I am not asking to ease up on border defense. I am not asking for it to be any easier to get into a nation space. I don't know anything about pirating in nation space and I don't know anything about sneaking in.

I am asking for the nations defenses to be on the nation side of things, because they get in the way of grey. The turrets are blocking access to the bottlenecks, and pirates can't block access to/from grey.

If you look at Warcraft's system for noob areas they have quite a good design for the problems that VO does in that area.

Umm .... not really
I have played World of Warcraft for years.

1. it is easy to get into Newb areas

2. the only real defense newbs get is a "friendly fire" option
what it is is the PvP flag. You cannot be attacked in your own territory unless you strike first. then it is open season.

So usually a player would go into the newb areas and taunt the new players into attacking them. or bait the players by using a low level character to flag them then bring in a higher level to nuke them. Also a partial bait / harassment is to kill the NPC's so the players can't continue their quest lines

if we were to set something like this up it would be more like until combat level 3 in nation space you cannot be attacked by another player unless you strike first or are in a duel status.

you want to keep the pirates out of nation space. i want to keep the newbs out of grey space.

just leave the turrets in grey, but make them unaligned turrets. they shoot at everything.

Well, the license system is going to eventually require that newbies pass a certain level before they're let out of nation space (see FF RFC). We have the first "iteration" done, with the new "Training Sectors", but then we need the Capitol System licenses and the Nation licenses.

Aside from this.. making turrets shoot at everyone would be umm.. wrong. I mean, no one could leave nation space.

Even if I did move the "normal" border turrets inside, the "Capitol" systems would be unchanged, so Arta Caelestis would keep its "outside" turrets.

Not to go off track Incarnate but starting newbs in arta seems like a rather bad Idea. It is way to close to grey space and it would be very easy for a newb to jump to ukari by mistake. Dau has plenty of room for newbs in any case so perhaps Arta should become an old capital and suffer a bit of urban blight...

The pirates are a bit lazy in thier work. A lot of them seem to be content to sit in B8 and a few other places rather then seeking out thier prey. The silly creatures still havent figured out to work in groups with the KOS doing the killing and the POS collecting the spoils....

You don't want pirates doing all their pirating in nationspace, PaKettle. The point is to make nationspace somewhat safer, keeping the pirates in grey. Unfortunately, there are currently next to no traders in grey, and so no prey, thus many pirates are taking a break. There is almost no point to piracy right now, because there's nobody to pirate in grey, and there are not enough pirates active to work in groups because there aren't enough targets to make it fun. This is what I have seen as a greyspace denizen who doesn't take part in piracy, so I assume the pirates have further gripes as well.

In my opinion the turrets in H2 could do with being moved to Azek, but the main problem lies with the economy, so I fully support not taking time out for this and focusing on the bigger problems first.

And I agree also. Focus and fill out the main game before cycling back to the little details. ;p incarnate did say he has plans laid for this. Let's trust our universe's gods to do their art.
They work in mysterious ways. Ours are kind enough to talk to us. ;p

Well at least we all agree there are bigger issues then this one....