Come to think of it, I had a lot of fun one playthrough with a 2nd ship being a Vigilance with a cautious officer, unstable injectors, an Ion Beam, and a Salamander Pod. That's a totally specialized support ship and it was super effective early game - best case scenario it disables things all the time, worst case it's a distraction. I'm pretty sure I've seen people talk about using Kites in a similar fashion.
IT WAS ME!
So is the introduction of automated derelics as low-tier exploration-based foes going to be focused on drones? Cause I'm not a fan of that thought, the already has the framework in place to justify crewless combat ops, and the mechanics to make it a scaling threat (is derelicts having more perminent critical malfunctions the more in disarray they are)
I mean, ships don't need crew to fire their guns and a onslaught with one guy (pilot?) can auto fire all its turrets the same as a fully staffed ship, it's just that damage it takes won't be repaired and systems that are broken stay broken, which totally plays into the low-end aspect of the mechanic. It would be super simple to make investing aptitude points in the industry tree skill itself (and not the salvage skill itself) increase your crews capability to identify how combat functional a derelict hulk would be if its auto fire turned out to still function/correctly identify hulks. Like, an 80% chance to be within x minus 9 critical malfunctions, where x is the relevant skill, so that if you found a derelict onslaught as a newbie even with just one aptitude point if the initial scan came back with less than 10 critical malfunctions you would have an 80% chance that if you approached engagement range and it didn't turn out to be a hulk (it's power system disable) and was in fact a ship that lost it's crew and was left adrift with it's autopilot on you would be facing a fully functioning onslaught, whereas being within 10 of the maximum amount of critically disabled combat systems means that the onslaught is either a hulk, or a severely crippled one.
Ionno, just a thought to systemise it and tie it into the CR mechanics