Spotters discourage interaction from both sides as noobs get griefed and bored vets smirk from behind their l33t WaRez pluginz.

The same dynamic is true for veteran traders and pirates as they navigate around/toward each other. The sporadic serendipity is gone. Another consequence of unlimited alts.

I've tried pushing spotters out of NFZ but this doesn't work. Wouldn't it solve a lot of problems and be entirely within the spirit of the game if you could push an unpiloted ship out of NFZ or even take it with you on a jump if you were in contact with when you jumped ?

I think an unpiloted ship, which is what spotters are, should be vulnerable in some way since they have no active player to interact with the situation.

Pushing ships doesn't work if F/A if on. It might be a good/interesting suggestion to make it so even with F/A on, that a ship can be moved around (no hard brakes). Or maybe after a certain period of time (30 minutes?), F/A turns off automatically (in game RP reasons for this could be power saving reasons).

If a spotter is pushed beyond 15k from the center of a sector, then it effectively blind, save for in sector communication.

Even with F/A on, the laws of physics dictate that a more powerful engine should still be able to move it since the net thrust would be in favour of the pusher. So I don't think there's any need to auto disable F/A after a period of time and just respect the laws of physics.

I have rammed spotters at 220m/s using turbo and they've not budged an inch. Surely even with maximum non-turbo thrust applied the ship would have been displaced hundreds of meters before it was brought to rest again. The net result being it would have been many meters away from the station at that point.

Ok. I understand what you are saying. How about you make a separate suggestion from mine that suggests what you just wrote. And i'll +1 it. My thread kind of went off topic fast as it is.