Thoon - We've had an orbital on the design table for a while now (the art's done already) called a Hyperspace Wake detector that can increase your visible range / send notices of incoming ships but with all the other revisions / fixes we've been doing there just hasn't been time to get to it yet.

As for combat taking time I like the idea particularly because it allows for players to pull in reinforcements or as for help from allies but I can't really speak to the logistics of adding in new players / ships into combat in real time. One thing that does come into question is how we'd go about displaying that visually since one of the goals is to eventually add in a more visual representation of combat. You've probably seen this floating around but this is what we've been working on. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjhTu8oR1N0 So in the case of a battle that takes 30 minutes per round I'm not sure what the best way to display that would be. My first thought is that you could simply have the combat view be a post battle recap that's attached to the battle report like it is now. So you'd still see the planetary battle animation going on to show there's a battle going on there but you wouldn't see the detailed view until post battle.

Something else we'd need to do is change the background in the ship roll up for all ships currently in combat so we could more clearly indicate that they're in use. (technically they should also move to the 'under ai control' position of orbit but I think most people think of that as simply a place to manage harvest routes.