On 4 I see only the option to have slow to normal speed ships, so that new players can build up and not be overrun by the (lucky) whales.
I would have asked if they could insert something like a binomial distribution algorithm so that it kind of prevents that there are real unlucky player who won't find any planet after 200 searches. Something that it get's from a random mode to this after 100 unlucky searches.
New players spawn in a second ring as you can see on this map: https://spycolony.herokuapp.com/map.html
This gives them days of flight duration protection from all the early player in the inner ring. It is pretty much impossible that the newjoiners will be overrun by the early joiners as they will have to fight their neighbours first.
As the outer ring fills up we will also open up a third region for the new players again and they will start with similarly powered players.
You can think of it like a leveling system in regions. That is also why we will be careful when introducing faster ships. We will connect space regions over time but it will happen in a slow enough pace in order to guarantee a balanced playing field.