With a crew of 1500, you probably have a fleet strong enough to take on 300k bounties, so it doesn't seems that bad even for someone that hates trading.
Also, that's pretty much the point of salaries: incentive the player to use a small fleet of elite ships rather than simply stack them up without much consequences. It also gives High Tech ships and their reduced crew a slight economical advantage since they lost some of their appeal with the Ballistic buffs from the last few patches.
Bounties get so high?
Just the though made me smile.. But yes, in one way or another salaries seem fine to me.
If anything Dark Revenant , would it be hard to add multiple options like "Full Salaries", "Half Salaries" and "No Salaries"?
How much ram would I need to run this 10 recommended faction (i have 4 gb of ram on my win 7 64bit). Would it work ok, or would i need to run less faction (I am only interested in starsector + with additional factions, without any additional mods, so no Nexerelin 0.7 or better graphics and similar)?
By default your Windows, without running any other application, must be using 1.5GB - 2GB got itself. That leaves only 2GB which is how much 32bit Java can use up to. Having said that, I think you are on the limit when you use even just SS+. I am not sure it will work actually, but with all the factions I am sure your pc will struggle. When I ran SS+, Nexerelin and 6 factions, I was seeing 3.5GB used by Starsector most of the time. ALthoguh I used Nexerelin too, so I am not sure.
A test will definitely work better~