Stations in EVE

There are historically three different types of stations in Eve Online.

Firstly, mostly, and most importantly for you as a newer player (also the oldest actually), are the NPC corporation owned stations. This includes ALL stations within empire-sovereignty regions. So all stations in amarr space, caldari space, etc, but also within some 0.0 regions like Pure Blind or Geminate that are only partly NPC faction soveriegnty. The same goes for the purely 0.0 regions with NPC pirate faction sovereignty (Stain, Curse, Venal for full-region NPC soveriegnty and Fountain and Delve where NPC pirate faction own part of the region.)

Secondly, there are conquerable stations (now in all aspects the same as Outposts, but with a different history, since CCP placed them a few years ago before players could build outposts). You will find 3 (sometimes 2) of these in every non-NPC owned region in 0.0 space, and in Delve region (which originally was non-NPC sov, then was changed to partly NPC sov). These are conquerable as described in previous post. The fully detailed mechanics of POS warfare are rather complicated, so I'm not going to explain all the details here.

Thirdly, there are outposts. These were and are built by players. They are all fully conquerable and come in four flavours: refining (minmatar), manufacturing (amarr), market/economic (gallente) and research (caldari). They can only be built in 0.0 non-NPC sovereignty systems and are also fully conquerable by way of the sovereingty system.

thus ends the historical context of stations in Eve.