looting after large-scale battle?

[VA gamer]

I happened across a group of system ships fighting off an alien attack. I managed to scoop up some decent stuff.

I'm wondering if there's a way to identify ships that can be salvaged or recovered somehow. There are multiple gray ships on my map, but they all seem to be burned out wrecks...

[markdb92]

if there is salvage it will show up as a resource in the about section of the sector and just
use ships to auto salvage to collect them

[conrado.lacerda]

Any loot crate will show on your map screen like this:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2970214466

[galacticlore]

The grey wrecks can be recycled, using tugs to gather them and drag them to a recycling plant. You'd have to either find one owned by a faction or build one yourself.

It is unlikely there would be any usable ships left over, but it does happen sometimes, rarely. A usable ship would be blue in colour (or I think white if you have faction colours turned on), and would be abandoned with no crew and no faction ownership.

To claim one, there's 2 methods. Either your ship has to have a marine on board, in which case you could fly to the abandoned ship, right click it, and select "claim". Your marine will go to it and take it over and it's yours now, but you lose all the modules doing this (weapons, turrets). The other method is to fly to it, then leave your ship in your spacesuit, fly over to it, put your space suit in scan mode (shift+2 by default) and get very close to the glowy red data leak on the ship, and wait a moment for it to be scanned. Then it is yours.

[VA gamer]

thanks for the responses - very helpful