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You could have 'energy contracts.' It would appear on the GBT, and participating colonies/stations could 'rent'/sell energy, as you would give other colonies/stations 'x' power. This would give you a steady income along with an initial fee, but would put more strain on your power supply as you have to maintain what you 'gave away.'

This conversation needs to be revived!
@bastecklein are you still thinking about this?

Yep indeed, I'm curious as to to the status of this.

same here !!

That sounds good, but it won't do anything if Bast doesn't tell us the status of this.

Well the status is that I haven't started anything, but if people are interested in the idea, I can make My Space Station the next game to run off of the My Colony engine.

There was this game on Steam a while ago called Spacebase DF-9 that ultimately got abandoned, but I thought it was pretty fun for what it was. My plan would be something like a blend between that and My Colony.

Here are some more thoughts of mine regarding this idea:

I still think that it would be much more efficient to include the game as part of mc instead of being it's own game. That way you're not splitting your focus on working on two games, but you are continuing to add more features to mc. I would honestly rather have a space station that can trade with other colonies than a space station that only has other space stations to trade with. The same goes for colonies being able to trade with space stations. Plus, space stations inherently have a lack of certain items that colonies do well at producing, like food, water, oil, metals, and other things that come from planets or asteroids.

The space station would be better and refining and producing high end products, and would be more efficient at making money, but would have to use that money to purchase "supply lines" with other colonies/stations. The supply line would auto-charge money from the the station and auto-ship the resources to the station at regular interval's. I think that any colony or station should be able to make supply lines with any other colony or station. This way the player doesn't spend all of their time buying resources via single transactions. The player loses a certain amount of civics each time they perform a transaction via the supply line, and when they run out of civics, all supply lines stop and the colony/station suffers. This would prevent players from spamming the creation of supply-lines, which would probably reduce server performance, and it would be more realistic since you need administration in other to handle transactions between governments or companies in real life. It also ensures that as you're governmental power grows in the station/colony, your ability to make more lucrative supply lines grows as well, provided you have to money or resources to maintain the supply lines.

The issue with the supply line feature is that there would be instances where only one of the two players doing the supply line are online when it comes time for the next scheduled transaction to take place. This is probably why this feature isn't implemented. But I guess you could do the same thing that you do for when a cw pays for it's sub-colonies' worker costs. Even if the cw is offline, when they get back online, the server sends them a message with all of the worker costs that they owe to their sub-colonies. Something similar could be done with this. Even when one player is offline, the supply line continues until both players are offline, albeit the online player will not receive money or resources from the other player while they are offline. And then when the once offline player comes back online, they are given a message with the amount of transactions that went on, how much money or resources they've recieved, and how much resources or money they owe to the other player. If both players are offline, no transactions occur. This can be a risky endeavor to enter into a supply line with another player, because that player could scam you and other people by remaining offline just to collect your payment or resource supply, and then come online and never pay you what they owe you. To combat that, I would impose a merit system that people can add or remove one point to or from. This would tell other players how trustworthy a player is.

I really hope that these thoughts are helpful in determining what to do with my space station.

@bastecklein
did this ever cross your mind again?
It's still a good option for a tie in for my colony still and you could "link" it with your current my colony game.
Then you could have a new building in my colony thats basically a launch pad that send resources to the station.
Then for a step further you could do the trade routes that was briefly mentioned a while back.
It would add a nice layer for the late game playing.

So a space station...... I have some ideas I can share here (•ω•)

• Space Telescope
  Generates... research?
  upgrades:
  
  • Photographic service
    Space telescope will also generate some revenues through selling nice pictures in the space.
  • High density scanner
    Planet surveying or research generation will be faster.
• Mining Depot
  Some mining drones or mining vessels will bring you minerals from adrift asteroids.
  Upgrades:
  
  • Extra crew
    Mineral yield per production cycle will increase.
  • Advanced Beam Drill
    Faster production cycle.
• Comet Tractor
  It captures a comet, which allows you to harvest its content.
• Adminstration Uplink
  It allows you to accept requests, sometimes distress calls.
• Scrap Launcher
  The most crude way to ‘manage’ your trash through seeing the space as a massive dumpyard.
• Atmosphere Generation Module
  Generates vital air for breathing and also scrubs some exhaled air. Simple enough?
• Zone Airlock Checkpoint
  Not all races and organisms are able to live under the same composition of air. So in order to seperate the different air and ensures everyone breathes safely, the checkpoint must be established between living zones of different races.