((Also, forgot action.))
"Alright, people. Bishop, come with me. We're going to brainstorm the upgrades to these ships once the Sword's VR pods are working again. Won't do to just throw ideas around without some way to test them.
Everyone else. If you want to go off on some kind of misguided building effort, now is the only time you'll get. I want everyone back here by the time we've got a plan of action for the ships. And parts from the salvage yard are not to be used until they have been properly decontaminated. If Auron wants to build a robot, he'll have to make do with stuff he finds elsewhere."
Return to the Sword, wait for VR to come online. If it happens, load Tinker and all of our six ships chosen for refurbishing. Apply the following modifications to them and test their performance:
Tug: Additional plating on the front, four laser or Gauss (or a mix) cannons facing forward, cluster of smaller turrets towards the back as point defense.
Courier: Single laser cannon, small laser or gauss turrets to clear landing zones, a pair of sub-nuclear missiles. Check how this affects speed.
Hauler and modified shuttle (if it can be recreated): Standard shuttle weapons.
Transport: See if it can fly and maneuver in atmosphere, with and without cargo. Also, how large is it, exactly? If it can fly in atmosphere, see if it can work as a massed missile carrier.
Blackship-too: find the largest cannon, laser, plasma, HEP - the biggest and most powerful weapon the craft's frame and internal systems can feasibly support. Then add engine pods and maneuver thrusters until it can fly as well with the cannon as it could before modification. Forget durability - it needs to fly as fast as possible, and destroy anything we need to deploy it against. It'll be the last-resort weapon against nasty surprises, so those are more important than its own survival.
Await Bishop's (and Steve's, and Simus's, and anyone else's really) additions and inputs.