Not exactly an exploit - it is a consequence of the true supply and demand economy. The cost of recycling the goods could be prohibitive and counter productive. The material cost of manufacturing ships is quite small when compared with the ship yard prices.Falcrack wrote: ↑Sat, 16. Mar 19, 01:37 As for the exploit, consider this. Buy a massive number of upgrades for a large ship, it costs maybe 9 million credits. Now you have depleted the wares from the station, so the ware prices increase due to scarcity. Now sell back those same upgrade you just purchased. The dock offers you 10 million credits to buy all that stuff back, due to increased ware prices, so you make 1 million credits just by buying and selling back the same upgrades. Buy upgrades again for 10 million, sell for 11 million, again due to greater scarcity than before, because there was no recycling the wares just keep getting destroyed with each successive upgrade/sell back cycle.
I actually tested this out to confirm that this happens. The best way to prevent this exploit, as far as I am concerned is to make it so that when you are paid for items sold back to equipment docks, just knock off maybe 10% or so of the sell back value. Or, make it so that only 80-90% or so of the original wares used for the component construction can be recycled back, and so you get paid less for selling back the same items that way too.
The same principles can be adopted in other areas of trading - the consequence of automated recycling on sale is that it would not discourage the practice you seem to be complaining about but instead make it easier and more repeatable.
Sale of kit/ships should probably remain as is, with salvage being an option the player has to pay for (at least at NPC facilities) - and can only be done at shipyards/wharfs.
The only way to truly cap the alleged exploit would be to make NPC shipyard ware and equipment prices fixed (possibly at average price, price could be increased as a penalty for lower reputation). However, in general I disagree with the premise that the sequence of events you describe is a true exploit.