I've noticed how station guard bots tend to "hide" near roids by resting very close to the surface. The idea is to make such actions useful by making it hard(er) for someone else to lock on such a hiding ship. In real life I know fighter pilots would fly low so that a higher attacker could not lock on because of ground reflections.
So, proposition is: make the ship dot on the radar still visible but much fainter, such that it's almost impossible to see the dot at ~2000 meters and then the dot would brighten as the detector gets closer as roughly half the rate brightness usually increases. Also, the hiding ship could not be targeted, so guided missiles can't track it.

This opens the door to interesting stealth tactics, miners having some additional safety as a consequence. And maybe if there were a longer range sniping weapon...

thoughts?

I like the idea of making ships harder to detect in roid fields. I'm not sure if changing the ship signature on the radar is the way to do it though as that makes targeting in general more difficult. It might work to have ships only be detected in a 360 degree line of sight from the ship, allowing them to hide behind roids, but I'm not sure how that would be implemented either. It's a cool idea though.

The station guards aren't actually trying to hide... their pathfinding is just getting them stuck on the roids.

Shh! It's 'emergent behavior'.

Making the ship harder to see on the radar is relatively useless if you are using targetless or some similar plug in.