The fear, of course, is if you allow one station, then why not ten? A hundred? Suddenly you have people creating an empire of stations - and keep in mind how many people are involved in this game.
That could get VERY messy within a short amount of time.
However, I did have a thought on a way to expand the frontier pioneer style that might be appealing and not turn the game into something empire based: Sponsorship.
Picture it this way. Let's say you're an explorer and you found a really good system away from civilized space. You want to set something up there. Imagine within the Stellar Cartographers section there was a submenu for proposing and funding an outpost. You choose the star system and planet/moon you want to put a station around. It has to be a planet you surveyed, and the value of the survey has to be such that it indicates it would be a profitable location for the corporations who would exploit it.
But you don't just buy a station and have it put there. For one thing even a basic non rotational space station would be far more expensive than a bunch of Anacondas. It's not just a floating box, it's a floating city.
Once proposed you can sponsor it getting made, which is a target number representing a fraction of the total station cost (still bloody expensive). You can add to that number over time in donations, doesn't have to be all at once. And here's the thing - sponsorship is made open. If I propose a station location, you can help contribute to sponsorship if it's in a location you'd also like to see a station in. In fact, the costs should be so high that crowd sourseing station sponsorship would be preferable to you slogging it on your own.
That said, the station is never yours. It belongs to the company. You and others just put in the seed money to get the wheels turning.
Why would you want to do it this way? Well, for one thing, as I said, it helps reduce the idea of Empire building. The last thing Elite needs is for several grinders with hyper fine tuned rare trade routes and billions of dollars at their disposal to flood the systems with stations. And they will.
But you still have your own perks for doing it. Since you initially sponsored the station, you get to name it (pending approval no doubt), and you could effectively consider it your personal base, even if you don't "own" it. I'd say repairs and refueling could be free for you there, commodities at a discount, and a personal black market even if it doesn't have a black market for others, to represent the "pull" you have there, but I'd be wary of the idea of any income being provided for it. Again, that would encourage spamming of stations by grinders looking for cash cows.
Does that idea hold any appeal?
