Does that etcetera on things affected by salvage rigs include scuttling ships?
No - again, seems situational and not necessarily good. There's no much room for scuttling to be both not completely awful and still worse than selling the ship; any boosts to its output are trouble.
Alright - I'd suggest explicitly calling that out in the tooltip, though, as otherwise it seems reasonable to conflate "salvaging a derelict" with "deliberately scrapping a ship". In particular, consider a case I ran into once: A derelict Prometheus, far out in the fringe. My options are salvage it, incorporate it into my fleet, or leave it alone. Presumably if I salvage it, the salvage rigs come into play. But hey, free Prometheus - who'd turn that down? Especially since derelict tankers tend to come with lots of fuel.
...Turns out this one didn't. I incorporated it into my fleet, and then had to immediately turn around and scrap it because there was no way I could get it back to civilization. At which point the salvage rigs... don't come into play?
And that whole situation just... doesn't quite feel right, somehow. Either I should have been able to tell that the ship's tanks were empty before I recovered it, or recovering and then immediately scrapping it should yield the same resources as scrapping it from the get-go.
Support ships are worthless to the point of not existing tactically unless they're one of the few combat variants ( Gemini comes to mind), and there's really not much thought to how much space they take up in your fleet either, so the only other consideration comes with a few of the hull mods that provide fleet bonuses. For example I was hoping we'd see a hull mod that lets you turn a salvage rig into a mobile refitting bay, lowering the supply cost of refitting when not at a planet (maybe only for smaller size ships). Just something to make me give more thought to the support/logistics half of my fleet composition besides numbers.
@Eji1700: I've wanted for some time to go through and (via mod) rebalance ships so that (aside from special cases like the rare pre-collapse Kite), every freighter is an at least vaguely-passable combat freighter, and the actual combat freighter designed ships (mule, apogee, wayfarer, etc.) are only marginally sub-optimal compared to straight-up combat ships.
Funny; I'd made some other changes that factor in here, but I don't want to talk about them because that's possibly another blog post
In addition, the Mule got a significant buff, and the Hound/Cerberus got a bit of one, too. Wasn't thinking about the Wayfarer; that might be worth another look too.
Interesting... looking forward to that blog post, then!
In the meantime, though, here's a list of ships that I'd count as combat freighters, sorted by category:
Ships that are already at least vaguely decent at both combat and freightering: Kite, Shepherd, Wayfarer, Mule, Apogee
Ships that, lore-wise, are supposed to be able to defend themselves, but aren't actually all that good at it: Hound*, Cerberus*, Prometheus
Ships whose stats suggest that they ought to be combat freighters, but have various flaws that make me not want to use them for either purpose: Gemini, Venture
Also, I'd suggest promoting the Condor to combat freighter status, by simply increasing its cargo and fuel capacity; lore-wise it's a converted freighter, so it feels strange for it to be less freighter-y than the Drover. I'd probably look at cargo capacity in the 100-200 range (somewhere between 1/3 and 2/3 of the Tarsus' 300), and a fuel capacity of 80 (matching the Tarsus).
And it'd be a decent niche for the Odyssey, too, though that notion may have already been obsoleted by combat upgrades you've mentioned elsewhere.
The last comment I'd like to leave, re combat freighters: please adjust their CR stats! A ship like the Apogee should be cheaper to send into battle than an Eagle or a Dominator - but should also lose a much larger portion of its CR, and be slower to recover that CR. Cost to deploy should scale with the actual value in battle of the ship in question - but ships that aren't dedicated warships ought to fare poorly if forced into multiple back-to-back battles.
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* The Hound and Cerberus would be fine if the makeshift shield generator were a bit less makeshift; the current design of that hull mod fails to recognize that none of the ships it can be installed on have strong flux systems, to the point that it's generally a defensive downgrade rather than an upgrade.