Current situation
Currently, used laser crystals are the most frustrating source of inventory clutter in the game. I imagine that managing so many unique items, each with their own state, must also put a lot of load on the servers.
Solution
What about making it possible to “melt them together” and create new, undamaged items that can be repackaged?
How it could work
You add up all of the remaining percentages and round down to the nearest 100%.
i.e. 3 crystals (50% remaining, 70% remaining, 98% remaining) would come out to 218% and therefore give you two undamaged crystals, making the remaining 18% waste.
That way, you could collect crystals for a while and then eventually just melt them together, gaining stackable, undamaged crystals at the expense of some waste.
How it could work, part 2
It would also be possible to increase the amount of waste by substracting some set percentage from each crystal before the melting process.
i.e. in the case of 20% forced waste, the same three crystals from the previous example (50% remaining, 70% remaining, 98% remaining) would come out to 158% and now only give you one intact crystal with 58% plus 3*20% = 118% being wasted.
How it could be implemented in the UI
I’d envision this happening ‘automatically’ when right click > repackaging laser crystals. It should give a confirmation pop-up similar to what you get when you repackage ships with rigs (“repackaging laser crystals is a wasteful process. You will lose X crystals in the process”)