As of tonight, destruction of Hive vessels by fire from Capship Turrets will result in a drastically reduced chance of their dropping rarer items, like Synthetic SilkSteel.

It should be noted that, since last week, these same rarer items are no longer displayed in the bot's scannable cargo manifest, as other mechanism now after to determine whether or not they will spawn. Thus, the fact that a bot does not show Synthetic SilkSteel as cargo, does not mean that they won't drop it.