[dmm]

Since we are brainstorming:

How about allowing anybody to BUY the abandoned ship from the Trade Federation? (No, they are not in SEIV; I just invented them.) Perhaps they will even provide you with repairs, supplies, and a crew (for the right price). Or maybe the TF gets all technology from abandoned ships and can sell that to any and all who can pay their exhorbitant rates?

So, abandoning an outdated scout ship would be no big deal, but you wouldn't want to abandon something good, like a colonizer. UNLESS, maybe you had just stolen it from your arch-enemy and you wanted to let all of his neighbors get his colonization tech. (This differs from gifting or trading because you wouldn't need to have diplomatic contact with any of them.)

Interestingly, you might also want to abandon a captured ship if it had a bunch of levels of a tech that you didn't have any of. (Example: captured ship has Shield IV and you don't have shields at all.) You could then buy all of the levels from the TF, but it would cost you a lot and it would make them available to everyone else for that same price. But then maybe you could recoup some of your cost by trading the info to allies.

And how about this? Maybe you could also bribe the TF each turn to keep the tech secret?

Well, all this would require major recoding, but I can dream.