The rare bottleneck is fierce, and not addressed in any of the guides I’ve seen. The guides seem to assume you have infinite uncommon and rare exchange loots. Assuming perfectly even teams of 5, and an average loot multiplier of 400% (T4 is 350), to build 2 tier 5 ships per month (more reasonable estimate is 1.9 but I’ll round up in favour of the advocates of T5) requires around 26 level 31 rares, and 70 uncommons, or 17 level 33 rares and 50 uncommons per month. Scrapping 14 T3 takes around 70 uncommon 31 or 50 uncommon 33. If you’re not grinding rare emadas like a fiend, I don’t think scrapping the T5 is the way to go. If you are getting in on that many rare emadas, then it’s absolutely the way to go. You get a touch more than twice the particles by scrapping 2x T5 vs 14x T3 Stellas. In any case, if you have 2 Stellas, you should keep one at max, and only scrap the other. This will yield the maximum loot over time.
On a side note, the total cost of epics to get to Tier 9 at Accomplice (best price for epics) takes 25 visits to the faction store, or 75 days, and approx 112 L35 epics or 75 L37 epic Emadas. This scales up very badly as you increase your reputation (112 goes to 166, 246, 366), so the other thing the guides seem to miss is telling people to NOT raise their reputation past Troublemaker for uncommons, and grind out all your T3 Stellas there. Cost for uncommons at Accomplice is just over 3x what it is at Troublemaker.
Until I have the rare uranium already in my inventory to make another Tier 5, I’m on #TeamTierThree, and not increasing my reputation until I’m on my second T9 Stella.
Please note I didn’t include any bonus loot from crew, research, etc.
The above is mostly relevant for people with 2 Stellas. If you only have the 1, I highly recommend you get to 5, farm the materials to get back to 5 before scrapping, and then repeat. You want your main Stella at the highest possible tier for the Master Thief ability, so you should always have an active T5 Stella. I also can’t stress enough that the guides make a huge assumption that you have unlimited Rare Exchange Loot. Yes, you get 2x the particles per month if you scrap 2 T5 instead of 14 T3, but can you realistically get that much farming done? I think I could if *someone* wasn’t constantly hogging spots on Thursdays. If you have the patience to max out your Stella AND build up the 258k uncommon 45k rare and 12.6k epic uraniums BEFORE you scrap (so you can instantly get back to T9 ) you will be maximizing your loot.
In general, I recommend the 3 pull for uncommon, 2 pull for rare when possible, and 1 pull for epic. This completely depends on how many Emadas you can get into.
Finally, you can squeeze every last little bit of efficiency by NOT raising your reputation with Rogue until you need to get to Outlaw for the Assimilated Skin bonus. The lower your reputation, the more efficient the uranium purchases are. Does it really matter? Not really. Would I intentionally keep my rep as low as possible for as long as possible? I did, and I’d do it again, but that’s just me. I tend to obsess about efficiency. Would I recommend it? Not really.
Also, getting the Opus Grande and Assimilated skins, Prime Stella Efficiency, and at least one level of Highway Robbery research are a very high priority.