Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - The Road to Salvage

Salvage will be broken down into four different types:

Hull scraping - Removing the paint off the hulls of ships.
Component Retrieval - Salvaging/taking out the components inside the ships (coolers, power plants computers, etc.). It will be done from first-person; you fly over and retrieve components from the ship yourself.
Maw - Crunching up the ships (using salvage ships like the Reclaimer).
Siphoning - Removing resources like oxygen, fuel (both hydrogen and quantum), or data from ships. Oxygen and water will be the most useful resources that you can siphon, so that you don't have to pay for them yourself.

Hull Scraping - Damage Tech (I believe this has been completed a long time ago), and partial persistence, to allow for ships to spawn correctly.
Component Retrieval - Physicalised ship components and systems are needed, so that you can retrieve them from the ships. Power systems and pipes also need to be working the way they want them to (look at the resource generation and item control section for more info).
Maw - They need to figure out exactly how ships will be broken down and crunched up. Probably the most complicated salvage mechanic to implement.
Siphoning - The room system needs to be working correctly, so things can be pulled in/out of rooms (e.g. Oxygen). Life support also needs to be working the way they want to. There will need to be entry points in fuel tanks to allow for fuel to be pulled out of them.

When they started building their ships and environments, they created what they call the 'pipe system'. While it did its job quite well, it has become obsolete and is only used right now for a limited number of things. Therefore, they are creating a new system that will encompass all resource generation systems, such as power, fuel, coolant, ammo, etc.
This means that all the ship systems will be linked together (for example, if you don't have fuel, you are unable to generate power, so you cannot generate shields, etc.), and it will become likely to have cascade failures, even from small amounts of damage. Engineers will become very valuable, especially on large ships, as if you don't have a good engineer, you will run into issues when you're damaged, and they will cascade until you are unable to effectively control your ship.

All of the design has been done, and all of the senior directors have seen it and believe that the system will function well for its intended role. Currently, they are in the technical documentation phase. This is where they plan on how to code this system, as it will affect many things in the game. After the planning gets reviewed and approved by the directors, they will move onto actually coding the system.

Right now they are working on the power systems (resource generation and item control). They are also working on getting physicalized ship components, however, due to the large number of ships, this will take a while.
After those two are completed, they will begin working on salvage (and decide what type of salvage they will release first; hull scraping or component retrieval, etc.).
After they release the first implementation of salvage, they will release different types of salvage later down the line (like how they have done with mining; from ship mining to FPS mining).