No, universally forcing players out of supercruise is a bad idea. In system jumping takes away supercruise and interdictions, rendering piracy nearly impossible outside of a (theoretically from your intro) heavily policed nav beacons and making travel across the bubble and through systems a huge pain.
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Nav beacons are not pointless, they broadcast the station info and the location of the system in Morse code (go have a listen, I assume it's the system id, I don't speak morse). Why are the NPCs there? I don't know, good question. Let's give them a reason to be there rather than just to "hang out".
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Ask yourself this? Why would I want to go to a nav beacon?
Answer: To meet up with someone, wing beacons make this a little less relevant, but in the absence of winging with someone, it's a handy, near entry location to meet up.
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So lets give players a reason to go there and meet up with the "people" we can't wing with. NPCs!
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What if you could go to a nav beacon to try to make a contact with a black market rep? (yeah, black markets should be removed from the maps and access should be earned, not default)
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What if there were various vendors at the nav beacon? You know, those "buying technology" guys that randomly show up in a USS, they'd make a lot more money if they were somewhere I could find them. It would give traders the chance to pop in and sell their goods on the quick, without that long supercruise, no doubt there would be a whole armada of T9s there waiting to take your goods.
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(deja vu)What if there were various vendors at the nav beacon? As a pirate that would be a really promising prospect, assuming you can get some of their loot before the fuzz show up, or your swarmed en masse. Fortune favors the bold, the quick and the sneaky.
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What if you could buy complete cartograhpic and/or trade data for the system? It's already a contact, just select it, scroll down to "purchase local cartographic information" and you now can free up that ADS slot to carry something else, and you don't have to go back and purchase an ADS to find the planet you want to land on. From a trade perspective it could save you a lot of time looking for a good place to sell some goods, but it also makes you a vulnerable target while you drop out.
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So why doesn't this happen already? I don't think the AI is there, but it is improving. For these scenarios to be believable the AI needs to be smart enough that an organic flow of events occurs all spread out as wide as a conflict zone (often spreading 8-15 km away from the center), that could potentially be a mass of traders, pirates and bounty hunters 20km from one end to the other.
- Traders set up shop to make some quick money buying and selling goods.
- Pirates come to prey on the traders (which are somewhat safe-ish due to numbers)
- Police and bounty hunters show up to put down the pirates to keep business in teh system good.
- Traders come and go as their cargo holds fill up. (both into and out of the system and from the station to the nav beacon)
- repeat
An ebb and flow of trade, piracy and security forms. Trader/vendors pushing for the relative safety of the center of the hub (the actual beacon) warn away competing trade/vendor ships from encroaching on their corner of the area, smaller more timid trader/vendors spend their time out on the fringes keeping an eye out for pirates, praying a well armed bounty hunter might show up to poke around.
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They shouldn't ever become a place to "farm", that's dull and stagnant, they need to be dynamic, a place you want to swing by, check the situation and go on about your business, the water cooler/snack table of the system. Turnover needs to be very quick, things in constant motion, nobody around for more than a few minutes.
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But the AI isn't there yet, pirates just attack traders until they die, only fleeing when it's far too late, traders are the same, choosing death rather than abandonment except in rare cases. Security forces linger too long, as if there is nothing else to do in the system, they should come in, smash whats going on, see that things have quieted down, and then head out to deal with some other situation elsewhere (this is a rather dystopian future, cops should be at a premium), indeed, in low security systems the nav beacons might be almost entirely dependent on freelance bounty hunters and well armed traders (pythons and condas) to keep things relatively secure, but prices would be better.
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Just imagine being a trader, not knowing if that python is a bounty hunter watching your back or a trader coming to make a deal or a pirate lining you up to take his first shot, would your nerves hold in a little T6, you could make a lot of money, but you could also lose it all. Imagine being a pirate not knowing if there are any bounty hunters around, looking over your shoulder before you move in to make a grab for some goods. Imagine as a bounty hunter, dropping in and scanning around, checking up on things, looking for a juicy target and catching a pirate in the act.
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What they should not be is a mandatory stopover to do anything in the system. You're gonig to make me slow down to 1Mm/s and drop out of supercruise so I can be scanned, pirated or at best, just inhibited from actually playing the game? That's a terrible idea, mechanics should be incentivized, not forced. If you have to force something to be included because it is otherwise useless, it's a bad mechanic and would be better off just eliminated.
