Make the mechanics of transporting survivors the same as for POWs (again).
Why?
With the current mechanics, the survivors of the picked up lifepods are instantly transferred to the crew pool.
The problem is that any ship can pick up lifepods, so a 5-ton rusty bucket without engines is enough to rescue all the surviving crew and officers, even if you have completely lost some battle on the other side of the galaxy. It’s not logical.
I also personally preferred the need to have an emergency cryogenic transport so that the fleet could take the survivors home, rather than instant transferring. It was much more interesting.
I would like to know your opinion. 
Transporting POWs to a suitable location has a major benefit, so the players have meaningful decisions to make regarding where to establish such locations and how to transport POWs
Transporting your own rescued survivors has a very minor benefit compared to the amount of management involved. When it seems that management overhead is greeter than gameplay benefit, I remove the mechanic or simplify it.
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What about the limitations from these mechanics?
You can’t lose ships too much if you don’t want to leave lifepods in space or have overcrowded ships - especially far away from your own colonies.
A separate hospital ship needs to be protected, like tankers, supply ships and colliers. In fact, this is just another kind of fleet support ships.
Of course, you almost don’t benefit from saving your survivors, but that’s not the point. There are enough crew (anyway, I’ve never had a problem with that) to just ignore the lifepods and not pick up any survivors at all. I don’t know about the others, but I pick up lifepods just so that the enemy doesn’t get POWs.
BTW, one of my last suggestions in Quick Suggestions is related to lifepods, which could further simplify the mechanics of survivors, if you don’t want to manage them at all.
In general, I don’t consider this too much of a burden on management, as you can just drop them at any population - and you can just add +1 ship to the support fleet.
And like I said, you can easily rescue officers and 50k survivors with some fast fighter right under the nose of the enemy fleet and teleport them home. With the old mechanics, they would have died with this fighter, and it would have taken you a little more effort to save your favorite officer. Maybe even board the enemy fleet.
It seems to me that this mechanic creates enough opportunities for interesting and memorable stories, to have a right to exist.
So RP is it’s main goal.
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