After defeating an enemy, the flavor text will say things like "leaving behind a substantial amount of scrap" or "you collect what scrap you can".
I know that ships drop different scrap rewards [low, medium, and high] based on how you defeat them (killing the crew drops more scrap than destroying the ship, for example).
Does the flavor text indicate which rewards I got?
and if so, what flavor text corresponds to which rewards?
The flavour text does in fact correlate to the amount of scrap received. For ship fights in particular:
The ship explodes, leaving behind a substantial collection of useful scrap material.
This is the most common flavour text, received when you destroy the enemy's hull. This leaves you a medium reward, as well as some fuel, missiles, or drones.
There are no more life-signs remaining on the ship. You strip it of useful materials.
This is the next most common flavour text. This occurs about half the time that you suffocate or otherwise kill the enemy crew on a piloted (i.e. non-automatic) ship. This gives a high reward as well as fuel, missiles, or drones.
With the crew dead, you are able to take the fuel out of storage. You also take all the scrap you can manage.
This is an uncommon flavour text. It occurs about one in four times that you kill the crew. It yields a high reward in addition to some fuel, obviously.
Now that their ship has been emptied of hostiles, you search it. Eventually you find a prisoner who offers to join your crew.
This is a rare flavour text. It only happens if you kill the enemy crew. It gives a medium reward and a free crew member.
You find a weapon system on their ship. With no crew to stop you, you can install it on your own.
This is a rare flavour text. It only happens if you kill the enemy crew. It gives a medium reward and a free weapon.
The various quests/events/ships that give you scrap will have a specific description for that outcome. The reward text for driving off an auto-scout from a fuel station is specific to successfully driving off the auto-scout from a fuel station. There are no particular keywords, phrases, or consistently-applied rules for the reward text; it's just whatever the author thought would sound good at the time.
If you really want to know whether you got a "high" reward or a low one, the only solution is to open up the data file in FTL that describes all of the events.
