1) Eliminate or make it extremely expensive or difficult to stockpile ships and equipment.

2) Based upon the home nation of the player who owns the station, provide the premium ships and weapons (I think we need nation specific weapons but that's another thread I'm not going to start) of that nation for sale only to members of that nation that have been granted a key. Perhaps even allow the owner to further limit who can make purchases.

This should allow Itani and Serco to use the stations as outposts close to enemy territory from which they can engage the other side with top level equipment- possibly even free equipment, similar to ship replacement in Deneb.

This doesn't do anything for UIT who don't have any meaningful enemies anyway.

-1; that is retarded.

What conquerable stations should do is let you fill their inventory with raw materials in order to have them manufacture owner-defined items over time, gradually consuming the raw materials. The station would have a number of upgrade slots that you could use to make it manufacture things faster, or have more turrets, or more storage, etc. There would only be a limited number of slots, so you could either max out one thing, or strike a balance. There should also be configurable shops able to sell the manufactured goods, goods players sold to it, and goods that the owners deposited into the shop inventory. Owners would receive a percentage of the profits.

I could see that with player built stations. Not so much with the conq stations.

I would guess that a player built station is also a conq station, as in: you build it, I can conquer it. As such, conq and player built stations don't necessarily need to differ in anything except for how they came into being...

I seriously doubt they will be conquerable in the same sense as the current conq stations. If you take the work required to build a trident as a base for what will be needed to build a station, the ability to lose said station so easily would make the prospect of building it idiotic- unless like the tridents, the stations are going to be insured- which would imply the destruction and looting of said station.

Control over the station like is currently held would have to either be temporary or require a phenominal extended effort to be justified.

+1 to Pizza. He and I both have been saying for years now that VO needs a consumer based economic system. I've also mentioned a number of times that the conquerable stations should allow for increased defenses through construction. You want 24 turrets, go for it, but you need to dedicate the resources for it. You want only 3 turrets for defense, but have a lot of other stuff? That's fine too.

I'd add the player investment process (i.e. donating manufactured items to the station's shops for sale and a percentage of the proceeds) after you get the consumable thing going.

One thing that would require being worked out: who gets to decide which slots do what? Different factions taking a station might have different ideas of how to proceed.

I've suggested this before but cannot locate the thread at this time. To get at least some kind of open player trade going use the conquerable station shops as a way to begin by having whatever is sold to them remain in the shop for others to purchase. With the station buying the items at 'verse average cost and selling them at 'verse average cost, or could use these shops a sort of consignment shop where the player selling sets a price and when the item is purchased the shop "keeps" a small commision from the sale. The player selling the item then only gets paid from the station when they return to it after the item has been sold. The items sold via these stations shops would be available to whoever holds valid keys regardless of which faction placed the items for sale. To also eliminate over clutered shops the items placed for sale or credits held for sellers would be "lost" if not claimed within a time of say 30 or even 60 days. This would encourage a player who has placed items for sale in these shops to return to the stations regularly to reclaim their items minus the percentage of asking price(as a "storage fee") or to make sure that their 'alt) at some point can access the shop to purchase the item. While I realize this may not be a perfect or final solution to the issue of player trade it would::

1. Eliminate the emptiness of the shops at these stations.
2. Provide for a way to enable buying and selling of ships between players.
3. Enable trade between players that may not always be on at the same time or even in the same faction or guild.