Could you post this excel spreadsheet or send it to me? I mean, if you want my help, I'll need to see what you've got and what needs to be done.
So will my idea for the invisible star in the black hole system work? I think that to make it so that the purple star doesn't appear any where else, you would have to make several copies of each system type, one for each standard star color. That isn't too bad for the standard system, but it would be a big problem for those trinary systems. If you wanted to have systems with 4 or 5 stars, then that would get very crazy!
Actually, what does this do exactly?
Mask Background Objs := TRUE
If it makes a regular star become invisible, then i guess that my purple star solution is pointless.
Alternatively, you could give black holes this ability:
Ability 4 Type := Sector - Sight Obscuration
Ability 4 Descr := Light cannot excape from a black hole, so sensors do not function here.
Ability 4 Val 1 := 30
Ability 4 Val 2 := 0
This would obscure the star(s) that you put in the black hole system. Also, it would prevent you from seeing enemy ships in the system, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.