50,000 Credits really doesn't come anywhere near covering the cost of a leviathan assault. Even a minimalist fitting easily costs in excess of 30,000c and when taking into account ship losses, repairs and reloads (especially from the capital ships) the battle easily costs hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions of credits per person.

An increased reward doesn't necessarily need to be in the form of high payout from the mission, it could be via substantially increased ore drops from the leviathan in addition to changing the contents of the leviathan's ring to contain a broader spectrum of rare ores opposed to the current xithricite makeup.

We could also mitigate this by making repairs free on the allocated capships, like we do on BS, I assume?

Yeah that also works, though I wouldn't mind the levi ring getting chocked full of goodies anyways >.>