a new idea is to have salvage ships as an update/attachment to the orbital refinery, i.e. a frigate option that is accessible when you  build a orbital refinery and have the necessary recycling technology in place.

These ships can go out a seek automatically or manually patrol a planet for  destroyed ships, tow it back to the assigned bases and convert it to metal and crystals.

the more upgrades in the recycling process the more that can be extracted also adds more ports for more scavenger ships etc.

just and idea, don’t be too harsh