The planet has a defense station to take care of home, so if they loaned a small fleet, the combination of their firepower and tutorial ships should be enough to break through one of the gates. Towards the end of the tutorial you took care of the lesser pirate patrols and have all the information to break out of the system, so it makes sense to try busting out. Instead, I think the tutorial should introduce a more useful topic: team battles. Players will naturally learn it over time anyway.
That kind of maneuver requires practice, and you basically autodie if you screw it up. Outmaneuvering two enemy fleets is probably too tall an order for the entry level player. Because that's kind of the point of a tutorial. I think the point of a tutorial is that it should be perfectly winnable if you don't know how the game works. But overall it was much steadier learning curve than tutorial. I took a few unprofitable deals, got caught and crushed by a pirate destroyer (well technically it was a stalemate), tried to do bounty and stumbled on AI ships that wiped me (turns out that warning beacon was there for a good reason).
I am saving for a destroyer now and will try to take some bounty quests afters that. I installed some fancy bombers and now can take on both stronger pirates as well as some trade quests. Then I got a Gemini on the black market it was tempting because it seems to be both a freighter as well as a reasonable combat unit. I started with Wolf and got to hunt pirate scouts earning some money from Hegemony. In contrast, now that I got to play regular campaign a bit, the learning curve is much more fun there. Additionally, supplies are very unfun to deal with in tutorial - they are dwindling with every day, you are super broke and only learning what's going on. Then at the end you go back to report, they tell you "cool, now we take back our stuff, you are good to go" and then the normal game begins with the starting ships. The pirates should have some easily beatable ships so that a new player wouldn't have to deal with a fleet of cruisers and destroyers for their first battle. In my opinion, the whole salvage quest should give you some strong destroyer or whatever and a handful of weapons to learn equipping it. I still dislike that mission, it was good until the point where the ships are salvaged - all those ships and weapons are just too much to handle for a tutorial. I mean if the bug is gone and the ships get fully repaired, it probably is winnable but I am too lazy to go and check. That's most of your starting bank! But if the mudskipper has 100 and the quest reward gives 100, the player should be mostly set. The tutorial fleet needs ~200 extra crew in total, which will set players back $10k($40/crew!). There still isn't enough crew to supply all the tutorial ships, but it's enough to keep them in the green while introducing the fleet crew topic. The tutorial mudskipper should probably come with crew (it fits 100), that way the player only has one concern on their plate at a time and can go directly to the salvage operation. Bring them all back and we'll fix them up, on the house." The quest reward can teach by example, giving the player the repairs, crew and supplies that they need to manage their new ships. It'd probably be more important to say something like "Don't worry about their condition.
#War of the chosen tutorial free
In truth, they are guaranteed a free fill up when they return so the question is moot. The player enters the mission pondering if they can or can't afford to recover the ships, but learning what ships are worth salvage is an experienced skill, not a tutorial skill. The previous "salvage the tutorial ships" mission doesn't actually allude to the rewards at all. It'd probably be better to dunk the rewards directly into the inventory, and maybe include some extra crew as well.
The rewards from returning the derelict ships aren't announced like normal quest rewards, so it gets lost in the fluff. To be fair, I've seen a lot of new players gloss over it as well.