I've been trying to figure out the best approach to expand ship inventory (both tech and cargo slots) for a while. I've got half a dozen ships in need of love, and scrounging together storage modules for even one of them seemed like it would take forever. There's been the temptation to go into difficulty and make everything free and just "buy" all the slots I want immediately. But that's too quick and easy for my main save. (I might do some time with an alternate save when just experimenting with ships, I guess?)

For a while I was taking every mission that offered an augmentation module as the reward, and most of those are not hard, but they weren't coming up often enough on the mission boards to feed my habit.

I know you can buy ships and scrap them for modules, but that doesn't feel right. I'd still be spending many millions, and it's not a fun activity for me.

I tried getting into the ship salvage business. I'd use my Nautilus to find drowned ships, patch them up, then scrap for money and storage slots. I made some progress with this, and it was fun setting up my salvage yard with storage, refiners and supply chains for all the stuff needed to repair them. I could turn decent profit and collect storage modules at the same time. Still a bit slow going, though.

The final answer? Guild envoys! If you get high enough rank in Explorers Guild and Merchants Guild, some of the envoys (not all of them) will begin offering you a free storage augmentation when you visit. Thus far I've found one Explorers envoy who does this, and two Merchant envoys.

There were very few Merchant envoys in the galactic region where I started, and I had to travel far to locate stations with them. Once found, advancing in Merchants Guild is very easy, because they accept salvaged data donations! I've always liked to roam around planets digging stuff up, and it's particularly fun since I got a Nomad to ride around on. I can rack up the salvage data very quickly.

I've reached the point now where I've got three different space stations that I can visit and collect an augmentation, apparently whenever I feel like it. It's like going down to the corner store and grabbing a sandwich. And I feel like I've earned it. Getting to this point was a journey.