[AgentZero]

I kinda like the whole obfuscation thing, but I wouldn't go so far as to apply it to things like planets. I mean, a planet is BIG, and as soon as your ship enters the system they're gonna know where the planets are, and even have a rough idea of the conditions of said planets. So as soon as a ship enters a system we'd get a rough idea of what the conditions of all the planets were like but not if there's anyone living there, unless the colony has reached a certain stage of development. However, even if you know someone owns that planet, you won't know WHO until you wander on over and take a closer look.

But ships, even big ships, compared to the scale of an entire solar system, are TINY so naturally, they'd be a lot harder to find, and until genuinely advanced sensors are available, finding a ship in a solar system would be like... Well, you know.
When you detect a ship in a star system, I think there should be several stages of identification:
1) There's a ship over there somewhere.
2) There's a ship right there and it's about -this- big...
3) And it looks sort of like this (silhouette)
4) Now it looks exactly like this.
5) It's weapons/engines/shields are about this powerful

And that's all we'd ever know until actually making contact with the empire owning that ship. Then, under Diplomacy, one would have the option to 'Share IFF Codes'. Once this is done, any ships in you 'Unknown' list that belong the empire you shared with will be moved to that empires list. Obviously, any new designs will still come up as Unknown unless IFF codes are shared regularily.

More to say but no time to say it..