EDIT: No. Actually, this thread proves people *do* care about the story arcs... it's just when in-game activity is blatantly contradictory to the narrative, those players currently won't invest more than a cursory glance to investigate anything anymore.
This.
Manually disable all the services, pin all the local faction security states to the bottom of lockdown - which can be done, in 3.3, without messing up the BGS for several systems around - and set it going [1]. *Maybe* that's coming in today's tick and it just didn't get applied in time for the news article ... but really it should have been done on Wednesday's tick, so maybe some players discover it beforehand, we get some "what's up with this station?" threads, and then the reveal on Thursday.
I really hope the new events sort this out - the stories themselves in Galnet are decent, but they appear to be taking place in an entirely separate universe at the moment.
[1] Plenty of fancier options - make a new Tothos faction, put it in charge of the station, disable NPC trafffic and docking clearance at the station, add escape pods scattered around the station instance to rescue (maybe with Tothos-aligned terrorist NPCs attacking you), have a Fed capship show up in a POI orbiting the same planet, etc. - that are still within proven existing capabilities.
