Ways to make stations more useful/viable

Stations at the moment serve really only two purposes; glorified mining platforms, and places to put repair beams on. To resolve this, I propose these ideas:

1. Station classes. In the same or similar fashion to the way a station is defined, there would be three (or more) station "classes" respective of their intended function, being Mining/Salvage, Repair, and Economy. Each would get boosts to improve their functions, such as extra storage space and miner units for Mining and Salvage, repair bay LS units for repair, and faster pump speeds for economy. These could also be on sliders, like weapons, that would provide the boosts per the slider values.
2. The Universal Request Assistant An LS device with an array input and output meant to interface with E2/Starfall that can send messages to other URAss units. For example, Automatic docking requests between stations: Send a table of [user, shipclass, reason] to a station to request docking. An e2 chip can recieve this, and begin the process to link ships, if allowed.
3. The Bay One type of bay per class, the Salvage bay, the Repair bay, and the Docking bay. The Salvaging bay would have some form of built in tractor beam to pull ship pieces in, and can deconstruct wreckages more efficiently than beams. The Repair bay would be a method of repairing ships without the cost of weapon slots, and with high efficiency, but costing materials like Iron, Carbon, Titanium, etc. The Docking bay would function like a resource pump, with the added effect of having to do predetermined trades and protecting the docked ship from attack with shields.

These are just some ideas I had, subject to change or rewrite as balance requires.