Ability to buy and or capture ship designs

Or maybe assimilating certain minor factions could give new ship types, similarly to the minor faction units in Endless Legend.

I like it!

Yes! If nothing else, it would allow us to upgrade ships that we acquire from quests, curiosities, and assimilations.

I really like Supramarine's idea above as well.

Came here looking if someone had the same idea. What I would like to see implemented is that if defeated fleet has any surviving ships after a space battle, defeated player/AI has to make a choice to either:

• flee (with some percentage that it can fail and all ships will be lost in the process)
• surrender (ships are captured by winner without approval penalties)
• selfdestruct (empire-wide approval penalty depening on how many ships were lost)

Captured ships become a new fleet, each ship can then be repaired and used as-is, sold to a marketplace or brought to a system with Scrapyard improvement where it will be disassembled and the hull will be unlocked for new ship designs.

It would also be interesting to see this as a base playstyle for a new faction (junk scavangers?) that doesn't have it's own ship designs but has to steal them from others. They have a special cloaked ship that can hijack other ships in the orbit, with various degrees of success (depending on ship type, fleet size, experience?).