I love the idea of setting up roaming patrols between close planets. At the moment my general use is to set a triangle of re-directors to send ships around on FRD so they auto-intercept enemies.
My problem is that if it's only two planets (or if one planet is a 'dead end' on the route), the ships warp in and warp out instantly, and don't stay to attack enemies if they are present. This makes patrols useless for many planet configurations.
Secondly, it's annoying when non-military units get routed onto these patrol routes (colony ships, transports etc).
There a few solutions but what would suit me best is if you could make a separate class of re-directors that you could target onto each other and didn't auto-redirect when units arrived on the planet. So essentially you make a chain of these then command the ships to move onto the redirector which allocates them to the track you've created. This would fix the first issue, provided you made them automatically target one-another when targetting separate planets. I'm sure it could be improved beyond this but I think it would make the game much more interesting on the defensive side.