For the far reaches of my ever expanding galaxy or more likely one in every system that doesn’t have a gas giant I’m thinking of building a Deep Soace Nine (?) refuel resupply maintenance station - is that pretty much it?
refuelling ability, maintenance and maybe ordnance transfer
Does it need habs
And then have a tanker or two constantly cycling round topping their fuel up etc
Probably recreational facilities for your crew if not at a colony
Space Stations are a great idea and have definetely a space, but the implementation is too punishing, especially due to the no Armour.
Long story short, you are better off by building a ship with no engines so you can defend it, sure, still needs towing and it loses the no armor size advantage along construction from construction industry, but overall is the best option in remote and not so friendly areas.
Space stations are great in fully controlled heavy patrolled systems, however, I don’t think it’s the case here.
For your specific goal, I would probably find a rock, put some STOs and DTS on it, then use the 0 workers planetary modules to handle fuel, ordnance, and all other needs for replenishment. The worse it can happen, bad guys will take over and you’ll have to send some good old Starship Troopers to take it back, and all your fuel, missiles, etc will still be there.
Can I arm a space station?
No, you cannot have military components on a space station.
But you can arm an engineless ship that you then call a space station. You can also call a fleet a space station with each engineless ship (military or commercial) in it as a module of one space station.
You can add a commercial hangar to the station. In it you can place missile satellites - MFC, several box launchers and a small MSP storage. Nothing more.
The satellites will consume some MSP, but because they are very cheap, they will not consume very much. The station will replenish their stocks of missiles and MSP in the hangar. The Active Sensor and missile magazines will be on the station itself (or large AS on separate satellite).
You can also place a beam ships in the hangar. They have a higher cost, so will spend more MSP, but they don’t need missiles.
If I remember correctly, Maintenance Modules reduce the Maint clock of ships docked in the hangar.
And CIWS is also a commercial component.
Technically, you can arm a space station.
This is how I deal with this problem.
Design your desired space station how you want with your given requirements (Defensive, Anchorage, Refinery, Listener, etc)
This forms your main design, that you use in the game.
Create a copy & rename it to i.e "Class Name - Construction)
Now, strip away all subsystems that makes it a “Military Ship” in terms of game logic by clicking the “No Armour” toggle.
You now have your space station that can be constructed via industry.
Now in game, I build the “Construction” space station at the planet and when it is completed, delete it and using spacemaster instant build the full design.
This gets you a Proper Spacestation, Death Stars anyone?
Now, you will notice in the above their is a resource gap that isn’t accounted for, with all the combat components.
You can recreate this with a “Upgrade Module” ship, basically all the missing components made at a shipyard, then delete this on completion.
This should be I’d say 90% fair in terms of balancing resource and time wise.
Or you just forget about this module, your choice.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a reason (At least that I recall), as to why you cant build military on planets. To me industry wouldn’t really care, they just wouldn’t be immediately setup to cater to it (Time and Cost/Resource penalty)