Something I thought about a while back, was an idea that Titans and others, were persistent in space. Logging off would merely eject the pilot's capsule which would warp off, and the ship would stay where it was.
This would mean Titans and such would be proper Alliance level assets, rather than individual level assets.
It would make anyone deploying rashly pay the consequences. However, it would tend to make people much more conservative about deploying them at all, except in overwhelming force, which wouldn't help to reduce numbers. Meh.
There's also the problem of timezone coverage, and parking for such ships, example are the numerous exploits in the past to do with bumping ships out of POS shields, or the thing that allowed you to destroy things in a POS without reinforcing the shield, as long as you started shooting no earlier than 11:59 before downtime, or whatever that was exactly. bugs and exploits like that need to be sorted before you could reasonably have persistent ships.
Outpost destruction is tricky, because it gives the NPC 0.0 systems, much more importance, because of invulnerable stations. It also makes lowsec bordering 0.0 hugely more important for the same reason.
The NPC stations have to be invulnerable, otherwise you'd have to write the pirate factions out of the game.
It could mean that groups such as the current CFC would be able to sweep regions clear of opposition, and also to prevent any establishment of opposition in future, if Titans and such were persistent. Destroy stations, destroy POS, prevent re-establishment, people do not have ability to form a challenging force, and then things stagnate.
