They are not that hard to find actually, you can see shops in the map view, and just keep warping from shop to shop until you see an NPC shopkeeper in the nav menu. You see shops that other people have explored, and most times they stick to a limited radius around their HB system for shop hunting.
Take notes of which shops are the advanced shops with the NPC and 4 rail dockers, and if you find someone using one, go ahead and leave a little surprise like a Pulse+Beam setup to stick the damage bubble into the core room (where it would kill them when they spawn into the ship, assuming they logged off at the shop), or a simple swarmer clock to essentially trap the ship at the shop until they can get backup to kill the clock with a bigger ship.
And at that point, if you had it set as a fleet AND were online when that happened, you would instantly be aware of the happenings and could try to gank them.
But the damage pulse paired with the range extending damage beam is by far my favorite weapon for this XD
But this is all if you want to engage in total war and guerrilla war.
If you want to fight in fleet combat, shops are basically a non issue.
In fact, it could be a way for a player to keep ships basically mothballed and have a "hidden" reserve that they think you dont know about. Players might be a bit more aggressive in fighting when they have ships to spare when they lose them.
And then the issue of docking tons of ships at your homebase is lots of lag whenever it is loaded, so fps and ping inclind players who usually just dump their ships 20+ systems above/below the galactic plane which makes it harder than finding a specific needle in Manhattan to parking ships at shops, and shops are visible on the map, making it a bit more like a needle in a haystack and less of an impossibility (considering scanners don't detect ships without players in them).
Also new players can log out and log back in without losing their stuff before they have the credits to spawn in a station, and nomadic players can winter weekdays of inactivity knowing their ship will still be their when they log back in.
