I figure this would be a way to discourage team inactivity and provide a series of sinks for teams, scaling up against larger teams.

I'm looking at this as each team has a default roster, max galaxy count, outpost count, beacon count, etc. If the team needs more, they need to pay more through team activity (building, runs, wars, etc) to support their larger empire. If they fail to pay off their fees, Earthforce starts to unown and unteam bases and accounts, which of course makes their galaxies and members more vulnerable to neighboring teams. The fees would be based on a month-to-month deal.

This would replace the appropriate team skills currently in game.

./shrug

Sounds a bit to complicated, and annoying... and in my opinion, having just a tax on random stuff ingame aside from the emp tax is a bad idea. If you have the game just taking money from people, it gives people less money to invest into other avenues of the game. However small the tax is, it will still take away money that could be otherwise used elsewhere. This is kind of off topic but the biggest problem I see with the SS economy is inflation, there is just so much credits out there that it causes prices to go up. The best way to get value of something in the current economy I've found is to trade goods for goods, rather than creds for goods. But I digress, the idea of a tax in this game besides the emp tax doesn't seem practical nor beneficial to the game in any way.

- Chrono

Makes players dream, gives them an idea of how active players are, by looking at team scores and creds being used can tell approx how much players are spending?

It only affects the bigger teams with the lower activity rates. A team like Zephyr, with 100 accounts, but only 5 active players, would be hit extremely hard. A team like S&P, with 40 accounts, but only 30 active players, would see no hit at all.

If you want a team that's bigger than say, SRX/RF size (about 10 gals, and about 20 accounts between their members), then you get to pay the tax.

Alternatively, you could fragment your team into sub-teams, like how Dark Traders, Umbrella Corp, and Blueberry Pancakes went. Of course, without an active enough team, your fragmenting could have dire results, which is why Zephyr's 10 sub-teams flopped.

Docking fees were removed for a reason.

tl;dr on the posts after this
This is what many MMOs do. Instead of having skills which allow them to have their own guild territory and guild possessions they just have to pay for it. This is a very effective solution

Docking fees beyond the default 25 ships. If you want to dock 200 ships, have fun with the fee.

?? Docking fees to an ai base for everyone except the team that owns that galaxy ??