Posted by CCP Rattati himself.

https://trello.com/b/R44szWCe/dust-514-development-roadmap

Look at the tabs labeled Warlords 1.3 and Backlog for PC.

This would be cool but would this not need new maps? I feel like that is the biggest road block for your idea. I am glad to see we are getting salvage from CCP.

I don't know if an idea similar to this has been posted, but I'm posting it anyway. Better post a repeat than lose a good idea.

The idea is that there is a ship wreck in eve online space, and an eve player can go in and deploy a CRU/supply depot combo. If it gets overrun by people or drones, it is destroyed and the loot you have gathered is scattered everywhere. There are a number of deployment areas. The map is based on a couple of possible layouts, with each room and hall picking from a number of possibilities, making a large number of possible layouts, which the mercs will have to figure out on the fly. A pathway open on one ship could be closed on another. The mercs have to go in and look for loot.

The loot is guarded by drones coming from hives that start producing when the first mercs land on the ship. drones roam around and are attracted to noise, such as gunfire or heavy equipment picking up big boxes of loot. The ship is hard to find on scanners, but when the first eve player deploys a squad of dusters, it becomes easier to detect. The eve player acts as the commander, and looks at the overall map as the mercs discover it and directs them. If he meets another eve player who decides to shoot at him, he could have a hard time commanding or even have to leave the mercs without coordination.

If the mercs are abandoned, they can find a distress beacon, and turn it on, so that the ship is automatically visible to all ships in the system, like low level high sec pirate complexes. Anyone can go there and negotiate a contract for the mercs loot. The original contract will specify how much money is paid out for various levels of loot. There are a few levels of loot, each more valuable but more guarded. All sorts of eve stuff could be in in. You could also find some dust equipment, which the mercs get to keep if they get out. It is quite possible that mercs with no particular loyalty to the person who hired them(i.e. most of us) could end up negotiating a deal with the person who killed the person who originally hired them.

Finally, another eve player could swoop in and deploy his/her own squad of mercs in the middle of this, making the teams chose between cooperation and competition. There will be some chat channel that the mercs may or may not use. Deployment is done by a module that loads one of the moderately expensive mini command centers made by eve players and shoots it into the ship. It is easy and quick to deploy, so you can deploy it and immediately fight the other person. On the ship there are turrets that can be hacked by mercs, and control transferred to the eve pilot, who can use it to his advantage in the event of a confrontation. That's all I can think of, and it is not organized, but here it is. I hope its new.

I'd like a salvage mode. A few ideas I'd like to add for consideration;

1. Make different suits have a different benefit for salvage ops: Light role frames can use EWAR to locate items and drones better than other suits as well as hack doors open faster but can't carry much loot or large items, Heavy role frames can carry the most loot or biggest items due to Dropsuits strength but would be slow and can't see anything with EWAR unless they're looking at it, Medium role frames would balance between the two with better EWAR than Heavies and better carry capacity than Lights. That way it's worth taking a mixed role team rather than just all Assaults or all Scouts.

2. Make loot destroyable. This would stop people tossing REs or Core Locus to clear rooms without worrying about destroying the content. Certain things should, naturally, be tougher than others. Also, REs and Grenades detonate ammo stores and munitions? Pretty please? That'd REALLY give us mercs a reason to be careful.

3. CRU inserted into salvage site has limited clones, no Depot inserted. Mercs only get when they spawn with so they need to plan ahead, placing an emphasis on reviving clones and rationing ammo from Nanohives rather than swapping freely. Uplinks shouldn't be available for this because [insert lore reason that sounds plausible.] Would also stop Scouts going out in advance, dropping links as checkpoints and the rest of the squad spawning in that way rather than sweeping the site as a team.

4. AI pirate fire teams as well as drones? Having to deal with pirates looting the ship as well as drones defending would be fun and certainly mix things up.

First off, I gave your post some paragraphs. A lot of us here don't like walls of text. It strains the eye.

Second, I like this idea of yours but there are a few road blocks.

1. This requires development resources on a scale much larger than what CCP Rattati has available. He has only a skeleton crew to work with so don't expect changes as major as your idea requires.

2. Even if development finally shifts to providing the content you're asking for, the game is limited by the PS3. According to CCP Rattati, Dust 514 has been optimized as much as it could be optimized for the PS3. Unfortunately, the content it has takes up too much memory. The only option so far to alleviate that problem is to #PortDust514 over to the PS4 or the PC. This would make it the perfect time for CCP to fix the code during the porting process and finally give us the capacity to add content as fun as what you asked for.

Note: CCP Rattati and his team do have working rogue drone models but their AI is rudimentary at best (think of the AI for the turret installations). They were even featured in the Gathering Forces trailer of Dust 514 a couple of years back. We even had functional fighter jets. But they couldn't add them in for the very reason stated in my second point.