Obviously, the idea that all you get from destroying any cap ship is usually the same cruddy scrap you get from killing a bot is anticlimatic and unrewarding.

I suggest that cap ships and manufactured ships and top tier/expensive ships be given a new scrap drop called premium scrap. Premium scrap is worth significantly more than regular scrap and the drop should be proportional to mass of ship and cost of ship.

Premium scrap could then be used to recycle into sss at mining stations since we don't have refineries. Offering an alternative means of getting sss and/or cash. Or maybe premium scrap could have some other purpose.. But regardless, I think it would be a win to differentiate and give more of a reward for destroying expensive ships without just dropping hand outs.

Why not just have them drop like 1000cu of scrap metal instead of... 30?

Or something useful like ffsa or fcp at a rate of 1 to 5

You wouldn't want them to drop manufactured goods because that would yield a lot of issues with making sure it doesn't undermine manufacturing or open up exploitation etc. Perhaps have new Recycle missions where capship scrap of a given amount cu can be recycled (plus money) into manufactured goods at those stations you normally would build them. Taking the place of needing to collect the raw materials. But it would have to be done in a way that makes booming your own trident over and over not cost effective.

You wouldn't want to just drop a ton of scrap because scrap is kinda useless.

Now, could you implement the other recycling features into the current scrap drop? Sure. But why not differentiate between the scrap of common parts (what basically amounts to recycling cans and plastic) and recycling expensive parts you'd find on high end ships (like rare earth metals found in recycling catalytic converters). It's a better scrap found in high end garbage vs common garbage. It should be reflected as such in the game.

Currently we get money for scrap and it is used in various collecting missions. Since booming cap ships and other top tier/manufactured ships is significantly more rare than common ships you find or bots, it's scrap should be differentiated so missions can be written around it's collection and whatever rewards to those missions can be hashed out.

Not a bad idea but also not good enough to be a priority over better ideas.

What is priority? Pretty much nothing in this forum is exactly a priority in the short term, unless someone is posting suggestions to port the game to a platform that will generate revenue. And what is priority in the long term is more fluid than most of the users would prefer. An idea may or may not be looked at simply on the basis of if what is required to implement it happens to be where the programmers are currently reworking anyway.

Though it may be interesting to start a thread and maintain a first post that illustrates forum user's perception of what should be priority given a handful of selected ideas from recentish posts.

Actually, I would. We've been asking for trident component drops for Deneb for a long time. One unit of ffsa every 5 trident kills is not going to create a shortcut to help a player build a trident. After all, it takes about 700 right now. Perhaps a lower drop rate for fcp is in order, say 1 in 10, since you only need around 400 of those. Possibly even drop an occasional samo 1 in 30 or an aggregator 1 in 100.

Otherwise, I like the underlying concept of recycling which is what I would expect in a real economic space situation. My concern is that without a larger reward, the solution recommended will still leave the experience as 'anticlimactic and unrewarding'. Can you give examples of what you envision to be drop / extraction ratios?

ok, just in regards to recycling.

Premium Scrap is dropped from manufactured ships / cap npcs

The drop amount limit is proportional to the mass of the ship. Which i'm just basing off of vo wiki, which from the looks of their units, got hacked and someone screwed up all the mass units. (I guess a Heavy Assault cruiser has only twice the mass of a superlight)

The drop amount rate should be a range that can be tweaked. It's not really important to talk specifics there but between 0 and limit with player controlled ships favoring upper limits and npc's can be steered one way or the other by who destroyed the ship. A player kill would yield a higher drop than npc.

These are maxes i pulled out of my ass because I can't trust the wiki at all.

a superlight drops 20cu
a trident NPC drops 100cu
a trident type M player ship drops 160cu (the wiki says it's 3 million tonnes)
a teradon drops 200cu (the wiki says this is also 3 million tonnes)
a Constellation drops 300mg 300
a heavy assault drops 800cu

Like i mentioned above. Assuming the engine supported it, the rates would depend on who landed the killing blow.
A player kill may get a drop from a pool of 3 choices. 0%, 30%, 100% max drops.
A NPC kill may get a drop from a pool of 6 choices. 0%, 0%, 20%, 40%,80%,100%
The drop is a random roll into one of those buckets.
If the engine can't support that then it can mimic the odds of coming across a seipos transport with 4x SSS, only scaled to the various max drops.

Recycling parts has to be done at their respective bases that you would normally manufacture them.
Since recycling requires a lot of re-processing. Only the building blocks can be recycled. Everything that builds on them can't be directly recycled. It would ruin trade/manufacturing balance way too much if you only had to deal with a single base. etc.

For instance,
Fluid Formable Silksteel Alloy (FFSA) 15cu + 10000cr
Fused Composite Plating (FCP) 10cu + 10000cr

Maybe more.

There is also the opportunity that the insurance company that handles Trident Type M re-building (since owners have convinced the devs to nerf the re-spawn all the way down to a few minutes) will also require a deposit of scrap material that they use to supply their manufacturing line with raw material. This can be 800cu + the money currently required.