I was just brainstorming some ideas for the player owned stations, cap ships and player crafting that are said to be added soon (tm). I think the best thing to do would be to take advantage of resource gathering by implementing making collectors from basic stations to be sent to gather resources to move said basic station through the tiers of crafting and also have hive skirmish-like missions for the collecting sectors (giving more depth and purpose to hive skirmish missions to guilds and players)... I shall elaborate.

So it all starts when the guild decides which sector to make their station in, it would simply start out as a piece of scrap with a dock for unloading minerals and resources in (players would not be able to trade or repair and refill in it yet). This would be the first tier and would involve players collecting their own minerals and resources for building the station.

Once this station is built (very basic, one dock and one part maybe said one piece of the station would correspond with a choice given of the station being either research, barracks, or commerce), the players would be able to repair at it (if enough say, carbonic ore is stocked in it or something) and also be able to craft their collected resources to build collector bots (for example, bot cores which would be a necessary part for a collector would be either collected from dead bots or crafted from minerals). Once these bots are crafted, they can be sent to whatever the guild's station manager decides to be their collecting sector (an asteroid sector without other stations or wormholes). The bots will go to this sector, collect, and come back... however, hive bots will constantly be attacking the sector and until the guilds can build guardians or assault bots they would have to defend these sectors themselves. The collecting sectors would be in constant contestation and would give guilds an even better reason for taking out the local levis. The station manager can also decide to collect in a rival station's collecting sector which would lead to something like a player controlled hive-skirmish situation with the enemy station acting as the levi. As a station moves through the tiers, they would be able to designate more and more collecting sectors and whether they would be able to keep them or not would depend on the guild's overall combat, commerce, and/or collecting skills and strategy. Of course, as the stations moved through the crafting tiers, more bots would become available to build and more parts and docks would be added.

Eventually, whatever the devs decide to be the station part/dock that capital ships launch from will be available for the station at a high price of minerals and parts that would require the right station research and crafting sections, the capital number of collecting sectors and collecting bots per those sectors, and there for the most dominating guild in skill and numbers. From there, commerce sections added to the station encourage more convoys from other factions to dock and trade leading to more crafting parts, minerals, or income made by the station, barracks sections will correspond with the efficiency of the weapons and ships available to craft, and research parts add to the types of available items to craft.

This is obviously just an example of one of the possible tier setups of which I think would best suit all of these soon to come items. Generally I think it would be cool if the player owned station system would adopt any sort of resource-centered tier setups that also use some sort of "hive skirmish" setup. Feedback?