So I kind of said as much when I mentioned that bug in the main chat, but I think that the AI should probably be set too 'launch PDF when ships enter system' by default anyway.

It gives the PDF the best fighting chance most of the time. If they only launch when I bombard/invade their planet it just let's me pick of the PDFs after I've basically won the war and go through to hoover up the enemies planets. If the PDF are constantly launching then taking planets becomes really important because if I don't do it quickly then they'll re-take their system and the PDF will rebuild. But if they just wait for me to come to then it's just more end of war busy work.

Talking new features, this might be difficult to do but it'd be nice if there were an option to launch the PDF only when it's at a certain amount of ships (say like half of it's max amount of ships or only when it's got the full amount). In addition to being useful, setting this to the default behaviour for AI would mean that they're getting the most use out of their PDFs and really make them something you have to deal with because you can't rely on the station killing them as they spawn.

Yes I greatly appreciate your feedback seriously I would of never noticed the AI was only using default I'll be fixing this

And as for your bottom idea right now it's not ideal to bring that into this as we all know paradox is playing trial and error with the AI with each update
It's totally doable but not until the AI update is out
And this will likely be implemented as an add-on

Maybe add a little mini shipyard/station around the planet's orbit if they have a PDF base, around the same orbit as a planetary shield( But a little higher). This is so you can know the planet has a PDF without looking into the buildings.

Also maybe add that along with a feature where you can see mini patrol craft ships(not big) flying around the planets when you zoom in, like the ships that you see in Ecumenopolis when you zoom into it.

hmm the first one is reasonable but the second one would cause a patching nightmare for everyone as altering planet texture would cause alot of conflicts with quite a few real popular mods

Patrol cruisers when you get battleship tech, and maybe hangars on patrol craft so you can have aircraft if you get what I mean.

Carriers or planet based fighters make sense for home system defense. (the addition of a hanger building for planetary based fighters). Perhaps each higher level of fighter tech increase number of fighters deployed.
Another thought is all planets have default fighter protection if you have fighter tech researched, that is based on whether there is a planetary admin, capital etc... buildings constructed on the planet.

yes upgrading to larger ships for the patrol craft is on the list for things to do i might stop at cruisers tho because having 50 battleships defending each planet might be a bit op

having actual fighters pop out of planets is a bit outside my skill level it could be impossible to do currently due to the hard coding around planets but i do plan to have carrier upgrades for the patrol craft so it would be similar

Perhaps patrol craft with carrier wings for these planetary defense fleets is too OP. But I was thinking about the limitation in the game for fighters on planets. What if you had an orbital carrier ship launched from a planet, that has no engines so it remains in orbit but serves as a fighter platform that is spawned as part of the defense fleet. You could launch the ship, its in orbit automatically and it is just fighter bays, shields, and armor, that returns to planet after use just like rest of the ships.

Now that might actually work I will test that out but I still gotta rebuild my ship sections mod and make the military factions mod nsc 2 season 6 ready along with a couple little bugs that need squashing first before I go adding new stuff