Any thoughts about making power plants burn fuel, with abandoned ships keeping their shields forever? This would be a nice way to address that for salvaging and the like.
TL;DRPower plants will consume hydrogen fuel in the future, not in the initial 4.0 resource network release, so ships without fuel would lose shields and life support.
Yes, power plants will consume fuel in the future. So it has been a plan for quite some time already, and we are now looking into when is the perfect time actually to release it. It's not with 4.0, so it's not with the initial release of the resource network, but it will come at a later point. And the goal there is that the power plants will consume hydrogen fuel. So it's used for the thrusters and the power plants. And the reason is because power generators right now create energy out of thin air. And especially when we go forward to base building, we can't do that anymore. So we need a resource that is actually consumed over time. And the benefit then, in the scenario that is described in that question, is once your fuel runs out, once your battery is depleted, all the systems on that ship will then slowly die. And yeah, you will be able to enter that ship without any shields anymore, but also without any life support.