It seems Outfitting is just RNG. My Home Station Outfitting Store sucks (no I'm not moving). FD should add Outfitting to the BGS or some way to get more hardware in stores. Unless I'm missing something you can't improve your stores no matter what you do.
I'm not completely sure how Outfitting works, but if it does have a random element it's not a very large one, and it may be entirely deterministic. The pattern is complex enough to be very difficult to predict, which will *look* random - but it isn't.
So far as I can tell it's based on:
- a fixed baseline value specific to the station (for the vast majority of stations, this seems to be related to the economy and population, but there are exceptions for some hand-placed stations)
- a multiplier based on the current BGS state (Investment seems to be best)
and these two determine how many "slots" the station has available to stock items in.
The government type controlling the station then decides how to use those slots - exactly how is not clear, but the outfitting available will change if the government changes.
So you can improve your stores in two main ways:
1) Get a government into power at the station that focuses on the types of items you want (I don't think anyone has really studied which governments do which things, so you might have to just try various ones and see which you prefer)
2) Push the economy into Investment state and keep it there as much as possible to maximise the range of items produced
What you can't normally do is adjust the baseline - though you may find it sometimes increases slightly on its own with new major releases.
