For exploration, it's a risk to stop in a system anyway. It costs lots of supplies and fuel. The salvage is your reward for that. Adding additional risk/tedium to your reward just makes it less of a reward.
Yeah, derelicts in unpopulated far-flung systems are the only exception I'd have to this. But making it less rewarding is kinda the point, since the biggest incentive you have for going out to those systems is derelict analysis/running sensor packages/surveying particular planets, each of which have very hefty payoffs with little real risk, mainly just cost - and what risk there is is mitigated by the ease of vessel recovery, and how resilient the player fleet is due to this ability. Even if your fleet is wiped - With the starting cash (And tutorial fleet if you played it) you can open storage and immediately begin building a reserve of recovered ships and weapons, because lord knows there are a lot to be found in and around Jangala at the start.
If I stop in hyperspace to salvage derelicts, I'm already spending a lot of additional fuel by stoping. If I'm salvaging post battle, I've taken a risk by engaging in a battle in the first place. Point being, most of the time, in order to get salvage, you've already taken risks, adding more is just pointless.
Fuel is an investment, not a risk - usually if you're travelling through hyperspace, you make sure you've more than enough to get to your destination and back. It's the beginning of a compelling choice though. "I've spotted a derelict <Favourite ship>, it'll cost me X of Y fuel to determine whether it's recoverable". X will usually be a tiny fraction of Y since derelicts usually have a minimal sensor profile, meaning you're rarely going far out of your way to get to it - and whether you are or aren't, the value of a recoverable ship is several orders of magnitude beyond that of the fuel (and supplies) spent.
Throw in "Oh, there's an <enemy/neutral> fleet already salvaging it. It's <size> so it'll take roughly Z days for them to complete it at most. I can get there within that timeframe, but I'll probably have to fight a battle to claim it and that's only if they haven't finished before I get there.". Or, "There's a Hegemony fleet patrolling around here, the derelict is outside Jangala. It's outside their sensor range right now, but by their course there's a risk of them catching me. It'll take me half a day to restore it, and they're within a quarter. If they catch me, they'll confiscate or scuttle the ship, give me a fine and I'll lose rep." Instantly much more risk/reward.
As for battles, there's two aspects; the ability to recover your own destroyed vessels, and those of the enemy. In the former case, this makes the losses you sustain in battle a lot less punishing. You risked that loss, yes, but the recovery its self is without risk - if it's recoverable at all, and there are many things you can do to insulate yourself from the possibility of a given ship being entirely lost.
In the latter case, you're sometimes rewarded with the choice to salvage an enemy ship, but again this choice its self is without risk, it only demands a relatively small investment. For both cases, let's say you've just won this battle, but there's another enemy fleet up your backside, just they weren't close enough to join. Without a timer, you can recover any of those ships immediately and have them in your fleet. You can then play cat-and-mouse with the enemy fleet til they've been repaired and recovered some CR and they're then employable in combat provided you have weapons to equip them with (Which you're more than likely to).
With a timer, this changes. If you start recovering those vessels, the enemy fleet will doubtlessly catch up to you, but let's say for the sake of argument, maybe not necessarily before you've recovered them and they're spaceworthy. You're presented with 3 choices: Cut your losses and abandon those ships, maybe coming around after you've lost your pursuers; Attempt to salvage them before their arrival; Engage the enemy fleet. Which choice you make will depend on how valuable that derelict is to you.
This is much more compelling than the current state of things - Right now there's no reason not to recover every derelict you generate in battle, provided you meet the supply/h machinery and skill requirements of each. Crew is a non-factor since you can simply mothball them and drag them back to storage, or a market where you can hire crew.
The main exception is if you slink around in an inhabited system trying to pick up the remains of other battles. I don't mind making patrols intervene in that sort of thing or having other hostile salvage fleets. Those are interesting mechanics. Adding time delays is not an interesting mechanic.
And this mechanic requires a time delay to be worth anything. If you can simply wait for a patrol for example to leave sensor range, then instantly salvage the derelict, nobody would get caught doing it except through negligence. If you have to take half a day to salvage it, that patrol might turn around and catch you in the act.
Restoring ships costs 2-3 times what they are worth brand new, it's not an advantage at all, it's a huge penalty. It certainly doesn't make the game easier.
Note, I've been using "restore" and "recover" interchangeably, my bad. I meant recovering operational derelicts in the first place. Tutorial notwithstanding, you can quickly build a strong fleet without doing anything to really earn it, just hovering about the battles between Hegemony and pirates, or going out into hyperspace to find a large number of drifting derelicts, or investing the fuel and supply costs to travel to a sector with a warning beacon and likely finding a heap of them there. The most powerful ships in my fleet (2 Onslaughts and a Mora) were found floating around in different systems with a hostile presence, and it didn't feel like I invested or risked anything significant to get them. Now I have a fleet an order of magnitude more powerful than what I had before, at negligible cost, potential or actual. This is the core issue.
Recovery allows you to gain a ship you might not otherwise have access to through markets or any other means, and in the majority of cases, even having a D-mod ship is more valuable than what you invest to gain it in the first place. You pay a premium to restore it to pristine condition, but this is offset to a huge degree by the payoffs of analysis missions, each of which will probably net you a few new recovered ships by proxy. I don't have a problem with the restoration system myself (In fact I had a similar suggestion a few months back), but the conditions surrounding it.
if you think that *anyone* will be happy just staring into monitor for 20 seconds doing completely nothing
(probably first few times it will be somewhat funny, but only first few times):
A) you are very wrong
B) you need other type of game, there are lots of F2P and mobile\web "games" that does exactly that thing and allows to pay money to skip delay, there are lots of people who enjoy such kind of "fun" for variable reasons, i can't tell that such games are bad and desing is wrong, i simply not going to play such games.
Didn't get the memo letting us know you were speaking for everyone now. The enjoyment from such a change would come from what the timer enables and facilitates, not the timer its self. It's a means to an end, and the only alternative I've seen come up so far is dicerolled events per salvage/recovery operation/survey which would be worse by most accounts including my own. Equating the addition of a 5, 10, 20-second delay to these mobile games where every action takes literal days to complete is grabbing at straws and you know it.
current implementation of SS obviously is not timesink and there are no delays of any kind with exception to com sniffer, that:
1) 2 seconds
2) can be ignored without any issues
3) you actually need to do it only few times per entire game
"The way it is" =/= "The way it could/"should" be". That's the nature of a suggestion.
1) 5 seconds, translating to 2/3 of an in-game day.
2) Same can be said of salvage/recovery/surveys
3) Ditto. In fact, you don't
necessarily ever
need to do any of these.
