Two small suggestions for the AI traders.. if you hail them, and have sufficient standing with their nation, I'd like to see them give out pirate-sightings or other relevant information they may have picked up along the last few legs of their current route:

"Hail. I just saw Shape in Azek J-1"
"Hail. widget_x is selling for abnormally_low_price_y in Ukari L-2"

..As well, I'd like to see persistance of AI traders, or at least a greater chance that you can see the same ones time and time again.. maybe *Eos Mai is the friendliest TPG trader, giving out advice regardless of a player's faction standing, or maybe the Tunguska trader *Vas Corvusti is really a pirate in disguise, that will attack anyone that hails him...

Great Idea, and I have a few things to add. First off, I'd also like the ability to extort traders and for thier to be some pirate npcs that pirates can hail to get the location of people in trade ships, etc. The persistence of npcs im all for, a new npc shouldnt be generated till the old one is killed, and there needs to be much more variety in npcs (said take some traders, give them the collector AI, and leave them in wormhole sectors mining, etc) There should be traders, miners, pirates, anti-pirates, bounty hunters(no xp loss for being killed by an npc bounty hunter, but the cash that was your bounty gets deducted from your balance), explorers, maruading packs of rabid noob npcs(you cant say that wouldnt be fun)

All those would be tremendous fun, plus I really like the idea of occasional NPC battles like someone mentioned a while back, where (for example) a wing of Serco ships warps into Deneb and there's a big space battle. The upcoming Serco mega-ship patrol will help a lot with this, but game-generated incursion would be cool too.

ooo.... I like the NPC battles idea... maybe announce them over News??

-as seen in Itani station:
**Breaking News -- A large Serco fleet has been detected, massing on the outskirts of the Deneb system. The IDF will pay 1000 credits for each fighter destroyed in the name of Itan**

(hmm.. that reminds me: does anyone know if the News is only updated on a daily basis?? ie, can a message appear for only minutes at a time, or only for the whole day??)