I got curious on the question of whether to repair or not repair found ships. So, I went to a random planet, and located a downed ship via distress signal. The picture here is how I found it (plus a repaired pulse engine – forgot to grab a screenshot before that). Without repairing the pulse engine, I was not able to fly the ship. The thrusters were not damaged, so I wasn’t able to test if I could move the ship without fixing them.

So, I left the pulse engines broken, got back in my main ship, and flew to my freighter docked in orbit. I then summoned the ship to my hangar which worked, even with the pulse engines not repaired. So, now I had a flaming wreck on the deck in my freighter. I then got in the ship to make sure it was “primary”, got out, and used the freighter’s teleport to jump to the station. The ship followed and was now in the station, thankfully no longer on fire.

The ship was an “A” class shuttle with 36+26 slots, most of which were damaged as shown below. In this configuration, basically “as found”, the ship was worth 2.9mil units at the recycling station.

As found.

I then proceeded to fully repair the ship. Here is the resulting bill of materials to fully repair it:

BOM to repair and P/L

After fully repairing the ship, it was now worth 13.150mil at the recycling station. So, for a basic “A” class ship, I spent 1,132,555 units for about a 9mil increase in profits.

This is just a quick example, but I’ve found that the new ship value calculations really take a hit on unrepaired slots. I can turn a pretty comfortable profit on “B” class and above. “C” class is usually close to a break even plus/minus.

As always, YMMV, but in my opinion and based on my experiences, it’s worth the time.