Would Shard Spawner still work with this ship if I add it back?
It is possible just add auto_rec tag for vanilla Tesseract, and after battle with them they occasionally will be available to recover, and it will be full Tesseract, no shards, but shard spawner actually buggy if ship with it used by player, the battle never ends, since battles is hardcoded not to end until ship with such mechanics either retreats or gets completely destroyed, no matter on which side it.
You can order Tesseract to retreat, or use cheat codes in order to force end battle, but I don't know if its possible to end battle if it get split into fighter shards, since you can't issue orders for fighters directly, so you probably will need to use cheat codes, it will work I guess, but works buggy.