I've explored the idea of changing the course plot info in an effort to control ztm. This setting would hide sector numbers for sectors that are not yet known or have not been seen in any way. So basically, any sector you've visited or has been shown in a warps list would show up on the course plot. Anything else would show as *. This allows you to see the length of a course without gleening aditional information about map structure. As with all of these kinds of ideas, this was not well received. I think it would be an interest option to explore, and it would be very easy to do.

As you saw in the 30k universe, 3k turns it only took us about 2.5 weeks to grid 99.9% or so. And that was with only 3 players devoted to gridding.

I've used the gridding scripts, I know what they are capable of...

I'm still thinking loosing abort display will buggar up most aggressive scripts.

I could see this as an toggle controlled option, much like hiding dock. If you hide dock but run a ZTM it takes about 20 minutes after ZTM to find SD and Class 0's. I can't say it would be used a lot but it would definitely slow the game down a little.

I remember that discussion.

The way you're describing it, it wouldn't actually do much to restrict probe exploration. You could still find out the distance to every sector, and then shoot them in order of distance, culling sectors that are hit along routes to more distant sectors. This is actually how I already do my initial exploration.

If you really want to kill ZTM, eliminate course plots entirely and change the autopilot so it only tells you the distance. In single-step mode, each step would tell you the next sector in the route.