Mods cannot effectively deal with the large volume of an MMO playerbase and the 'griefing' that M1 Abrams is talking about. To suggest that this should be the solution is to ignore the underlying issue; the game design of safe zones. The solution is not about removing safe zones either, but looking at it from that root cause. The safe zone is basically a logical layer preventing players from interacting with each other in certain ways. It is from this poor game design mechanic that all other problems arise, requiring developers to spend countless hours working over which interactions to disallow and allow in the 'safe zone', rushing down the rabbit hole and eventually finding no solution.
Starbase I contend is too complex to think there is a solution in the direct sense. It needs safe zones, to be an MMO, but it needs to deal with these problems which the presence of safe zones uniquely create. It is an unsolvable problem. Unlike Rust, which has NPC/AI controlled 'safe zones' where if you attack another player, you are shot at by turrets and NPC guards, Starbase is complex with players and ships being a factor where tracking "who attacked who" or "who rammed into who" is not really something you can define. In Rust, it's simple - fire your weapon and you're a target for the guards. But again, there is no ship, just your player entity in Rust; and Starbase has no NPC/AI guards.
I'm not saying I have the answer, but this is just how I see it; there's no real answer that doesn't require a trip down the rabbit hole where players create new problems, developers create new solutions, and then players create new problems - repeat constantly.
One possible 'solution' which I will not flesh out in detail (because again, we'll just back-and-forth all the problems/solutions of it): a stationary ship with no player on the controls is easy to 'push', and stationary ships with players on the helm gain an artificial layer of 'weight'. In other words, the longer you are stationary - to a low limit - the more artificial weight your ship has. Then, if someone is going to block or 'cap' your ship against a station, you just move, and since your artificial 'mass' is more than their ship, you push them away with ease, as they were not stationary. The limit or 'cap' of this extra weight should, if your ship is stationary for a while and you are in the ship/online/the ship is active, prevent some random ship from running into your ship and pushing you around. However, if someone stops next to you, waits the 1-2 minutes for their ship to reach this artificial 'cap' of virtual mass, they can then push your ship per normal, moving you out of the way. This puts a time component on the solution, meaning if someone wanted to grief people, they have to come up, sit around for a couple minutes, and then push them around - but as they move, their ship lowers in artificial weight, and thus they cannot continuously push people around. Just enough to get by.
This exact same system could apply to player-robots as well, making it possible to have player collision in the game (not sure if it does), but still allows someone who is standing still for a while the ability to move past people.
And of course, this then leads to all the rabbit hole stuff of "what if there's 10 ships stacked around you, how does that work?" and so on. But that's not the point. The point is disincentivizing the act of doing these things - through good gameplay elsewhere, through mechanics which require time and hassle from the 'griefer' where it becomes less valued an action to take, or through economic incentives like allowing any ship with no bound-player to that ship to be salvaged by anyone (eliminating junk piles on the 'road' so to speak).
