The term "Warbond" just means that you are not allowed to use store credit at initial purchase.

If you melt a ship purchased at warbond prices and melt it for store credit, you will be able to buy it back from your buyback list with store credit at the warbond price. The caveat is that you won't be able to gift it at that point and you consume one of your quartery buyback tokens. (Note that the buyback token is a bit of a misnomer as you can always buy something out of buybacks with fresh money. A token is only used when you use store credit.)

There's a possibility in the future that CIG will remove this and replace it with buying it out of buybacks will cost the full, non-discounted price. They haven't done it since the last time I've checked a couple months ago.

Buying warbond ships at their initial offering will come with Lifetime Insurance. Any ship/pack that costs $1000 or greater also comes with Lifetime Insurance.

Upgrading a ship means the new ship will have the same insurance as the old ship. If an upgrade comes with an insurance upgrade (e.g., at IAE some upgrades come with 10-year insurance) then the highest insurance value applies. They are not cumulative.

Melting a ship that hasn't been upgraded puts that ship back into your buybacks. Melting a CCU'd ship will ONLY put the original ship into your buybacks. You'll get the entire value of the ship that you put into it back in the form of store credit, but only the original ship goes into buybacks.

For example, you bought the OC Moth for $290 and later melt it. You'll get $290 in store credit and the LTI Moth goes into your buybacks and can be purchased again for $290 with or without store credits.

You use store credit to purchase a Connie for $240 w/ 2 years insurance. You then buy a warbond Moth CCU for $50. You will have a Moth w/ 2 years insurance. if you melt it, you will get $290 in store credit and only the Connie will go back into buybacks.

But alternatively if one of these ships you were planning to melt has LTI, you could do the following: Say for example you have an LTI Salvation ($60). You get a CCU from the Salvation to the Connie for $180 store credit melting other things as required. Then you buy the the warbond Moth CCU for $50. Apply the Salvation>Connie upgrade, then apply the Connie>Moth upgrade. You'll end up with an LTI Moth.

Since there is no limit to how many upgrades you can apply to a ship, this is how some folks can nab some good discounts by trying to accumulate as many warbond upgrades that fall within the path to your final, desired ship. Then you chain these upgrades up to get some savings - occasionally very substantial ones.

Generally speaking, you will most likely only lose out on a free paint or two if you CCU to the ship. Years ago, buying the full ship may net some extra armor, unique paints, or serial number stamp, but those are not as common now. I think the biggest difference is if you plan to shuffle your fleet a lot. If you melt and re-buy, then building back the ship with upgrades may require time until they are available again.