Sector Hazards and Obstacles

[Fatsack]

Volumetric Hazards or other obstacles would certainly make sectors more diverse, memorable, and challenging. 

Some Ideas:

1. Solar flares that you have to evade to avoid damaging your systems, leaves the hull/armor untouched.  Like evacuating the sector within a countdown timer, like time trial race.  Or you have to find 'shade', opposite the star, behind an asteroid that's bigger than your ship.  Could scale this to multiple sector areas on the galactic map for 'supernovae' events where you have to escape the area or get systems damage, dead crew, or other such things.  This could create ore rich sectors afterwards as a reward.
2. Speeding meteors/comets to dodge like traffic.
3. Different volumetric nebulae that disable different kinds of weapons, systems, and shields.  Or they could damage/destroy cargo, crew, or hull/armor the longer you stay in them.  Or just 'smoke clouds' that obscure view and sensor readings.
4. Neutron stars or black holes rendered on the skybox, with a 'wind' type effect that pulls your ship toward them, so you have to 'sail against the wind' and compensate your flying because of the additional acceleration vector from the gravity source affecting your ship.
5. Magnetic minefields with mines that slowly float toward your ship if you get too close.  Making smaller faster ships easier to fly through, but larger ships would get pummeled.
6. Space 'infestations' such as flying through nebulae of corrosive acids, or importing organic infestations via looting, that you have to visit a station to repair or purge, to remove (trouble with tribbles episode of star trek), like a 'disease' would affect a character in a survival game and they need a certain medicine or npc to cure it.  Could apply a debuff and generate a quest/mission showing where to go to 'fix' it.
7. 'Away missions', where there is a space platform, or a large planet in the skybox, and you can send some of your crew to the surface or to the structure. This could enable a narration story and a series of choices for you to make which would determine what happens to the crew and any rewards you receive.  Good way to add plot and flesh out the galaxies lore. Maybe market it toward 'faction' story lines, depending on the which factions territory it takes place in, or between factions if it's in a border region.  Maybe 'tag' factions with different keywords or descriptors that would determine which kinds of stories could play out in that territory.
8. More events.  They don't have to be combat related, could just be funny quirky easter eggs or unique handcrafted landmarks, like the actual station that spells out 'avorion' on the title screen appearing randomly in an otherwise empty sector, fun/weird stuff like that.

[SpaceMarine4040]

Solar flares, meteors, corrosive nebulae, high gravity seem cool. I am not a fan of a disease event, it seems tedious.

 

But several of these features can make the system you set as your home base feel truly unique, and allows interesting strategy. For instance if the star in system plays hell with shields then all of your stations might not even bother with shields, if your system has rogue asteroids that hurtle around, you may have "bumper pads", if the nebula is corrosive you use a corrosion resistant material.

[Fatsack]

Could even be beneficial ones too. Like ancient nanite clouds that auto-repair some damage on your ship.  Or places you can gather resources like hydrogen, or nitrogen etc.