I mentioned my unhappiness with the current bounty system in the
release thread, and there were multiple suggestions for improvement. Well, here's mine:
Pirates with a bounty should have the ability to appear as traders or other civilian ships, i.e. they would appear grey instead of red and display a inconspicuous name and destination. You could only identify them by contacting them, demanding cooperation and performing an inspection (all via dialog options).
Of course factions would not like it at all when you pester their fleets with unwarranted inspections, your standing would drop. So you had to be very careful whom you inspect... and how do you know whom to inspect? Well, you'd have look for suspicious behavior of fleets in the system with the bounty. A trader who's nowhere near its stated destination or origin? Suspicious. A bounty hunter who's just circling a remote planetoid? Suspicious. A miner with heavy combat ships? Suspicious. Higher bounty fleets would be better hidden, so there would be a difficulty curve.
If the fleet does feel superior in strength to you, it might not cooperate, though (depending on faction standing etc). Then you'd have to take your chances in an attack.
Of course the behavioral range for fugitives had to be expanded. Maybe the game could just generate a civilian fleet with some standard behavior, but label it with another behavior.
Nice thing is that the AI patrols already know how to perform inspections, so it would not be a "player only game". But hidden pirates would also not get wiped off the map within seconds (as happens now).
Beside offering range of interesting decisions in bounty hunting, player inspections could also be used for all kinds of other shenanigans. For example finding drugs on a smuggler and extort him, or perform not-deadly piracy by demanding cargo/credits from traders.