I am a massive fan of the idea of this game, and I wanted to give some ideas to the devs on how dying could work out. Think of it like a scale of 1 to 10.
1: Death had no penalties and is meaningless. When you die, you do not lose any stats or resources, etc.
2: Death has microscopic effects. Perhaps a very small and short penalty on tasks such as combat, mining, etc.
3: Now we could consider spawn delays, and maybe inventory losses. Very small and short lasting negative effects. No stats loss.
4: By now, death might make a player hesitate before putting themselves on the line.
5: Spawn delay perhaps? 50% inventory loss, lasting negative effects.
6: Complete inventory loss, stat penalty.
7: Long spawn delay, no recovery of an items. demoting perhaps. Permanent stat loss.
8: Loss of any armor or skins on character at death, long delay in spawn. Loss of any ships that were destroyed.
9: Loss of all items, ships, stats, and other set ups.
10: Player's character wiped. They will have to start all over and completely lose all bases and ships.
I hope you consider one of the higher ones. This is a massive game with loads of possibilities. You want death to count, you have to make it important to make the game more immersive and realistic. People have to strategist and think, and not be hot headed and kill everyone in sight. Now is number 10 too far? Most of you would probably think so, but in a game of this scale and this much possibility, you have to make death count so that some random user does not decided to kill just to have fun, everything has to be a risk, just like in real life. You don't see people everyday running around killing others...because there are consequences. You have to turn reality into the game for it to work better as a community. And of course, this is all purely my opinion, I am not saying this is fact and sealed. While the part about reality is slightly true, everything else is purely my thoughts on the matter.
Thank you for reading my ideas
Maximus