This may be a randomly sinister idea to add more peril, but I'm going to roll with it.

What if, of all the ion storms that may occur in any particular system within 24hrs, one of them turned out to be a "heavy" storm. This would imply that the storm itself, not just the angry bots in the fog, would pose a threat. Since the ions would be "heavy", time spent in the storm would amount to slow but steady damage to ship/shields. There could even be another multiplier for defending escorts in a "heavy" storm?

Maybe just in greyspace? We already have random NPC pirates...why not random acts of nature?

The idea's cool but heavy ions are really rare in space it's mostly helium'n'shit, as long as we have some collision damage storms remain somewhat inherently dangerous. (Well for me anyway pilots who suck less won't run into that issue)

Throwing the odd lone pcb unrat in odia's storms would also tickle my fancy.

Halving shield regen in regular storms isn't a bad idea either tough, can't think of any negative gameplay implications, might make more capships blow up it'll make crits in storms that much easier (biggest pain in the ass is typically finding the thing)

If peril's what you're after announce your location and intentions in 100, going afk/idling on wormholes usually works too.