Player collisions outside of the mat parties, fleets, and QAR are rare. The only reason they are common in the three instances is because those situations put lots of player ships in close proximity while they are focused on the same targets. Even if you are committed to entering these situations you can still avoid collisions easily if that's important to you. I suggest that it's more fun to embrace the collisions and learn how to deal with them, they are a fun part of the game for me. Player-player collisions are usually just a matter of turning away but occasionally a player will deliberately block another for various reasons, usually because they feel they have been abused. Yesterday I was in multiple collisions with another ship that was also chasing the QAR, this would not normally have bothered me but this particular person was was dragging hunters and sotl into the battle which I ended up accidentally hitting and so by the time the QAR was disabled hunters were also after me. The guy ended up getting boarding rights but couldn't board with sotl after him which really made me mad. He wrecked my chance to get it even though he had no chance before he even got started. One of my crew suggested that I block him until he sank which I didn't do but I did give it serious consideration. After all it's a dog eat dog world out there, lol.