Loot

When a player destroys an enemy ship, any cargo that the ship is carrying will be left floating in space. If the player has a tractor beam, they can lock on to the "loot" and it will be pulled into his or her ship's cargo hold. The exception to this is any ship labelled "Hijacker" in red, encountered during a Salvage mission. These ships will always be carrying either a "Secure Container" or a "Secure Cabin" when scanned, but these are destroyed if the ship is destroyed. The only way to loot these ships is to fire EMP weapons at the ship until it is disabled, then lock on to the ship.

Trivia

 * If the loot is not picked up by the player within a certain amout of time, it will despawn and you will not be able to get it back.
 * Each loot container has its own unique design and logo according to its Faction.
 * Interestingly the size of the container does not change in relation to its content volume.
 * Freighter loot is much more valuable, which may be a reason why destroying them causes more major reputation damage.
 * When collecting Secure Containers/Secure Cabins, if the ship's hold is full, the game will glitch and instead of removing something from the hold, the mission will simply fail, due to "The destruction of the container due to the destruction of the ship carrying it."
 * The Probe that Trunt Harval used to Ignite the Supernova was actually a Terrain container, due to the fact that the devs never intended it to have a unique sprite.