Modding Help Help with fixing a bug in More Planet Info

So I've been working on a mod that fixes some issues with more planet info (and it's biome fix addon) and am pretty much on the cusp of releasing it, there's only one bug left for me to resolve and that's with how more planet info prevents the player from selecting npc ships while they're in flight. It's a rather minor bug but given how slow they are it's often pretty annoying having to wait for a ship to reach a planet or something it can orbit in order to reach it yourself.

I've managed to narrow down the cause of this bug to an injection the mod makes to the cockpitutil.lua file, in particular the closestLocationInRange function. Replacing its version of the function with the vanilla one fixes the issue with ships but ends up breaking the appearance of asteroid belts, so ultimately I'm looking to combine the two versions of the functions in a way that both fixes this bug and doesn't break the appearance of asteroid belts. The two versions of the function are linked below:

the vanilla function

MPI's function

any help would be greatly appreciated with this