I propose some new artifacts that are available after a successful base defend.

They can come in on the shipment when you claim your next shipment, or even still, on the same page where you claim your shipment, a new button that allows you to claim your reward/scraps salvaged from battle debris.

Example:
Button Title: Salvage Debris

Text: You search through the debris and find a ........(insert artifact/item here). You store it in your cargo.

Item 1: Increases your ship's shield by 100.
Item 2: Increases your ships hull by 100.
Item 3: Power Canister: Restores 500 energy.
Item 4: Increases your bases shields/hull by 50 each.

So on and so forth. There are a number of artifacts/items we could have available through this. Items could also be rated for how many attacking legions were held off. If you hold off just 1, a bottom tier reward. If you hold off 2, something higher, so and so forth, kinda like base crates are now.

I haven't had a chance to think up names for these items (except #3) and what I listed for what they do is just examples of what could be done, so feel free to give other suggestions to improve the idea. Change things out. But the basics is just be able to acquire stuff from successful Base Defends.

+1 to reward gains for successfully defending your base.

not sure how you could stop exploits by bountying your own base lock to lower legions.

Hmmm, this is a good point.

Your reward for keeping your base alive is the base production bonus.
Don't need another reward.

I'm not alone in this belief.

I think you should be able to post smack talk on the base once you kill it. LAsts for say 1 week. Rewards for base not dying would be abused for sure. Though most good bases don't need the extra from such a drop. This is pretty much exactly why we have exoclamps, thermal regulators, and all the other mission buffs for bases.

This

I wonder, would it be fair to reward a refund(maybe partial) for qualifying race changes.
qualifying race change would be, of course, a race change into one of the race or profession that provides a base defensive bonus via base abilities. Lazuli, Fixer, Aerlen, Physicist for sure, not entirely sure if there is a way to make it work with chromatic.
Thou if one takes the refund, maybe they should be automatically changed back to what they were before? Need more thought on this.

Quite frankly, base defense is rather dull at the moment, more member actions could be quite interesting.

Hey! That's MY line!



Why should that even be considered? You know in advance, that regardless of defense your base can be disabled and that race changes are in no way mandatory. Therefore there is absolutely no reason for any type of "refund."

The idea is to incentivize race changes for base defense.
Most people balk at the idea of spending 40gp to make their base slightly tougher for one lock.
If adding this option resulted in more changing to defend bases(and hence gp spent) i see that as positive.
Also about your comment relating to bases being able to be disabled. Yes any and all bases can be killed in 8hours with the proper group, but there are many legions and battle groups that cannot take down every base, already do fail on ones they lock, and would possibly fail more if this was implemented.
I do think some restrictions would have to be put in place in regards to race/profession artis/legion missions.

Partial refund idea sounds kinda awful.
Would be easier if there was a cheaper 10 GP cost of changing just your race or your profession.

I don't really see the need for making bases harder to kill.
You don't get easier base defense without making bases harder to kill. It feels balanced well enough as is.