As someone who has come back from about two years ago, here's a couple suggestions. (Perhaps a bit Spaceshipy bias, as I started that game in 2004).

1) Allow new folks to build on the second stage islands in a limited capacity.  This doesn't mean make huge forts or what not, but allow them to at least TRY out that stage of the game.  Maybe make something simple such as a titan mine they can place (lasts for 24hrs), that mines the equal of two or three basic miners.  Make the mine disappear in 24 hours, so they have to get ore out or it is lost.    Perhaps give it a two or three tile "spread" that allows them to siphon from.   Again, just an example.

2) The missions need some work.  Right now it is the same old same old thing.  The tutorials really should be improved to make it a bit more... exciting.  Point and click and click and click.  Increase rewards so new players come out with three or four pieces of T1 stuff maybe even a light mech of their choosing.  Maybe even some teamwork based ones (You've got an hour to kill x amount of drones - better find some friends to help you).  Almost like a public quest/mission type thing. 

2a) Missions can be more dynamic.  Perhaps the player is teleported to an area where they can do their thing, rather than driving for 5+ minutes to get there (And assuming the bots are there for them to kill).

2b) A bit more randomness in bots wouldn't hurt either.

3) Make the easy things easier.  There is a very steep learning curve.  Again with a reference to the spaceship game, when I started that 8 years ago, there was no learning curve, it was a cliff.  Once the easy things started to get easier, the population of that game improved dramatically.  Just saying.

4) Keep the hard stuff hard.  Make it worthwhile to get that mech/gear/whatever.  Give players something to look forward to.

5) Allow solo players a chance to do some of the things corps can.  Again, NOT everything, but nothing kills off potential players more than "You have to join a corp to do X".  These folks don't care about the "metagame" and who owns what. They want to do there own thing.  Allow them to at least try some of the "big boy things".  This would be easy enough to add in perhaps a handful of new islands where half is consensual pvp, the other half is full time pvp.   It lets them do pvp, and build stuff/produce stuff.   I had a station in low sec in the spaceship game that was just me - I mined/hauled/fought for it.  After standing up to some pirates they left me alone - I had "earned" enough respect for them to just ignore me (and they wanted what I sold too

I've got scads more, but I think this wall of text is enough for now.

Cheers

Ahhthanks Celebro.  I was thinking it must be an issue with the amounts, just confused as I thought I had enough.