What would help a lot is if one could share trade exp. with one's escorts. Maybe split evenly among all parties, increasing each share maybe 20% after the split.

This way there would be a real incentive to trade in groups; as it stands, the escort might get a little already-too-easy-to-earn cash for their efforts; with the proposed system the trader would pay some fee for the work, plus grouping with the escort would allow the escort some of the trade exp. benefit gotten from the actual trade run.

Once such a thing as this was implimented, there would be a built-in mechanism to actively encourage grouped trading, and the concerns about traders needing the FC battery to remain safe would have somewhat less of a basis.