Very interesting Ideas, but no mean to shoot you down, but i can say right now it would get too far away from vanilla, which is what Discovery tries to be on extension of.
For some other ideas, a giant machine-made planet would be interesting. Sort of like the Dyson sphere, but on a smaller scale. We would have to create the model for the planet and it would take some work to make it look mechanized but still very Freelancer-ish.