Idea! The players can decrease their chances of a random encounter by carefully navigating around the fresh ion trails of their enemies, at the expense of more fuel. Twice the fuel, half the encounter rate.
Or maybe you could take completely different routs through civilian and industrial areas, rather than fly through pirate infested asteroid fields.
I would think that on the initialization of the FTL flight via captain's chair, there would be a some sort of map GUI (I imagine like a pirate's treasure map), showing the starting point to the destination and you can choose on whether or not you want to steer clear from said space stuff, or stop the FTL flight entirely (despite not reaching to the destination) and choose to ready up or choose a different destination to FTL travel. Makes the captain role more sense.
