Combat AI question

I've been trying to make a living as a trader, and avoiding combat. The computer-initiated battles I have observed always follow the same pattern: a few ships appear, mindlessly (and fruitlessly) fire at the local station, and are eventually destroyed by local defence forces. It made a bit more sense when the Raiders did this in EoC, but even then they always seemed remarkably suicidal.

Q1: It it possible to force an AI ship to re-think its current target? ie. every time it takes a hit, there is a 10% chance that it will alter its target to "the guy who attacked it" or "the strongest enemy in the area" and ignore the station? This would make them *seem* much smarter.

Q2: Is there any possibility of having stations issue distress calls or declaring a bounty on their attackers? They don't really have anything to worry about, it seems, but it would be fun to have an incentive to come to their aid.

A similar incentive would be to have your repuation with the respective factions change as you do battle. For instance if there is a battle between Azran and EtCom ships and you jump in, your repuation will go up/down depending on which side you choose.

Maybe this is already implemented, but if I'm jumping into battle on someones behalf I only seem to be endangering myself.

Both of you have raised good points in regards to the AI. I am not sure what exactly we can change it terms of AI...I will leave that answer to the poggers. However, we are planning to completely overhaul the traffic scripts for Traffic, so you shouldn't see those suicidal and ubiquitous attacks on stations. Things will be much different.