With the strength of simply fitting a cheap Catalyst or equivalent with 8 salvagers and going out, and the use of MTUs to bring in loot, the Noctis has heavily fallen out of favour, especially considering its price.
Ergo, I suggest showing it, and salvaging in general, a bit of love:
Lower the production cost of the Noctis by 60-70%. There’s no reason for it to cost as much as it does.
Add a big bonus to the effectiveness of Salvage drones. Say, +20% per level of ORE Haulers, or even +30%.
Increase the bonus to Tractor Beam range and velocity from +60% per level to +100% per level. Possibly also add this range bonus to the range of Salvagers.
Increase the bonus (reduction) to Salvager duration to 8% per level.
Even with these changes, a lot of people will prefer taking out Catalysts because of the price changes, and the target painted on any Noctis’s back. Show the Noctis some love, give it a big boost.
Alphas cant use a noctis, so dessies make for good cheap haulers, choice between either for an omega, theyll pick noctis every time due to its role and bonuses
None of the people or corps I know use a Noctis regularly, whereas they use the destroyer salvagers all the time. There’s simply too little incentive to risk a 125 mil ship when a 5 mil ship can do the job with a single MTU in its hold.
“wouldn’t make a difference” … it’ll require a higher investment to get the job done. And if people aren’t using the ship due to the risk, the logical step is to make it “safer” to use.
The reason people don’t use it isn’t because it’s too hard to survive in it, it’s because the things it’s supposed to be good at aren’t actually all that great compared to just using an MTU and a destroyer.
But there’s also no real reason NOT to reduce the production cost of the Noctis, as it’s incredibly expensive at the moment for what little it gives. Even with a 70% reduction in cost, I still don’t think it’d be worth using most of the time, without also adding in some bigger bonuses.
As Advenat Bedala said, another option instead of giving a bonus to salvage drones (though I’d argue that would still be best) is to massively increase the range of salvagers on the Noctis. Say +100% range per level of ORE ships, for a maximum of 36 km range with 5/5 and T2 salvagers.
There’s more to take into consideration with caps though, since they’re balanced for combat. A Noctis has 0 turret and launcher slots and only 25 Mbit/sec of un-bonused drone bandwidth. The power grid and cpu are even tiny, so you don’t really have to concern yourself with smart-bombing either.
I support. The Noctis could get some love. Maybe not too much, but defnitely a bit more range and a Bonus for SalvageDrones. But price is okay imho. The Porpoise uses basically the same hull and costs about the same.
Per Skill level:
+20% Bonus to SalvageDrone Access Difficulty Bonus
I like the bonuses (smart putting the salvager on the role bonus). I would still argue it needs to be cheaper, however; the porpoise is an amazing booster for its hull size, whereas the Noctis has no other use other than salvage.
I’ve said that tractor beams could do with attention for some time; namely extensibility of lockable object types. If Noctis was first for bonus traits in that field I would be pleased.