Rough idea about missions that let you run a two-way trade route for a while with scaling rewards and maybe more territoriality and maybe even BGS flavour for those who want to stick to a place and don't mind rote A↔B travel. It is, partly, an extension of the state-dependent fetch quests already in place.
Let a player sign up for a mission that sets up a commodity exchange between two systems, say, Eranin and Alioth, with Eranin exporting animal meat and importing Land Enrichment Systems from Alioth, for a total of 20.000 tonnes with a maximum duration of a week. The player would pick up a shipload of meat after accepting the mission at Eranin through the depot mechanic and ferry them to Alioth; there, the mission interface offers options to directly transactionally exchange the meat for technology, counting each exchanged unit against the total. Return to Eranin and repeat the process (unload tech, take on food); repeat ad nauseam. (After a minute of consideration it may be wise to allow just unloading completely instead of just keeping the player's hold always full of mission containers though…)
Every 10% or so of the total mission volume (or just on a continuous scale), the player would get into a higher reward tier for the mission, scaling up monetary and pronounced BGS rewards; for reasons of flavour, those missions could be triggered and altered by pending states, e.g., just high-volume normal trade like the commodities in the example would counter a bust, if a faction is facing a famine, they would start exporting non-food items for food, if an outbreak was on the horizon they'd start trading for medicines, and when the rabble starts protesting the violence inherent in the system they'd make the target commodity arms.
Let a player sign up for a mission that sets up a commodity exchange between two systems, say, Eranin and Alioth, with Eranin exporting animal meat and importing Land Enrichment Systems from Alioth, for a total of 20.000 tonnes with a maximum duration of a week. The player would pick up a shipload of meat after accepting the mission at Eranin through the depot mechanic and ferry them to Alioth; there, the mission interface offers options to directly transactionally exchange the meat for technology, counting each exchanged unit against the total. Return to Eranin and repeat the process (unload tech, take on food); repeat ad nauseam. (After a minute of consideration it may be wise to allow just unloading completely instead of just keeping the player's hold always full of mission containers though…)
Every 10% or so of the total mission volume (or just on a continuous scale), the player would get into a higher reward tier for the mission, scaling up monetary and pronounced BGS rewards; for reasons of flavour, those missions could be triggered and altered by pending states, e.g., just high-volume normal trade like the commodities in the example would counter a bust, if a faction is facing a famine, they would start exporting non-food items for food, if an outbreak was on the horizon they'd start trading for medicines, and when the rabble starts protesting the violence inherent in the system they'd make the target commodity arms.