[Asmala]

If the Last thing you saw was a ship with long range scanners that got destroyed, then the Last thing you saw was scans of the ships.

Only those ships' damage status have to be saved which are clicked (=scanned). If each ship needs average 30 bytes (which should be enough) it would need enormous amount of clicks to cause significant increase in savegame file. Even 10000 clicks are only 300 kb which isn't very much. When there is 10000 ships in a game the savegame file is even currently many megabytes. And I really want to meet someone who clicks through 10000 ships, it would require dozens of hours of clicking.

Although you may not enjoy roleplaying your empire, there are a lot of people that do. Ship names are just one aspect of the RP supported by SE4. MM has made efforts to increase the amount of RP in the game from SE3 to SE4, so I doubt they would be willing to add a feature that cuts any of it.

Could you explain to me how this feature would cut any RP aspects of this game? Now all of planets properties (resource values, atmosphere, rock/ice/gas/asteroid) are updated even if you have no presence in a system. Modifying this so you see the planets like they were when you saw them Last time, somebody could say it adds more RP aspects.

The Last scan should be stored anyways even for ships you can see that are not in scanner range. What, your scan logs get wiped every day?

Absolutely true, the scans should be stored. But I think this scanner-hassle and status of systems not presently seen are different topics. Perhaps a new thread should be created for this scanner debate.