I wanted to start this discussion to see if other players are affected and to what degree.
Proposals (if you can call them that) are only for actual player piloted ships, I couldn't care less if the ai gets in its own way.
1) Friendly ships fly directly in front of the player, between the player and their target.
In 99.99% of the cases this happens, there is zero reason for the ship to be there. This is particularly egregious when piloting a ship like the Hammerhead, and you just engaged ammo feeder for it to do absolutely nothing because that Kite just flew in front of you and won't move.
2) Friendly ships prevent autofire weapons from firing even though they are nowhere near the line of fire.
In trying to prevent friendly fire, I really feel like this particular mechanic is way over tuned. Ships that are at a near 45 degree angle from me and my target, are preventing my autofire weapons from firing. Again, with the Hammerhead, with its very narrow front firing 'arc', a ship directly to my side (and even not so directly) will stop weapons from firing even though there's no physical way to hit the friendly.
If I'm being honest, it's not that big of a deal, it's annoying, but it usually resolves itself. It can feel like it takes forever for the AI to move out of the way, or for your weapons to start firing after the AI decides the ship half a light year away is safe from your weapons, but it's probably only a few seconds at best of waiting.
If I could ask for one tweak to the AI, it would be to never, at any cost, fly between me and my target. And targetis the important word. There certainly seems to be some sort mechanic where the AI tries to 'save' the player by getting in front of them when the player is taking a lot of damage. I'd like that to remain, but it would be up to the player to 'deselect' their target if they want to give the AI a chance to protect them, otherwise, as long as I have a target selected, the area between me and my target should be absolute no go zones.
However, I know there's more to it then that, and this is coming from the perspective of fairly up close battles, where if a friendly needed to move from point a to b and it crossed my line of fire, that going 'around' me would be fairy cheap in terms of distance. I could definitely see this as an issue with much longer range ships creating huge no go zones that other friendlies would have long travel distances to get around me.
I doubt there's an easy solution, but I'm curious if its really a problem that everybody experiences, or fairly isolated to certain playstyles/ships.