This has happened a few times to me. I will usually pull up ships with the "Actions" tab open, and rarely, there will be a Raid option without the ship being disabled.

I have noticed when this occurs, I always hit them once for a very low damage payout (generally less than 20), and get a disable.

Like I said, it is not often, but it is strange. As of yet I have not been able to successfully complete a raid on one of these ships until they were truly disabled, but I would never have attacked them at all if the "Raid" option did not show me that they were already on the brink of death (or had some kind of glitch working on their ship).

I just feel Dan should take a look into this.

Edit: To provide an example as to how rare it is, out of the thousands of ships I have browsed I have only had this happen 4-6 times (granted they were likely only 200-300 unique ships, browsed through multiple times).

consider it a free yellow badge, it's how i've gotten a few

I've been considering it as a free disable (I'm all yellow'd out, after those proteans), but the point is I'm pretty certain it's not supposed to work that way.

Or maybe I should say absolutely certain, and Dan would probably like to know about it.

I have seen this quite a few times actually, it is caused when a ship is too damaged to make an offensive action but not disabled similar to when you are killing npc and your hp gets down too low to attack them or perform any action but you are not disabled, the raid icon will show up showing that you can be raided.