Gojo_Ryu

Thats a very good way to look at it.
There is indeed no real code of ethics baked into the game.

I agree with this. Skill point loss is uninteresting and just plain frustrating. There is no way to earn that time back or prevent that loss, other than not dying in the first place. EVE used to have that system and they removed it for a reason. It doesn't make for good gameplay. It just discourages everyone from ever risking dying ever; pirate or carebear. As it stands now, you lose your ship, whatever you were carrying, and get sent to respawn somewhere else. That's already a big penalty. Plus, like Kurock said, they are things you can control. You control what type of ship you are flying (and if it's insured). You control what's in your ship. And you control where you are. If you want to risk it all with a super blinged out ship carrying valuable cargo through dangerous space, then you have a large risk. If you just want to fly around in cheap ships with your buddies and have fun, knowing you'll probably explode, you can, safe in the knowledge that your level of risk it low.
 
As to punishments for the killer, those should be player driven (with bounties or word of mouth reputation). There is no reason for intrinsic punishments for the killer. The game world is not watched over by some omniscient entity which punishes people who violate it's code of ethics (that would be religion and a whole other can of worms). It's up to the player's to provide consequences for people's actions in game.

Death is already bad:
1) loss of ship
2) loss of some maybe all items and equipment
3) locational disadvantage: it will take time to return to the location the death occurred at which may be many systems away. To get back a player would need to first get a replacement ship, and equipment and then spend the time traveling. Time is money. So this alone is a large setback.
 
Why the above are a good design is that they can be mitigated in some way e.g. Insurance on a ship, or a large org that sponsors your ships. Same for equipment. Or your good equipment is stowed while entering dangerous territory.
The location setback is potentially the largest penalty. If you need to go from A to B, getting killed before reaching B means the journey needs to start all over again. A large org could have closer rez nodes but they will be expensive so not everyone can afford it. But this is also not always a setback since if you are returning from B to A, being killed teleports you to were you want to be.
 
There is nothing situational or interesting about skill loss. Since everything is only slightly less efficient with lower skills, large orgs will recruit hordes of new players that have nothing to lose, equip them and ship them to war zones. Pirates will have to do the same. Gone are the ace pilots. There is no incentive to be an ace since the horde can get the job done better. Any that try will find their skills resetting to that of the horde.
 
Let there be ace pilots, say no to skill loss on death.

Funny you say that I've been thinking about this lately.  Maybe not the timey-wimey stuff, that's just too trippy, but the cosmic speed limit.  So instead of F=ma, use E=mc^2/(sqrt(1-(v^2/c^2)).  i.e. as speed increases and gets closer to c it's gets harder and harder to increase speed more.  This is all nicely self balancing and doesn't require weird speed limits like in Eve and Elite.  Also, just imagine massive space battles if you've got engines good enough to propel little fighters up to 80% of c, hundreds of them zooming around the solar system...

Scalable Components
 
Everyone expects that there will be bigger and bigger things built in this game. So I was thinking about how are you planning to do it with the pre-set functional components. Those seem to have static size and static stats/power. That would seriously limit some ships and when you look at 10 different capital-class ships, they would have same looking engines for example, just different number of them. And if someone made really big thing and wanted to move it, it would be bad if he had resources for it but was limited by too small sizes of components.
 
How about introducing scalable-components where it's reasonable? Let's start with power plant (reactor or core, you name it), then continue with engines. These are components that I'm most afraid of as different size ships will need different size components. As these should always follow some pattern, you could let us to simply choose the intended power of the Engine (using slider) and that's it. You could drag these around as any other component, change it's size and the textures of object would simply adjust automatically. It's no hard thing to code with the tech you already have and simple to balance with those pre-set tiers (you can also add new ones in updates anytime). When you make something X times bigger, it will simply need X times more + Y extra resources (Y resources is kind of technological fee, so the price of big stuff rises exponentially).
 
This example can of course be taken to any scale stuff, not only the biggest ships.
 
 
Future idea -> Functional Component Blueprints
 
And if you wanted to eventually bring this one level higher, there could be new type of blueprint: Functional Component. Players could design own components using voxels, colors, etc. and select their type. The resources and stats would be depending on mass of the object and player could see them during the process. During this process he could also select one of his ship blueprints and this would show little frame on the screen with information how much power would this component give to the ship. For example, you would make small engine and select your cruiser, the tooltip would say "Engines: 12% of optimal power, current max speed: 15 m/s".
 
While this could be super useful to many components, weapon systems would still have to be limited and couldn't be created this tool. Probably...

It would be best if we were able to engineer components out of subcomponents each of which have particular properties, methods and interfaces. For example, a rocket engine could consist of a fuel tank, fuel pumps, high pressure piping, fuel injectors, a combustion chamber, an afterburner assembly, a nozzle and control actuators. Without each of these sub components, you can't build an engine. But if you developed a superior fuel injector, you'd have a superior rocket engine, perhaps one which is more fuel efficient, while a superior nozzle could improve manuverability, a superior combustion chamber could improve acceleration, superior tanks and pumps could increase the pressure at which you store fuel and that increases range, and superior piping could reduce weight. That way you'd have more than the Mark 1, Mark 2 and Mark 3 engines. You could have a company that makes rocket engines that are lightweight and high maneuverability for combat craft while another company makes engines that are fuel efficient and reliable for long haul cargo ships. The new Zykos-V fighter is equipped with a Motokrafwerks F-300 rocket motor with the highest vector-thrust capability of any commercially available engine! Subcomponents for major components could greatly enhance the individuality of the designs produced by players. It wouldn't be the coolest looking starship is the best, it would be deeper than that.