Place a warp-gate instead of a ship like on my screenshot in the OP exactly at the central point you will see that other players (and yourself maybe) won’t be able to dock because the option won’t be displayed on the screen.
I didn’t know that ships could also block the zone to expand but Rennie seems to believe it so…I trust him.
According to this bug report, it seems that the dock system works on a single point (a dot) and not a zone; if you surround that dot with something (wapr gate I.E.), theres no contact from any nearby space to interact, wich would mean that it does not matters where you position yourself, you simply cant interact and dock. I havent checked this by myself, so this is only a hipothesis wich i would love to prove.
Yeah you can park your ship over the “beacon” then all docking is blocked until the ship is moved. It doesn’t matter where you are, the docking is blocked because the ship is covering the beacon.
It works like a beacon. If something gets in the way, capturing is stopped.
You need two people to reproduce. One person puts their ship as close to 0m from the Station name. The other person now cannot dock until the ship moves away from the Station name.
With the Stations of such vast size, it ironic that there is only one dock. Why not have 6 of them (North, South, East, West, Top, Bottom) ?
What I would really love to see as a modification is the ability to actually enter the Stations via the Dock Extension Tunnel and physically land on a platform (which is holding a dock beacon), then actually activate the Interact logic.
It would give the training of ship control and precise positioning to users instead of flying in close-to and activating Interact. Those triangle pads are large enough to land any craft on.