I held my breath until the you can “restore” a ship to peak condition bit.
Ha! Yeah, I can see that
What happens when a several times over rescued ship has all d-mods already on it? Is it just non-recoverable from then on? Does it just stay there?
Restoring a ship removes all d-mods, so at that point it's just new again.
A several-times-recovered ship will just have more d-mods, up to 4 total, and will cost more to recover - a base multiplier, and an extra multiplier for each d-mod.
Autofit! Does that imply procedural variants on ships generated in the campaign as well?
Not for this release, but there's definitely the potential for it. Performance-wise, it's probably not good enough to do for every ship being created, so would have to be a bit more clever (e.g. outfit enemy ships when you encounter them), etc.
So, have you ever considered giving players in-gameplay ways of increasing their ability to capture ships? Using things like EMP weapons to disable it before/instead of killing it; it would be time-consuming and tactically not very viable (as other ships can come in to assist before you're done) but if you're clever enough or simply have the overwhelming firepower to do so it would allow you to more easily secure ships.
Yeah, I've thought about it and I think it's come up before. I'd just as soon stay away from it because of how much it would mess with the AI. Either they'd be overkilling something you didn't want overkilled, or they'd be getting taken out while trying to be too cautious. Plus it's not at all certain that this would be more fun, and might indeed feel required to do more often than the player would like.