SO, many people are complaining about the credits payout of fleet and station bounties (as well as the supplies costs to reach them) when compared to other low risk high reward alternatives (drug-a-lug-lug, mainly).
And even if you increase bounty pay it would still fall short because smuggling is faster, cheaper on resource expenditure and (unless you're really unlucky) doesn't come with the risk of losing ships.
Therefore bounties need to entice players with a different type of reward (like exploration does) than raw cash as cargo running will always be the better option. And that reward should be increased weapons/ships salvage from wanted fleets/stations.
That gives players a more interesting choice: low risk/high credits cargo running or high risk/high salvage bounty hunting (which would justify lower bounty credits pay as employers consider salvage as part of your reward).
In addition, stations should not start with missing modules (to help increase salvage) and even a lone station should wield ships for salvage (that were docked at the time, presumably).
That would make the game activities look like this: smuggling for cash, exploring for colony items and bounty hunting for fleet improvements.
I had posted something liek this not too long ago.
THe idea I had was that these are bounties, these folks did *something* to *** off somebody who is somebody and put a price on their heads.
This could be a serious insult, or they stole something or kidnapped somebody, so we could have an extra step to bounties, regarding the cause for it in the first place.
you could have a massive cache of goodies the guy stole, or maybe some dirt on the person that put the bounty on the first place, and could be sold back to them, to their rivals (within and without) or even returned as if for a heafty reputation bonus, or they took somebody, returning a kidnapped victim should have some sort of "bonus" reward (in cash or spice, maybe some sweet tech, or a ship or what not)
Which makes me wonder if we could take a page from Elite Dangerous and give some of these bounties turn in variable rewards (reputation, goods, weapons, cash, or a mixture of the above)