For my first playthrough I made a chunk of change making/selling adaptive frames. They're made from iron and aluminum which are very abundant. Outside resource gathering via herbing or mining, the only point of them is as a home for you to decorate and store excess crew/loot. You can setup crafting stations but every station minus a herb farm you can setup for an outpost, you can buy to put in your ship. For me that makes them less useful as I just use my ship as my home and only visit outposts to gather up mined resources to craft into goods to sell or upgrades. In my initial 70 hour playthrough I even setup defenses and made sure the crew stationed there had bitching weapons but was never attacked to my knowledge.