My suggestion is that each ship has a transponder that contains data about the ship like name (current not the name when it was spawned), Faction and Current Pilot. These transponders would always be active however they would only be read when the sector was scanned. This would mean that the scan data would contain not only players in range but also all empty ships in range. It would also display the ships location in addition to the transponder data. There would also be an option in the...
Ship Transponders
Ship Transponders