Something is strange with the sector level & threat scaling.
I'm at sector 13 jump 3, with max gear, I can probably survive a wave of 20x lvl 20 enemies, but all I find is like 1x lvl 2, or if I'm lucky, an elite with: 8x lvl 8.
Sector 13 jump 7, max enemies: 5x lvl 2... pathetic.
jump 9, max: 8x lvl 5, still 1 volley is enough to destroy all of them, zero danger.
Jump 10, the end-boss was defeated before first reinforcement.
I have a Tier 5 Sensor array & 10/10 "POI Range" upgrade.
Also, buying weapons is SUPER RARE, in 13 sectors I have found it 2 times.
Maybe some kind of "gauntlet" with increasingly more & harder enemies, could be used to select a suitable threat level?
So after entering a sector, or respawning, there is a POI like Elite enemies, and after defeating that you can proceed to a higher Elites, but defeat does not equals death, just a return to normal levels.
Alternatively some kind of "background- / Idle- -fighting", where the ship is matched up against enemies to find it's limit?
until its fixed any sensor array/poi range are hampering your chances to see something good. since apparently theres limit on how many poi you see, so you see most of em entering sector and they all 1-2. then they add up just by 1 per jump. on the other hand running w/o any poi stuff. ive never seen a challenge anyways :P max ive seen are threat 19 elites and they were in sector 1. !however enemies (looks like only elites and boss) scale with sector apart of threat stuff. ie your threat level 3 elite in sector 50 will have 10x hp/shield of sector 1 one well or 5x. not sure xp scales though (it does, checked)
at least it was my impression from playing with and or without poi. if you dont want xp/challenge and just want to jump *useful* stuff its ok though (like maximizing your weapon fast or something like that)
or maybe i am wrong and whole sector is generated once you enter it, not every jump. well then generation just sus (well with or w/o poi it does a lil, theres no real danger apart from your first 1-10 deaths in sector 1-5)
I think this problem is caused by the long "detection time", it takes 6+ jumps for me to loose detection of some POIs, and because I always want to go to the (new) one with highest thereat, then the low stuff gets accumulated, and I can only visit 1 system per jump, that means I can't jump to all of them just to clear out the POI from the detection, so they expire just before (or after) I must leave the zone.
Apparently it needs some way to increase the detection range (see more POI) without increasing the detection duration (amount of jumps before expiring.