I had an interesting discussion with Yamamushi via discord today about cargo containers and cargo and how they would be handled in the game. This also ties in with how ships might dock to one another. Mostly this is a bunch of questions and speculation, but here goes.
We were thinking about how cargo will be moved around, and wondering if it would make sense to have it stay in the cargo containers rather than being piped around like in Space Engineers. We both agreed that it would make more sense for the cargo to stay in the containers and have a system for swapping out the containers on cargo vessels rather than having magic pipes. One possible RP explanation for this is the storage method that compresses the matter, as is described in the various story episodes in the devblogs. The container is the vessel that holds the matter in it's compressed state, and in order to remove the matter it would have to be reconstituted to it's original structure. This would make trading a bit easier as well, because instead of trading ore or raw metal by the kilo or cubic meter or whatever, you just trade it by the cargo container. It also makes it important that the cargo containers remain powered, lest they lose containment and make a big mess. If this is a feature, I would suggest that as well as not being powered they should have to sustain a certain amount of damage to go poof.
In a similar vein, there should be some cargo that is more unstable than others, for instance certain types of fuel that are more efficient should have higher power requirements to maintain containment.