-Get back to civilisation. This may require summoning peacekeepers so you can use their [insert maguffin here]s to get home (FTL drives, maybe?). Or it may just require heading east for a long time. Or both could be possible.
-Find an invisibility module, sufficiently fortified starbase, or something else that will allow the ship to remain safe ad infinitum, but possibly at the cost of the Captain ever getting home.
-Find a safe way to permanently destroy, deactivate or hide the ship, possibly with the Captain still inside. Teleporting it past the event horizon of a black hole, finding a wormhole to an uninhabited patch of space (which unfortunately would mean no oxy stations), turning the ship’s sector-destroying energy inwards etc.
-Find a way to permanently destroy, deactivate or hide the ship . . . at the cost of one last sector-shattering kaboom.
-Fail at protecting the ship, causing another mass death.
-Die painfully from lack of oxygen, only to be revived when the ship next wipes out a sector.

There could be a lot of drama coming from the player’s prioritisation. How much faith do they have in the rumors of invisibility modules that get passed on while dealing with starbases? If they find a wormhole, do they choose to sacrifice themselves to save countless lives, or carry on looking for a less suicidal solution? Is it ‘safer’ to stay in one place and summon the peacekeepers by smashing government starbases, or keep heading east while avoiding as much attention as possible? How sure are they that the starbase will be able to keep them safe indefinitely? These questions could be implicit, or the Captain or an NPC adviser could spell them out for the player.

Final note: the endings could depend on choices passed up as well as choices taken. A Captain who had no other options than to get back home, and got back home, would be content. A Captain who decides not to take the black hole option early on, and gets home in the end, may suffer from nightmares when he considers how many lives he gambled so he could have his happy ending.

I don’t think oxygen costs anything. It shouldn’t imo :P

Either the individual modules could become “infected” and need to be blasted off otherwise friendly ships or there could be an interloping command module that has attached and seized control.

the interloping module concept would probably be simpler to implement with in the current framework unless you had already built in something besides health into the tracking of modules.

I was just thinking that maybe a villain is needed to build quests around.

Love the use of Oxygen as a limiting factor.

I see the aim of this new game, Jameson, to not level up your ships to kilo and then own everything, which was the overall “goal” of the previous games, but this one is to survive. Yes you have to go somewhere, you now have the new feature of oxygen. And, to get oxy, you need credits. To get credits, you need to find a preferred “job”. I see you spending 70% of your earnings on surviving, (repairs, modules and oxy), then the remainder you could put towards the levelling-up of you ships, to kilo, THEN owning everything. The addition of asteroids will introduce another survival factor.

Now, i must ask. What’s happening with peacekeepers in this game? Are they once again (faulty?) and only show up once you reach kilo? Is there actually a “Peacekeeping Command”? I would love to actually get escorted by some info buoys to peacekeeping command to get fined, or “exterminated”.