Upcoming patch for Nergal
I'm going to patch Nergal, probably tomorrow (July 31) with the change to the observer mechanics. What this does is if you have a ship anywhere in the sector, you can view the details of any planets in that sector. Only when your last ship leaves and you also don't own any planets in the sector will you finally lose your observer status.
I'm only going to put it on Nergal for now to test, since there are a bajillion ships on there. Once I've said it's live, it would be useful if some players would log in and fly a few ships around to verify that it is all working. If it looks good, then I'll roll it out to the rest of the servers after a day or two.
A minor bit of trivia is that according to the compiler the server is 592,767 lines of code, including everything. No wonder I can't remember it all. :p