Suggestion: More friendly NPCs and trade stuff!

This game is pretty dead in terms of life on other planets. Sure, it has wolves and spiders and factions, but that's not what I mean in terms of life.

What I need is AI people. I mean, surely, you can't be the only living Engineer out there! Someone has to be building ships, stations and drones and sending them throughout the universe.

Yet it's all empty!

So give me AI Engineers that crew those NPC ships and stations. Cooks in kitchens, bartenders, clerks behind counters, priests in temples to Klang, pilots, weapons officers, drone operators and other things aboard warships.

Right now the only AI in this game is the enemy AI, and NPCs in player factions are just there as placeholders for people. They don't do anything, except prevent your faction from getting deleted if you go offline.

What I'd like to see is some NPCs that work for you. NPCs that actually have a physical character in the game, generated by factions, and that you can interact with and command to do stuff like assist you in building and repairing a ship, or to man stations onboard a larger vessel.

Summon-able defense or support drones on the players' side, would be nice as well. The AI uses summon-able drones to defend their stations, why not have the same capability for players?

Push a button, an antenna comes on, you get a call on the radio from Faction Headquarters and an allied defense drone or manned fighter comes in and defends you, or supports your assault against whatever enemy units may be around.

It'd be just like the AI does now, only to support players instead of fighting against them.

Another suggestion would be to have NPC trade ships. And by that I don't mean the ones you can fly up to and fight like there are now, but freighters based on those ships that will launch smaller ships to come and dock with your station for trade, if you have the right blocks and you and/or your faction is at least neutral with the AI faction in question.

These ships would also allow you to dock and access the onboard store to purchase stuff from the faction they belong to or get a job. They'd be mobile Economy stations, basically.

These freighters would even allow you to purchase small craft if the faction sells them, or to purchase the entire cargo ship, much like Freighters in No Man's Sky.

A third suggestion would be to allow players access to the special NPC Remote Control blocks used by the AI's drones. This would allow players to use those blocks to create support drones, able to follow the player and provide fire support against NPC enemies.