timing of mineral collection, retrofit?

[Suicide Junkie]

Now, scrapping happens simultaneously with retrofitting and unmothballing, so you can sneak some stuff in...

It happens in the order you give the orders.
So you could retrofit a bunch, scrap some others, and use the funds to retrofit even more ships.

Scrapping ships in order to pay for upgrades to other ships is not usually a sound financial policy, however, so use it sparingly.

[Mephisto]

Small tip: Resource converting is done before the retrofitting-step. So don't convert all your stored resources and then retrofit. It won't work.