[suggestion] Bailing in NPC fights, and competing salvagers

[LameFox]

Since exploration is at least nominally a bigger part of this game, I think this would be a good way to tie it in to what's actually going on around us and make the rewards more varied. Scouring the site of a battle for abandoned ships is far more engaging IMO than flying the same Odysseus from the same corner of the universe past the same incompetent Xenon each game. Or finding the same handful of inventory items in boxes over, and over, and over. Sure, ships aren't actually very valuable or hard to get compared to previous games, but it's still a whole different means of acquiring them compared to hostility or trade which added some nice variety when it was modded into X3. Plus, it's plain more intuitive: of course they also want to survive when someone besides us is killing them!

And now that marines' pods can actually land on things with some consistency, I feel that NPC salvagers are theoretically viable in X4, which would add some competition for the player (and map-cleanup for those who ignore the ships this generates). Maybe all the ships they recover could even be recycled back into the economy (i.e. scrapped for engine parts) and have an actual impact now that there's an economy.

Also, you'd see marines that aren't yours.