Here's a basic rundown of an idea I produced.
Mission chain (energy and artifact intensive, daily)

Upon finishing the chain, you receive an ability much like the dark rootnode, with a 72 hour cooldown and 1 hour run time
While the ability is active, any artifact scrapped will produce trade credits as opposed to regular credits, different amounts of credits for different artifacts. For example, 5 credits from a crimson obelisk and 15 from a ship-bot.

From there, an artifact market that carries nothing but ship-improving artifacts, such as microfuser-like artifacts, xcharge cells, durtanium brackets, etc. But said artifacts will be extremely expensive in trade credits, and possibly taking regular credits as a "transaction fee"

Premise behind this idea, to get rid of artis that you don't want clogging up your cargo, and to receive artifacts that you actually want.

High buying costs, such as 10,000 credits for a rescued prisoner, 9,000 for a ship-bot, so on so forth to motivate players to scrap as much as they can at once, to clear more space in their cargo.

Not a bad idea, I like it.
Though keep in mind, there are some absurd pack-rats out there. I know of at least one person who has over 500k artis in his cargo.