One somewhat obvious but neat thing that could be easily added as a feature would be the ability to buy alien tech in the form of point defense weapons and fighter bays.
Right now the focus is on the big guns, which you can buy from space stations and random ships. Earlier I had suggested to expand this by adding more slots to Stations and/or have Merchant ships with 3 slots filled (vs random ships with only 1 slot filled).
In addition to allowing more variety to use different weapons (such as underused vulcans,photon cannons,etc just because I can't get enough of them to really DO anything with), it opens up another possibility:
It would be logical to then include Point Defense weapons as something one could buy from the Station/Merchants.
Alien Fighter Bays would be the next thing to implement, which would be a bit harder to program and balance. But right now, particle guns were nerfed so that you don't start off with the best weapons in the game potentially. It would seem that fighter bays could be in a similar situation... towards mid and late game, one could pay a Station/Merchant to install an Alien bay with better stats and neater effects. Such as the ball-like fighters that roll out a dozen at a time. Or even a few new types of fighter. Nuke Bomber anyone? :-) Gatling fighters?
