Spacestation

Space stations refer to a bodily object within space which can contain defencive installments, peoples, electronics, etc, yet is inable to move. These 'immobile spaceships' often come with benefits of longer range weapons, more weapons and more power, larger size and docking abilities, able to act as fleet bases. The disadvantages include the lack of movement really limiting ability to go offensive and thus making old stations redundant if you progress into enemy space, where rebuilding is costly. Secondarily space stations cannot retreat, so enemies can attack them, regroup, attack, and so on and use their preferred tactics, whereas you cannnot attempt to use your tactics against them.

Standard uses
Stations see widespread use as outposts able to alert friendlies through their long range sensor capabilities; they are also very commonly used as defensive postures, assigned either to defend a world or to act as a point of defence to ships/fleets. The longer range weapons of most larger stations means that they can protect fleets from more artilleric ships /fleets.

Types of space station
Space stations come in 5 main forms:

Surveillance Space station -
Often not containing, or requiring crew to maintain, these space stations have extremely long sensor ranges and are designed to pick up enemy/neutral fleets long before they reach a location. Often deployed due to being cheap, but usually defenceless and can take up a lot of central fleet computing power leading to regular deployment only in no mans land borders and for alliances in general.

Outpost Space station -
Designed or utilizied to fufill the role of either scanning borders or scanning and protecting borders from enemy threats. Commonly deployed along in lines by alliances or players to assert soveriengty over an area of space. Often fairly weapon but dig painful bites and can be used effectively as early warning systems as well as to repel intruders without high fuel costs of scout/patrol ships.

Fortified/Base Space station -
Used as a meeting point for fleets, usually for, owned and worked with by one player or a few allies. Able to withstand a lot of damage, dish out a lot of damage and fire over long ranges, these stations often dominate large stretches of space, but are much more costly and use more fuel and ressources and thus see most role protecting prized assets like storage bases or important borders where the constant damage of long range weapons means bypassing these bases is usually not an option.

Control-Point Station
Each player receivies the ability to build one of these; these stations are behemoths and can defend from all but the largest of capital ships and fleets. Very long ranges, surpassing all known artillery systems known to DSOTG. So named after their ability to protect installations and large expanses of space as control points from enemy attack. Often used by alliances to shield borders.

Alliance-Size or 'Super' Space station
These stations stand largely above any other form of spacial object, ranging from the largest of capital ships to fleets of capital ships - Absolutely massive and with extremely long ranges, these space stations require large fleets to even damage, let alone destroy. Often centered around the middle of an alliances space, an alliance can build one of these and its strength actually depends on the number of players. The alliance size space station is controlled by the alliance leader. The size of the space station cannot exceed 12,300, and at minimum is 4,000 (req. 4 players). The largest size of 12,500 requires 25 players and after this extra players cannot increase the ability. In order to build the station, alliance members must donate space towards the project. Once they reach any % of the cost to build their super space station, they can begin construction in a sector which is choosen by the alliance leader. The stations statistics directly reflect the station for the number of players, times the percentage applied, so the highest project would be a 100% paid for 25 player base, whereas a smallest would be as little as 1% paid for 4 people base. The project can be expanded upon if a new player enters the alliance, in which case the percentage will be reduced to reflect this new player - ie if previously 7 players were in the alliance adn the cost was 7,000, then an 8th joined, the cost would be around 8,100 and 7000/8100 would reflect the percentage: 86.4% done. Now players could introduce and donate more ressources to the project to get it up to 100%. Any point in time where the percentage is over the percentage at the build, the station can be improved but this will shut it down for the improve time.