I like the degenerating universe feel. Kind-of invokes the gritty, run-down feel of Firefly or Raynor's Raiders in SCII. My first thought is that the varying prices from system to system will be a huge resource hog, since you'll need a bunch of copies of every weapon, along with corresponding tech levels. It's certainly doable, just a hassle.
If you'd like to do the same thing with ships, that should be easier. You could make a few copies of the major governments, all of the same class, alliances, etc., really no difference except for the ResID. Then, you could link ranks to each one, with different ship price mods. This would make it possible, with only a few resources, to have a huge range of ship prices to reflect the infrastructure and economic prosperity of different planets, and would even allow for fluctuating prices (via cröns that activate, say, one of five ranks per government ranging from expensive to cheap).
