EDIT: Would it be really necessary for you to not only made the storms interrupt SB
(... storms don't interrupt SB.)
In any case: looks like I'll be hotfixing another (more minor) crash bug, so I'll take a look at a couple of things here. In particular, "maintaining contact" fleets using IP is not intentional and never happened to me in testing, and that's easy enough to fix.
Re: storms, I think I'll turn them back down a bit in frequency. Thinking about them some more, I think they'd work better if they were a much more rare and much bigger threat, rather than "constant, low-grade threat that can become an annoyance due to being constant" as they are now. So, for example, if now and again you were to find yourself in the path of a storm 10 cells wide, or some such, that's got potential to be an interesting event. The same sort of idea as behind turning down the probability of derelict defenders down to 50% but increasing their strength.
But that's much more than I'd want to even attempt for a hotfix, so I'll just turn the storm frequency back down a bit for the time being, while leaving the other changes in place.
I will say that I also don't get much of the fuss about storms - easy enough to avoid, for me, and they were never any real trouble, plus it's fun navigating clear channels in hyperspace for once - but turning down the storm frequency will leave that in place, so it's not something I feel strongly about one way or another.