At the moment, drillship upgrades are pretty much all-or-nothing: you get the treads, hull, and drill after blowing up the first enemy drillship of its tier. I think that making a blown drillship randomly drop just one of them would incentivize spending more time at each tier, and engaging with the content a bit longer. Core and segment upgrades could possibly also be added to this pool.
Or make the researches more expensive. But either way, yes.