Smaller stations could have "Space-bridges" (station tubes or whatever) reaching out towards either external holding gantries/recessed spacedocks to permit capships to externally dock with some smaller stations (the capship would remain vulnerable and immobile but under NFZ protection)

primary purpose would be to enable capships to move ships/addons towards smaller stations.

another thing that could be tied into this would be that once docked capships are forced to perform external cargo transfers towards the station (the pilot would select an item/quantity to unload/load and the rate would be determined by total ship capacity and potentially standing or something) cargo would transfer at a given cu/s rate with exchanges happening between the stations every ~30s or so to give a small window for pirates to intercept/steal the cargo (protecting the cargo in a some sorta race-tube or shield/energy field that would have a small hitpoint quantity and trigger the nfz when broken).

building out this functionality could even then be applied to subcapitals they could be moored in space-marinas to even smaller trade outpost stations that wouldn't sell ships and could generate additional gameplay scenarios around them. (unknown system freeport outpost where players can temporarily store stuff but would be incapable of docking/homing or buying new ships)

I've been mulling over this idea quite a bit in the past few months doesn't seem like a straightfoward thing to implement but the gameplay avenues it could open up would be really neat.