The Luddic Church and its ships feel like they've been left out cold right now. They currently use the same ships as the hegemony and independent factions, mostly the common ships that the player starts the game with blueprints for. Their three faction ships are all recolours of those common ships you start with, so finding their blueprint package feels bad.
I was thinking about what potential flavor could be given to the faction's ships and what benefits their variants could have. Hegemony variants are militarized and/or have more armor at the cost of losing access to energy weapons. Tri-Tachyon variants have more flux at the cost of losing access to ballistic weapons. The church doesn't seem like it's the sort to develop their own ships or do extensive modification programs. Their fleet doctrine is set to the minimum quality standard. But all this time using old ships with minimal modification means that their engineers and mechanics will have long since worked out any system problems and developed ways to get the most out of what they've got. So what if Church ships got better deployment time and recovery costs at the cost of larger skeleton crews? They're using old, tried and true ships and systems and would emphasize a different aspect of low tech than the hegemony does.
Similarly, they could make use of old obsolete ship blueprints that no one else wanted. Even though the faction isn't that interested in developing new ships, a glut of unwanted blueprints gives them ample chances to try and hack in some system changes/upgrades from other designs. They have spares when they screw up and more d-mods than average is on brand for the faction. This gives lots of options for outdated ships that they've brought up to surprisingly robust standards through trial and error that are cheep and reliable.
tldr:
Why not give LC ships a built-in hull mod that increases deployment time and reduces recovery costs at a minimum crew penalty?
The LC could use unique outdated ships that they've hacked in improvements to the blueprints through trial and error thanks to being the only ones that actually collects these outdated blueprints.
