Posted from Steam forums:

Scrapping a ship in a system you control should return the ship's manpower to the empire manpower pool (up to the max). Currently it appears that the ship's manpower is lost to the void.

what do you mean by scraping a ship? 

Scrap: destroy a ship to eliminate it's upkeep cost and get some dust back. Maybe most players sell any unwanted ships on the marketplace after it is unlocked?

This could be nice, especially for manpower-starved empires like Vodyani. It would give some incentive to scrap rather than sell sometimes.

Hi,

It's indeed supposed to return the manpower of the scrapped ship if you did it over your own systems, I'll make sure it's logged in our issue tracker.

Thanks,

jhell wrote:

Hi,

It's indeed supposed to return the manpower of the scrapped ship if you did it over your own systems, I'll make sure it's logged in our issue tracker.

Thanks,

Thanks!

Why is ship Manpower not returned when a ship is sold to the market?

I'd like to sell my fleet of 16 Attackers to the market, my Manpower generation is only ~160 per turn, so I'm selling 10 turns worth of Manpower to the market? For no benefit...

If I had scrapped them before unlocking the market, I could have gotten that Manpower refunded.

I want to second this - it feels like a huge nerf to unlock selling ships on the marketplace.
A huge part of my early game strat to get around UC early manpower issues is to scrap minor faction ships for the manpower, and at some point that option simply disappears when the marketplace opens.

It would probably need to be adjusted to not apply to mercenary ships so you couldn't convert dust into manpower by buying mercenary ships then selling them right away.