I really am a fan of the idea. I'd suggest moving drops that fit into the 100 objects limit down below 1% probability, though.
Cap armour, dropped at .1% of the time. that's once every 1000 blown up pieces of scrap...which could make for a whole, whole, whole lot of cap armours. I'd suggest dropping it much farther down, to at least .001%. Probably farther.
Still, its a brilliant idea. Scrap metal and hull panels should be fairly common, and then you can go and mix in niobium, high temperature alloy, and engine components.
So, my suggested porportion would be:
Scrap metal 40%
Hull panels 30%
Engine Components 10%
High temperature alloy 5%
Hfuel 4%
Mox 3%
Niobium 3%
Gold 1%
That's 96% regular commodities, with 4% to work with adding in other things.
And you don't have to actually change the profitability of scrap mining with this system, that's just an adjustment of how much is dropped per exploded rock.
The argument against that I can dig up is that it would concentrate a lot of the wealth of scrap mining into a tiny percentage, but my counter is that it would be a lot like the lotto: an incredibly cheap price on the majority of the mining excersise, spread over thousands or millions.
Great idea, I'm not sure about dropping codenames or armor upgrades though. Maybe class 9 fighter guns based on whatever region you're in - if you're mining at bornholme depot in omega 15, there'd be a chance for corsair, hessian, BHG, or rheinland military guns, whereas if you were mining at pittsburgh or rochester there'd be a chance for liberty navy, liberty rogue, and civilian guns.
Still, if you think about it, the chances of a random chunk of debris in space, amongst a huge cloud of similar debris, having functional armor, weapons, or equipment... it's pretty low.
As far as vanilla FL lore goes, Junkers rarely find working equipment, they often have to fix it up and repurpose the stuff they find before it can be resold.
It might be a good idea to add some extra commodities to encourage that, so the breakdown would be something like:
50% Scrap Metal
10% Ship Hull Panels
10% Engine Components
10% Weapon Components
10% Starship System Components
and the remaining 10% being split between random consumable type materials - Hfuel, mox, oxygen, water, deuterium, etc. etc.
I approve. I just might make a Junker if this were true. Could be a weapon dealer and a scrapper.
A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,
brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
This sounds like a great idea. Much easier than the old trick of making specific fields drop specific commodities in specific times. And it would make salvaging a tad more interesting.