Most people take it for granted that they have a safe spot in the universe. But i played servers where the admin took a way more radical approach.
Where Home Base protection was turned off. Where if you died you lost ALL the credits and ALL the blocks you had on you as a person. The universe did not even had any shops. Not even at spawn! You needed to make everything yourself as you went a long.
People do not understand how good they have it.
I'd rather not turn Starmade into ARK. I know what it's like to be the little guy in a game where it's full PvP with no safe zones. Hell, ARK didn't even secure your personal inventory, as upon logout your unconscious body stayed ingame lootable and killable. Just like Starmade, it took a lot of time to grind yourself to anything remotely good, but if you didn't find a good server, every day you logged on you were stark naked, with everything you have built gone, only your XP which you used to unlock better construction and tools, stayed.
There is no impenetrable base, thanks to the cannons that outrange the defensive turrets, so the server's strongest tribe(faction) usually just annihilated anyone coming close to that resource/tech level pre-emptively, and made/enforced rules that made sure they stay on top.
I'd rather not see Starmade becoming such an anarchy sim. The protected homebase is a must.
The EVE model with high security sectors, is good because it works. It's proven, because it worked for a hella lot of time for millions of players. Obviously, the OP NPC ships wrecking your ass as punishment thing doesn't work in Starmade, not until AI is fixed and a mass limit is enforced to prevent players from using even the largest NPC ships as a farming opportunity. So a forced safety on weapons would suffice. It's not even big guy vs small guy, it's about some players not being able to invest as much time in the game as others. As weird as it sounds, there are people who study, work, or both, besides gaming, and have limited free time. Me being one of them. So I'd prefer some kinda chance to co-exist with the mad dude with nothing else to do, who can spend 10 hours a day on the server grinding up to get his megaship and then go on a rampage.