The first tech for that improves "scuttling."

You can already scuttle ships by clicking on them, then clicking on a little yellow and black bar underneath their portrait. You can scuttle pretty much everything in the game, it takes about 60 seconds, and you get back a small % of the resources used to build it.

The first tech just decreases the time to scuttle, and increases the amount you get back. A little better than you might think. It lets you move around your frigate factories to best make use of logistic structures and whatnot. You can also scuttle things before the enemy destroys them to get a boost in resources.

The second one gives you a % of the cost the enemy used to build capital ships and structures when you destroy them. I'm not sure when you get the resources, if it's spread over the time you damage it, or if it's a lump sum when it dies. I quite frankly have just never researched the second one.

Hope that helps.

Make a small map, give yourself all the tech... don't build any resource structures... and you'll be able to see what it gives and when it gives it

... if you can do that w/ Galaxy Forge, that is!

If you destroy an enemy capital ship or structure, and you have a capital ship of your own in the gravity well, you earn some money for the destruction.  This technology is actually quite expensive to unlock, making it impractical in most situations.  It's actually quite good if you're making lots of bombers and regularly knocking out structures, but otherwise you're better off putting your money into trade ports if you want to increase your income.  Most of the time if you're causing enough damage to actually profit from this, you're probably going to win anyways because you're dominating the battlefield.

 

Also, if the thread is more than a year old (lass post was March 2008) please make a new thread rather than bump the old one.