Let's just ignore the fact it's probably a well armed insta-gib station...
On that note....
Seems like ED might take a leaf out of Elite (1984)'s book here.
You used to arrive is a system "in the middle of nowhere" and most of the gameplay involved getting to the station with your ship and cargo intact, despite the best intentions of pirates, Thargoids, military ships and the rozzers.
I'd like to see a similar thing in ED.
Keep the FSI for those who want to bounty-hunt in "deep space" but modify other aspects of the game so that you drop out of SC, say, 50km from a station and then a lot of the combat becomes a running-battle as you try to reach the safety of the station.
You'd still get the same "incoming enemy" alerts but they'd (most often) be coming at you once you'd arrived at your destination.
It'd be up to you to either hope you could detect them before they detect you (maybe a good reason to fit A-rated sensors to your cargo ship) and fly a course to the station that avoids them, try to outrun them in a suitable fast ship or fight them if you can.
When combat starts, cop-ships would be dispatched from the station and the time until they arrive would be dictated, simply, by how close to the station you got before combat began.
Alternatively, you might find there were Thargoids sniffing around the station, pirates were raiding the station or that a war was being fought in the vicinity.
This would mean, basically, taking the contents of NHSS's, pirate USSs and CZ's and transplanting them to the vicinity of stations.
I'd put other assets, such as megaships, hospitals and naval yards into the same instance as the station
and have smaller ships travelling between them.
With that done, I'd set up the NPC AI so that they have to scan nearby ships before they find their target.
If you head directly for the station you'll stick out like a sore thumb and attract hostile NPCs.
If you try to blend in with the regular traffic, hostile NPCs would have to "search" for you.
Overall, this would add a more "living" feel to the area around stations, it'd allow players to carry out things like massacre missions and combat missions without even jumping into SC - which, in turn, would make it feel more tangible that you were fighting
for (or against) the station you could see in the distance and it'd create opportunities for more interesting gameplay surrounding stations.
The down-side of this would be that an uneventful arrival at a station would require a fairly dull journey before docking but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing and flying toward a station through space where there
were actually other ships doing their own thing would be quite immersive.
Also, while I'm at it, it would provide yet another opportunity (which FDev have always previously ignored) to create some gameplay for small ships if FDev created some megaships/structures that only had small pads and then offered missions at the station to ferry stuff to nearby destinations.
Implement that now and you create the bare-bones of gameplay that could later be expanded to involve resupplying Fleet Carriers and faction-owned megaships at a later date.
