Something to make pirating a little bit more lucrative, instead of hanging out in commonly accessed sectors:

Have a friend in a moth haul a buoy out into a sector. They jettison it, and while the buoy has energy (maybe an hours worth?) it pulls travellers out of jump, much like an ion storm. They get pulled out within 2km of the buoy.

After the buoy runs out of energy, it can be picked up by the moth and returned to a station for a refill. It can be destroyed, as well...

An idea that popped into my mind while thinking about this. Wouldn't it be neat if you saw someone streak past in the sector you're in, when they're in jump? Just for a split second, seeing a ship surrounded by a cylinder of hyperspace or whatever, shooting across the sector. Be kinda neat, if only for aesthetic purposes.

An interesting take on an old and much-discussed idea, that of a gravity well device to drop people out of warp and stop them from warping out again within its area of effect.

Two problems with the hour thing:

1. It's too much time, giving so much advantage to the pirates the trader will most likely do what we do with storms already: move away and call out the problem, which at the best will leave the pirate with no one coming to the system and at worst will have anti-pirate people coming in to bash him and his gravwell device. So in effect, it would be a one-shot thing, so it wouldn't be that different from stalking a well-traveled wormhole.

2. Right now all free-floating items time out at fifteen minutes, so if you can't pick it back up while it's working it's going to time out. Worse, if a sector is empty of players for five minutes it's reset and all items are lost. If the pirate(s) forget themselves and embark on a long chase, they could come back to find the device timed out too.

You should use the search function to look for similar ideas, and read them to see what else has been proposed.

Gravity Well Generater, yes please!!!