Salvage is open. It had its verb and nothing that flew it: no mission op, no ARIA plan, a tutorial branch that still described the dwell timer, and a bench that had never been run with the rig in the loop.

SALVAGE, the mission op. The pick is credits per second over leg + cut, and it passes over a hulk that will age out first, one under a hostile port's guns, one behind a world, one in a belt unless it is worth 2.5× as much, and one with a raider or a nest still over it. A low battery rests the rig (28% → 65%) instead of standing the mission down.

Jobs on hulks. "Recover a wreck" spawns a real, pinned, whole hulk sized to the order, on the port's approaches rather than in a belt shoal, on the open side of a tethered port and riding that port's world. "Salvage N plate" takes hull steel off any hulk. A flight recorder is handed in at any honest port for 350 cr + 240 per hull tier and trains Law.

ARIA flies it. The terminal player plans wreck and plate orders as SALVAGE → DOCK → DELIVER, sells or keeps what else came aboard, and flies free salvage between orders. At the conn she plans a salvage run when the pilot's habits or career say so. AUTO is STRIP while it is quiet and CUT under threat, and for an order: CUT, unless the wreck has no plate to spare.

What the bench found. The first run with all of the above was 0.15× Mining. None of it was pay:

• A hulk outside a world's sphere of influence lies in the star's frame; a ship inside it brakes against the world. Near the edge the autopilot braked for ever against a target leaving at 39 u/s — eight minutes for a 21 km leg, on a flat battery.
• A hull waiting on the core's jump reserve (65% of the battery) with the shed line at 45% shed nothing, never made the reserve under fire, and sat there until the leg was given up — then flew it again. Waiting 10 s on the reserve now sheds comforts and the tractor; 25 s stows the guns until she can jump.
• The newest hulks are where the killing is. See the pick, above.
• The rig worked at 0.4 plate/s STRIP, 1.0 CUT against a cutter's 3 to 6 ore/s. It is now 1.0 and 2.5; the 2.5:1, the 85% CUT yield and the draw are unchanged, so a plate costs less charge than it did.
• Orders were a third the size of a mining order for the same flying. Plate and wreck orders are sized to half the hold, and pay 3.6× and 3.2× the plate's base value.

The open loops from 0.3.88.

• Late break-off on a flat battery. The break-off line is the repair line plus 0.20 when the battery is under 25%, in both ARIAs. At the conn, a break-off is followed by the yard even when the hull is over the repair line.
• Drone culls did not count belt drones. A rogue drone with no nest and no owner is reported to the desk as a rogue.
• The dogleg was ARIA's only. Any plan with more than one step flies round a world across its lane. A single "go there" still stops and says why.

Also.

• A hulk somebody is flying to or cutting is not the one the cap of 48 throws away, and does not age out from under the beam.
• The rig is put back as the pilot had it when a mission leaves the SALVAGE step.
• The tutorial's salvage branch is RIG: lock a hulk, STRIP or CUT, reel, sell — with MARK HULK when the nearest is out of sight and the Salvage board when the sky has none.

| career | median cr/min | range | done / dropped | |---|---|---|---| | mining | 3,513 | 2,088 – 4,655 | 5 / 0 | | salvage | 3,061 | 2,461 – 3,573 | 5 / 0 |

Ratio 0.87×, band 2,459 – 4,567. Mining's own median moved between 3,237 and 4,109 across four runs of the same mining code — the runs are not seeded below the exploration coin — so against the highest of those Salvage is 0.75×: inside, with less room. At 0.3.85 the pair was 611 against 933.

ARIA at the conn, headless, 30 sky-minutes, 20,000 cr: miner +30,703, salvor +81,553.

All 107 node suites pass on that tree.

Not verified. Not flown on a phone. Not flown with two players.

Still open.

• Hulks are session state: not saved, not shared between players. A wreck order does not survive a reload.
• No ownership, claims or prize law. Anyone may cut anything.
• Salvager drones do not work hulk sections.
• Hand loops are not at parity: with no orders, ARIA's SALVAGE LOOP out-earns her MINE LOOP about 2.7× at the conn. The gate measures board work.
• Parity is measured on the B hull. The A hull's orders are smaller.
• The autopilot's approach law (4.5% of range per second) is why a 9 km leg takes 80 s. It is every career's, so it was left alone.

Patch notes: /news/15