Hmmm I think this really depends on the specifics and on the AI. Do you recover ships if you lose the battle? Will the AI keep shooting at the enemy 'hulks' that are slowly powering away? Would "overkilled" ships have lower recovery chances and more D mods than the current state, where a skilled player has a good chance of recovering their ships with minimal mods?
A lot of the time when allied ships die they are either overwhelmed or far enough away that I couldn't tell allies to go help anyways, so the hulk wouldn't survive long before exploding again and being put down for real, if the AI targets them. OTOH, if the AI is also "playing" at recovering enemy ships, then they'd have no reason to shoot hulks... same as the player really.
All good questions, some of which I thought to myself. As I envision it:
Do you recover ships if you lose the battle?
I'm torn. I think if you're fully wiped, you're fully wiped - those crippled ships that escaped the battle would be easy prey for the fleet(s) that you lost against. If you clean disengage, it wouldn't be unreasonable. In a disengagement battle they'd essentially be mothballed.
As for recovering enemy ships, it'd work the same as current. We can say their surviving crew scuttle the ship and the rest is left to RNG. That said, I can see the other side of it too, enabling the player more opportunities to gain rarer ships through salvage.
Would "overkilled" ships have lower recovery chances and more D mods than the current state
Yes and no, respectively. A diceroll for one D-mod extra, but recovery chances unchanged. Successfuly-retreated crippled ships would be guaranteed recoverable.
where a skilled player has a good chance of recovering their ships with minimal mods?
I don't have an answer I'm certain of, but the idea is to make the player more able to absorb casualties in battle, without necessarily being buggered for the campaign - particularly with regards to rare/unique ships. I think it'd make ironman gameplay a lot more attractive. So I'd err on the side of caution and say the recovery rate for destroyed ships remains the same.
Will the AI keep shooting at the enemy 'hulks' that are slowly powering away?
Yes, but will prioritise "live" enemy ships in range. I also see the benefit of having enemies ignore them completely, intending to salvage them for their own purposes, but I think there still needs to be a decent risk of their destruction.
I was thinking a crippled ship could have a chance of keeping a few weapons operational, PD especially.
Regarding the manner in which ships tend to die, that's something of an issue of its own - but this is an edge-case sort of thing. If those ships that are cut-off do die, there's still the chance of post-battle recovery.
There's also the question of whether crippled ships must be "recovered" post-battle, or go straight back into your fleet. I think the former would make most sense, incurring the supply cost, but the latter would be most convenient.