I wouldn't be surprised if an impromptu communication protocol (based on assigning meanings to things other ships can observe you doing) sprung up pretty quickl

I wouldn't be surprised if an impromptu communication protocol (based on assigning meanings to things other ships can observe you doing) sprung up pretty quickly to allow networking. At the point that ships can communicate, it's bound to come down to needing to do it with securely-written code, or risk ship-to-ship malware. Should be really fun to see where this goes.