Hello,
To be honest, I was not sure if I should post this here, or in bugs, or somewhere else. I decided not to post it in bugs since this is not reproducible (as far as I am aware), but I thought it might be a part of how player owned stations work and I just don't understand it. So here goes.
I had a water plant in a sector that was a good source of income, earning me about 360k per hour. It was selling with cargo shuttles to three other stations in the sector that had a high demand for water, a Spice plant, a biotope, and a habitat if I remember correctly. Along with these three stations, there was a resource depot and I believe a repair dock.
When I logged on today, nothing was different about the game, nothing seemed to be off, the game was a little stuttery to until it fully loaded, however. When I noticed my water plant was not making much money in the chat, I went to that sector to see what was wrong and literally every station but mine had vanished. They were not present in the sector if you flew around, and their names vanished from the galaxy map. This is extremely disappointing as this was a major source of income for me.
Is this a bug? Is this part of the system? I read on the wiki it says putting a station down affects your relationship with the local faction. So I was wondering if by having this station for a while (3-4 days I think) it eventually pushed out the AI faction stations? That seems to me like a bad system, but I really do now know. I really hope someone can help me out and at least maybe tell me what has happened, because I ask questions on the discord regularly and most people ignore my questions completely.