salvaging as you go causes a real drop in efficiency, either as a loss in mission times, or lack or overall income boost due to leaving modules on grid.

Even if you are in a Marauder.

Marauder salvaging is slow. If your salvagers and tractors can keep up with the rate you are destroying your ships, you are fail fit. The convience of the tractor in level IV's speeds mission blitzing times and that's about it.

If you are balsy enough to bring it into Null Sec Anomalies, it makes a little bit of sense so you can grab the faction / deadspace officer wreck it spawns at the end. even then you are working against the clock to GTFO and come back in something disposable for looting.

A mobile tractor unit is still faster than marauder salvaging. Unless of course, you bring a mobile depot to refit your entire ship for 7 salvagers and a refit for 7 tractors.... but why would you do that and risk staying on grid? I could be off blapping the next pocket while my MTU is stockpiling everything for a 2 minute clean up per pocket. I don't wanna wait to tractor everything in range.

Fair point. I was going off the original posters salvage remark. MTU and 3x tractors could definitely clean sweep a site in short order. No arguments here. even then I would still be in favor of extended MTU drops during long missioning sessions and then coming back in a warp to zero hauler to scoop loot for everything at the end of the day. MTU's don't vanish after 45 minutes. ^.^

Difference in play style then.

Just an example:
A mission nets you 20 million in bounties. As you kill all the things, you just drop the MTU and let your salvager drones salvage on full auto without paying too much attention to what they do. In each pocket you scoop the MTU as soon as you've done killing without fully looting the field. At the end of the mission you should get around 2-4 million in loot and salvage on average - at least this is what i usually saw. That's up to 25% additional income on top of bounties for very litte effort and without any further time investment.

Which is why I was making the argument for just dropping MTU's as you mission and come back, full loot, zero down time other than warping to bookmarks.

Prices have crashed so much it just isn't worth coming back or even sticking around for loot/salvage, whatever the MTU and salvage drones can pull in is a bonus. in basically all cases the time spent in warp between the old MTUs would be better spent running another mission. And like someone said a marauder should kill faster than it can loot/salvage but that is okay because at most you want to cherry pick wrecks and with a marauder you can usually get the good ones.