so, you've punched holes in the hull, torn off turrets, ripped out airlocks, destroyed life support, fragged the maneuver drives, and blown up the bridge.
ok ... why did you do that? what was the purpose of all that? if your goal was to capture the ship, congratulations, you got it, or rather what remains of it ... now what?
Its a good point. A wooden ship of the Age of Sail which was reduced to a hulk could be dry-docked and repaired and put back into use as part of your own fleet.
Spaceships one would assume are more fragile and if not less repairable than the wooden ships, they would be far more expensive to render combat capable again.
Is there a good reason to put a boarding party aboard a fragged ship? I can think of a few ideas but I can argue that most of these can be solved by massive firepower as well.
-Clearing the ship. T5 weapons mounts are self contained with both power and life support. On a completely wrecked ship they can become emergency shelters. Of course this also makes them the equivalent of Japanese machinegun nests on Iwo Jima. If you have these hulks drifting within your 100D space perhaps you have to board them and clear these weapons mounts.
Why not stand off and turn the enemy ship into little pieces? Well probably not chivalrous reasons, more likely because that creates space junk which is a hazard to astrogation.
-Resources. Most things in Traveller are standardized right? So an enemy missile should fit in your missile launcher, and an enemy o-ring should seal your leak just as well as one that might take a month to arrive from your logistics base. You might be able to supplement your supply train by seizing enemy stores, but that means putting a boarding party aboard to seize the ship before it's picked clean. On a more strategic level seizing a ship and breaking it down for expensive and difficult to make bits like the jump drive or pplant might make sense sometimes. (Of course in the realworld sometimes weapons and ammunition are made to be incompatible, or some militaries equip to take advantage of captured resources).
-Intelligence. Human and physical intelligence gathering means putting a boarding party aboard to take prisoners, capture documents and copy the ship's library.
-Propeganda. Churchill sent a special mission out to capture a Tiger Tank. In the process a lot of technical intelligence was gathered but the main pay-off was exhibiting the trophy of war in London. Parking a captured battlecrusier in orbit around your capital sounds good doesn't it?
-Mopping up. Most combat probably happens near planets. If you have a battle within the 100D limit which results in one or many enemy ships knocked out and either drifting or with some level of control or "fightiness" left in them you need to take control of them because otherwise they are a hazard to astrogation. Blowing them to dust doesn't work, that just turns a hulk into a debris cloud. Take control, neutralize and place in a stable parking orbit (or crash into sun/gas giant).
-Rescue. There may also be a humanitarian motivation to extract enemy survivors.
