Right now in starfield outposts are just an incomplete feature. There is no reasonable sink for what you get out of them except a meager handful of delivery quests (I.e. a shipyard wanting 600 aluminum) and building more outposts.

I think because fast travel is so incredibly trivial and mandatory they sort of wrote themselves out of being able to have space trucking be a viable option. What we should see is raw ore selling for like 20x what it does today so that mining becomes economically viable... but then it'd just be a free money spout. The whole feature needs so much more fucking work.

It’s not you, it’s the game that’s missing something. I too am trying to find a use for it all and am at a loss. I also am collecting things I no longer need because you can’t turn off the resource tracker after completing research on a project.

I've been feeling the same. There's a whole system with cargo links, fabricators, power generation, and tiers of extractors, but then nothing you can set up production for seems to have any purpose to mass-produce except setting up even more production.

There is one exception: manually mass-crafting components (on PC you can do 99 in one click) is a good way to farm XP and is a big resource sink. I've currently got an aluminum + iron setup to let me craft hundreds of thousands of adaptive frames, but I think the optimal setup, for most XP per click, would have cargo links shipping all the prerequisite components for an exotic component to one base (probably on Venus, for fastest time skipping [edit: cargo links work on playtime rather than UT time, unfortunately, so sleeping doesn't work]).

In terms of more intentional mechanics, something like being able to manufacture ammo (even if it took a lot of resources) would give it a purpose within the context of the rest of the game.

I haven't gotten it set up yet. But I thought it would be worth it to set up a fabricator to make components to sell. The components sell for a decent amount and if you can a couple out posts gathering materials and making components I bet you could make a ton of money pretty quickly.

Money and decor.