I would like to bring up the topic of swallowers again. For me, the balance of them seems mostly right, but there is one iffy thing:
A way to replace ships being swallowed. Right now, you either have to try to take out the swallower (often not an easy task, especially in the early game) or wait until your ships slowly and painstakingly get eaten before you can reclaim that lost firepower (through getting it back or rebuilding it). This isn't really fun.
I think maybe that the best possible to somehow introduce a way to scrap swallowed ships, so you can opt to just "give up" on the ship instead of having to wait for the ship to die. This would bring it in line with other "trapping" mechanics like tractors and gravity, where you can simply "opt-out" of trying to get your ships out of it if you don't want to bother.
Also, has the bug where the AI can get swallowers even when swallowers are disabled been fixed yet?