I think it would be a good idea to add salvage vessels and/or planetary salvage outposts. I have two parts for consideration on how these could function.
1) scrapping. these ships could allow a player too essentially scrap a module of their ship to receive a small amount of materials. Maybee not a lot but perhaps 2 or 3 from the last grade of engineering that was put on it. Also I think this could open up a new gameplay option where players could potentially scoop up damaged pieces of machinery from ship wrecks that are stored in the cargo hold in addition to the normal materials found in signal sources. These pieces could be taken to a salvage yard and either sold for credits or for a fee ground up for materials.
2) Salvage. Since it would be implied for an immersion perspective that other CMDR's are selling old and disused modules that the facility may want to sell some of them for profit as in real life. I propose that every so often perhaps every hour or once or twice a day each salvage yard offers a random module for each cmdr that can be purchased. These modules can come with a randomized set of engineering upgrades that may or may not be beneficial (ex G4 long range on a frag cannon) and the player can choose to either turn back around and salvage them for materials or they can choose to keep them. These modules will come with a risk factor to them that can cause them to either malfunction or not be useable at all until the problem has been fixed by an engineer.
Some advantages of this system could be getting to try out different weapons and engineering effects that you normally dont use. You could potentially receive a powerplay weapon giving you an opportunity to test it out and see if you would want to pledge to that power. This would not be a viable way to farm materials or PP weapons however. The number of times per day a new module would spawn would be very low and the chances of getting a high grade engineering on one would be even lower. Say your chances of getting an advanced plasma accelerator are .5%. The chances of getting an advanced plasma accelerator with G5 long range would be somewhere on the scale of .01% chance. And of course some modules would be more rare than others. APA .5% vs a small pulse laser at 7% for instance.
1) scrapping. these ships could allow a player too essentially scrap a module of their ship to receive a small amount of materials. Maybee not a lot but perhaps 2 or 3 from the last grade of engineering that was put on it. Also I think this could open up a new gameplay option where players could potentially scoop up damaged pieces of machinery from ship wrecks that are stored in the cargo hold in addition to the normal materials found in signal sources. These pieces could be taken to a salvage yard and either sold for credits or for a fee ground up for materials.
2) Salvage. Since it would be implied for an immersion perspective that other CMDR's are selling old and disused modules that the facility may want to sell some of them for profit as in real life. I propose that every so often perhaps every hour or once or twice a day each salvage yard offers a random module for each cmdr that can be purchased. These modules can come with a randomized set of engineering upgrades that may or may not be beneficial (ex G4 long range on a frag cannon) and the player can choose to either turn back around and salvage them for materials or they can choose to keep them. These modules will come with a risk factor to them that can cause them to either malfunction or not be useable at all until the problem has been fixed by an engineer.
Some advantages of this system could be getting to try out different weapons and engineering effects that you normally dont use. You could potentially receive a powerplay weapon giving you an opportunity to test it out and see if you would want to pledge to that power. This would not be a viable way to farm materials or PP weapons however. The number of times per day a new module would spawn would be very low and the chances of getting a high grade engineering on one would be even lower. Say your chances of getting an advanced plasma accelerator are .5%. The chances of getting an advanced plasma accelerator with G5 long range would be somewhere on the scale of .01% chance. And of course some modules would be more rare than others. APA .5% vs a small pulse laser at 7% for instance.