I've done a play through with derelict contingent, and I have some thoughts on its balance and some quality of life issues that come with making a mechanic the player should avoid into a desired buff.
Dmoded ships are better than their pristine variants:
Getting a 30% deployment cost reduction for a ship that's 5-30% worse in some specific field during combat makes generally makes dmods a buff to your ships. With this in mind, dmods become buffs with this skill, which leads to some problems that will be discussed later.
Building the ultimate derelict contingent fleet is tedious:
Dmods are a buff, and the way of obtaining dmods in a reasonably fast manner is to add reinforced bulkheads to the ships you want to buff, load them with crew, pursue a tiny enemy fleet, take command of that pursuit, question the lack of a crew morale mechanic as you personally massacre your allies, and recover the lost ships. Repeat this process around 4 times and you might have the ship you desired, assuming you didn't roll any ships with faulty power grid or defective manufactory, which is a sign to immediately scuttle. Purposely killing your own ships is a overly complicated way of adding buffs, and an option on the fleet or refit screen that allows the player to deliberately add dmods is in order.
Missile boats get off relatively scott free from dmods:
There aren't dmods that make missiles significantly less effective, so dmods matter significantly less on ships such as the Gryphon or Falcon P than on carriers or line ships. Adding dmods that target ships that rely on missiles would remedy this.
Rolling for desired dmods:
My biggest problem with derelict contingent is that how strong your ships are is significantly RNG dependant. For example, the player could get a Paragon with faulty power grid, degraded shields, degraded engines, compromised armour, and compromised hull, which would make it shoot 15% less, tank about 25% less damage with its shields, have 20% worse armour, have 30% less hull points, 15% worse turn rate, and 15% worse speed. This is terrible compared to a Paragon with glitched sensors, unreliable subsystems, faulty automated systems, degraded life support, and increased maintenance, which gives the Paragon trivial debuffs in battle and higher logistical costs, which become irrelevant going into the late game. In addition to logistical dmods that are mostly meaningless in battle, some dmods have little effect on certain ships. For example, compromised armour and hull matters little on high tech ships because they mainly use shields to survive. With a system of giving buffs like this, the player can acquire ships that cost 30% less dp and have little meaningful downsides in combat, but the process to get them requires a lot of grinding.
If the current 6% less dp for each dmod stat is to be kept, making dmods less random would lessen the need to roll dmods, make the strength of dmodded ships more consistent, and make derelict contingent easier to balance. For example, for high tech line ships, the first dmod could always be faulty power grid, the second degraded shields, the third a random dmod that effects some other combat stat, and the remaining two logistical dmods. For even more control, every dmod could be assigned its own specific dp, recovery cost, and maintenance reductions and the player could be given the option to select a ships dmods.
