Scouting is difficult early on. You can buy a pigeon, but it is too slow to really follow shipping. I sent mine empty on patrols, then as soon as it finds something, send the Bonny to it since it is faster and has more gals for the upcoming battle. I would not advise scouting with the Bonny, but if you were to build a Hunter-Killer, it has better radar and more mileage so it is a bit more efficient. It is also fast enough to track shipping to their landing spot.
For me, outposts are for building a minimalist base where you can resupply your scouting crafts. You want to resupply as locally as possible as you don't want to have them cross half the globe and waste fuel.
If you pursue your interest in finding shipping, you can discover other crafts that are much better at long term patrolling. (This is a high priority for me, since, as you said, building proper radar bases is too expensive, and scouting with nuclear fuelled crafts is hard to manage.)
Hammer + beer is indeed the best, since it can't miss even if you use it one-handed, has the best damage and the beer compensates for the heavy stamina use. Eventually, your gals will be good enough that cutlasses and billhooks are worth it. Also, hammer causes reactions because it's a "gun", whereas melee doesn't. On enemies with high TUs, this can mean death if somehow your hammer blow doesn't kill them (likely on power armored enemies/very high HP/concussive resistant).
If the gals are panicking, the flag won't save you. It is supposed to be used before your gals panic, so that you don't get in trouble. You might be able to keep the flag weaver within the area of the flag and give her morale too, to compensate for the loss? Basically, picture a medieval unit all ranked up around their flag, I think that's how it is best used. Of course, once the enemy brings out the explosives, that doesn't go so well. Best solution to morale is still killing enemies.
I'm not sure how rope works because I haven't tried it yet either. But the smoke damage means that it does stun damage, but applies smoke resist instead and ignores armor. So against a power armored dude, a rope is useless (because of the resist). If you have a high armor but low smoke resist unit (power armor dude who took his helmet off?) then it'd still work fine because it doesn't care about armor. The special ability subtract twice the damage inflicted from stamina also. So if the target wakes up, they should be low on stamina and they won't run too far (representing them being tied up).
