station nuking (and docking before the avalon hits) and mining docking bays really gets out of hand. I think there is an easy fix:

1. Anybody who does any damage to a neutral station cannot dock until he warps out of the sector. This should be easy to implement and does not require state to be transfered between sectors.

2. Missiles, mines and avalons immediatly trigger (lightning mines self destruct) if a station is within their blast radius. This is again easy to check and to implement. It basically ensures that a nuke exploiter cannot dock before his avalon hits and the docking ban becomes effective (same for mines).

These two fixes also address the docking bay camping problem: People just sit they and fire sunflares at incoming ships and then dock immediatly. With the proposed changes applied the sunflare would trigger immediatly, damaging the exploiter and the station, which in turn bans him from docking.

Intresting ideas, wrong board though.

True.

[Moving to SUGGESTIONS]

bah he took one of my ideas(#2)

heres another:
You CANNOT dock if you have any missiles or rockets outside the station

but you can still dock when you have mines :D

The idea of not being able to dock with avalons/sunflares outside is still easily exploitable. As with the idea of deleting the nukes if you dock before they go off. The thing is, you can easily dock at the same time the avalon is going off. If you time it perfectly, you can set both avalons off and dock with very little health left. It's not as hard as it sounds either.

I'm also totally against seeing an invisible barrier that would stop avalons and sunflares within the radius of a station. A person who captures the flag can easily exploit this by hiding next to stations. Although I think it would be an interesting tactic for a flag capper to camp next to a station to gain the advantage of added defenses through automated station defenses, that fires at anyone in the no-fire zone. But any type of invisible barrier would be an exploiter's dream.

Like it was mentioned 20 years ago on Elite development round table, to prevent player from exploiting stations would require simple rule - if you damage station above certain threshold you can no longer dock at this station. Even if you time it such that nuke or missiles or whatever go off as you dock, you will be automatically ejected from station and defences would start going for your head.

I definitely don't think it's wise to detonate missiles within certain radius of station. This would make it even more dangerous, you won't have to hit the station at all (just close enough).

"Eject" from the station is probably difficult to do. You just immediatly sell your engine and then what? The docking should be prevented, not corrected afterwards.

Andreas, if you sell your engine before the station ejects you, you drift, thats it.

that would suck....
Houston, we have a problem...no engine and frigate turrets firing at us...

/me winces

But its an excellent idea!

it's not stations problem you've inflicted damage on it and tried to exploit the game :)

I am all for eject from station and let god sort you out.

OK you may have hit on something here, to prevent or at least discourage stn mining / nuking and those nasty campers you could use the old 'Elite' 'safe zone' idea around each stn.
Perhaps 500m round each stn could be a safe zone, any persons firing weapons in or into the zone would then be 'attacked' by the stn police.
The HeavyDef bots from the home sectors could be used as a model as they seem pretty effective, though of course there would be no colour descrimination outside your own sectors.
Minimus.