With the advent of triglaivians, and the abyssal pvp sites, there could be a similar concept for an underlying ‘regions’ for players to colonize, region that would be a lot like J-space, in that one would not be able to claim sovereignty over the system. In these underlying regions there would be no jump gates, meaning special player up-well jump gates would be needed if you wanted to join two systems in the same region. If someone tried to connect two systems that were too far to be connected then the up-well structure would give a warning that the two systems were not in the same local region. The regions would only contain about 5-10 systems, but fighting for control of these regions would definitely be interesting. The gates would always be public access, but wouldn’t require fuel, but when someone would come through there would be a chance a couple of triglaivians would spawn and would try and fight you.
There could also be ‘lost’ triglaivians, trigalivians that accidentally found their way in and will attack any capsuleer they see on sight, even capsuleer stations and gates, their hordes will become more frenzied as the index of the colonies goes up, meaning that to create rats to fight, you have to develop colonies and maintain them. The triglaivian rats would be slightly weaker than standard triglaivians and would only go up to cruiser sizes.
The way to access these underlying systems would be by special anomalies that someone could warp to and they would only be available in J-space systems, meaning the WH diving could take on a whole new meaning. These anoms would only be able to fit ships from corvette to cruiser through them and unlike WH’s they wouldn’t be rolled after a certain amount of mass went through, but rather after a certain number of ships. I.e. if 10 ships went into a system, the anom would close behind them, effectively sealing them off until a new anom formed or they anchored a gate and connected it to another underlying system.
New special ‘colonization’ structures could be posted up and around moons, planets, and systems. They would effectively replace pocos, where special PI could be set up to farm new special materials. The colonization structures would need these special materials as fuel, perhaps some form of ‘void matter’ or something like that which is created by special structures on the surface of the planet. The colonization structures would increse in size from extra small(cruisers and below can dock) to extra large (caps and super caps can dock) but to create anything larger than a medium sized colonization structure you would need special materials that can only be produced by the planets.
Belts wouldn’t exist, so moon mining would be the only way to mine and even then, the moons would yield weird new materials, not better than any r32 ore but they just yielded ores in a weird combination. There would be no mining anomalies, data sites, or relic sites. There would be minor ‘triglaivian holdouts’ destroying all of them would yield less than average triglaivian rewards and perhaps blue print copies of the triglavian frigs and destroyers.
As a system is colonized, there will be a colonization index, the higher the index, the larger the size the ship will be able to come in and out of the system via anoms and in greater numbers, meaning people would have to build up their colonies to be able to get anything larger than a cruiser in. However, with this added security, they are also now more at risk of being attacked by larger fleets.
SOV wouldn’t be able to be claimed, but there would be some sort of proto-sov, where people could see the corp within the system with the highest colonization index. (let’s be real, most people would kill the other corps inside their systems)
The systems themselves would have no suns, and would look a lot like abyssal deep space. There would be about 3-6 planets with anywhere from 1-6 moons per planet. Planets would yield new materials that are necessary for the creation of specialized colonization structures.