From what yo said, it sounds to me like you want to create a hardcore PvP server. I would advise making a difficult economy in order to debuff ways to make money(like station farming). This can involve making ship blocks expensive and making blocks that can be found in nature reallz cheap(like a few credits). While like this, standard hull and glass would be cheap(but they are rubbish for defense anyway), but it makes it much harder to build titans.
Also, you could decrease shop spawn rate. With less shops, supply of blocks will be rare making it necessary to make your own.
Decreasing the pirate loot is also always a good idea. It should be 0.1 or even nothing.
Custom pirates are also nice to have. Maybe start by having a few easy ones(a bit easier than Isanth as these are currently quite strong when you joined a new server) and then add harder ones as the factions become bigger.
Something else you could do are custom recipes. I quite like having decent ones when playing sm(not OP ones, not crappy ones) so that I don\'t have to spend thousands of resources on them.
Also there are cubatoms. They can be used to exploit the economy should a block be too expensive. I know there is a way to disable them, but idk how.
There is also a problem with the build block, as people tend to salvage planets using them. Therefore, you can consider disabling them but people won\'t like it because building bases would become a pain.
Lastly, disable blueprint upload. This means that players need to build their ships on their own and can\'t use someone elses.
Ok that was everything I wish from a hardcore server(and some of them from any non-creative server in general). If you need any help doing stuff, I would be happy to help doing it.
