I'd defer to whatever Kyzrati or zxc say, but in my experience, you can get to the Factory and do decently well without storages, if you go for a less aggressive build. It's tricky, but my current run is nearly past Factory (-5 and well set up), and I haven't had storage since IIRC -9.
The key thing is to avoid all combat. Get flight or hover as quickly as possible, and try to find sensor arrays or visual processing units. If you get in a fight, you might be able to find replacement parts from salvage, but that's unreliable (the above build has gotten lucky several times now in that regard), so try not to get in a fight.
The only thing I could think of that would reduce attrition enough to make a storage-less combat build viable would be armor and shielding. I see where you are going with targeting, but that would require that you both get the first shot off, and have it be fatal, and that you are rarely if ever ambushed by more than one enemy at a time.
