Oh, interesting! The game is actually quite careful not to have changes to the quantity of the non-rare drops affect the RNG for the rare drops. However, in the case of the Domain Mothership - and *only* in that case - its drop data is misconfigured and what are supposed to be the rare drops are in the "value" drops column, which is affected by the Salvaging skill*. Glad this came up - fixed it up just now!
Haha just my luck I thought "hmm what's something to test it on" and the first thing I thought of was the mothership. Sigh.
That still leaves the issue of "post-battle salvage" though. Although, I assume then that the distinction of whether or not something is "rare" doesn't apply; it would simply be based on if that item was equipped by a ship in combat, right? In other words, "salvageWeaponProb" in settings.json is 0.25, meaning if an enemy ship used a vulcan then there's a 25% chance that the vulcan will drop. So if my post-battle salvage bonus were 20%, then that would increase this from 25% to 30% chance.
Then there would be two questions about "post-battle salvage":
1. Is the drop rate of AI cores affected by this? Since those are based on a different set of variables ("drop_prob_officer_alpha_core" "drop_prob_mult_ai_core_capital" etc.), instead of the usual salvage ones ("salvageWeaponProb" etc.); so this is if those variables also get modified by post-battle salvage in the code.
2. How does it affect the drops of Omega weapons after the hypershunt fight? It looks like this is almost certainly affected by post-battle salvage; however, the effect seems to be that it
changes which weapons are given, rather than the total
amount of them. I always get 2 larges, and then always 6-8 mediums and 7-9 smalls, regardless of the post-battle salvage % (testing from 0% up to 43%). For example, in my testing (seed <Lp>-5164560592258303327</Lp>, version RC12), at post-battle salvage 20%, I always got 1 resonator MRM launcher, 3 cryoblasters, and 1 cryoflamer, and then either 1 or 3 disintegrators as my medium loot. But I don't get "more" or "less" loot with different post-battle salvage amounts; just that what I get are different. This is despite the fact that only 2 cryoblasters ever appear during the whole fight (on one of the tesseracts; the other didn't have any, and none of the shards had it either), yet somehow I can end up with 3 with this particular post-battle salvage %. Different post-battle salvage % gives me a different mix of weapons. So it doesn't seem to be performing as advertised (increasing amount of post-battle salvage) with respect to Omega weapons, although it affects the drops.