Scrapping and Shipbreaking in Science Fiction

[@spamviking]

The fact Coruscant has ship breaking yards while whole scrap planets exist is a mirror of our own world. A modern ship like a Star Destroyer probably has components, like the hyperdrive, that make recycling the hull worth the effort. But a centuries old freighter probably would just be dropped on some outer rim equivalent of the Bangladesh coast where workers rights and environmental laws are what the local Hutt cartel say they are.

[@reganator5000]

'Laws? we're a crime syndicate, we don't have laws!' - Theoretically the completely different system of justice within a crime syndicate (i.e. that there not only isn't just punishment, but there isn't even the ideological desire for it) would probably result in the environmental constraints be broadly 'whatever you can get away with', but with the caveat that not getting away with it does result in you being publicly hurled into a sand monster to be digested over the course of a millennium. Writing a complicated code of enforceable rules is a lot of unnecessary work when there's literally nothing stopping you dropping the accused into an impromptu rancor-cage-match because it sounds more fun than listening to someone list out how many PPM is allowable within a domestic water supply, and whether the detection and mitigation techniques were deployed ineptly enough to satisfy the legal standard's of negligence. 'While this is a terrible tragedy, and our hearts go out to those effected by the sewage leakage, our position is that my client not only met, but exceeded the standards required by-' *Rancor pulls off lawyers leg, crowd goes wild*

[@Phil-D83]

Military removes useful components from old ships for reuse when a war ship gets decommissioned or put into storage. Ssme thing here

[@Tomyironmane]

@@Phil-D83 If you listen to the curators of museum ships, that can be a real problem, sometimes. I think there's a few things aboard every ship labeled as "Pillaged by the Navy" and a lot of stuff labeled as "Pillaged FROM the Navy." After all, where do you think they get spare parts for a Mk38 Fire Control system in the 1980s when they're recommissioning the Iowas?

[@Tomyironmane]

@@reganator5000 Maybe so, but having a code that you uphold and principles you adhere to and a standard you follow makes it a LOT easier for other people to deal with you.... and to gain profits thereby. They know what to expect and what you're gonna do to them if they try to fuck you over. Less than legal organizations that live solely by the "Might makes right" principle will sooner or later die by that principle.

[@reganator5000]

@@Tomyironmane You are talking about a slug who was STRANGLED TO DEATH BY HIS OWN SLAVE. I'd assume might makes right prevented the prosecution of any former rebel in hutt space for murder and property damage.

[@MatecaCorp]

The fact that the shipyard background in The Mandalorian was in a large part composed of physical miniatures makes me appreciate that show a bit more

[@Beuwen_The_Dragon]

Just makes me hate the show more, knowing that such excellent talent is being wasted on Disney slop.

[@nobodydoesanything381]

​@@Beuwen_The_DragonThis^

[@BattleUnit3]

Honestly the Y-wings looks like something built so cheaply that the Hyperdrive was probably more than half the production cost.

[@FearlessSon]

Unsurprising then that the Galactic Empire decided to manufacture their basic line fighters without hyperdrives going forward. Much more cost-effective when considered as part of their Star Destroyer centered force projection doctrine.

[@enisra_bowman]

@@FearlessSon but even the Empire need Lambda Shuttles or TIE Scouts

[@joshuahadams]

@@FearlessSon and you can see that as an extension of the Jedi starfighters in the Clone Wars, especially the ETA-2 and its lattice cockpit, solar panels, and pair of ion engines. They lacked hyperdrives and used the external ring like the Aethersprite before them. Most TIEs don’t really work independently - carrier fighters, eh? - but the TIE Advanced fills the same role for the Empire, just given to flying aces or Inquisitors instead of Jedi, with some TIE Interceptors also filling the same role.

[@FortuneHunters]

@@FearlessSon Not only without hyperdrives, also without life support as well.

[@RoballTV]

To be fair, they look cheap cos they have the armor stripped off too. Clone Wars active Y-Wings were sleek and beautiful with the armor on. The rebels preferred to leave the armor off, the ship was still sturdy, but it was faster and less awkward to maintain without armor.

[@thomasspangenberg5328]

The final level of Halo: Reach is a great example too. You literally fight your way through a shipbreaking yard that's being overrun by the Covenant as well as through a partially scrapped ship. There's also a spot where you can see in the distance dozens of decommissioned ships laid out in rows on the planet's surface waiting to be scrapped.

[@enneverproductions]

I know right? plus it is on the ground and looks like it employs some pretty blue collar type workers to recycle all the titanium A

[@unrelentingkitsune3407]

The frigate you go through, the one that is the main focus of the multiplayer map, is the one from Fall Of Reach, the one that got Chief his first suit.

[@raptor1672]

Does the Covenant just glass their old ships? lol

[@charlesbaslow5218]

@@raptor1672no, they would feed old designs and/or salvage to the assembly forges to be broken down and recycled into new vehicles and ships

[@zed12-ui4jy]

I just had an idea for a little plot there are a bunch of people living inside of a humongous, scrapped ship And then the big bad INC. decides to scrap the entire thing, technically they own the ship

[@arandomcommenter0135]

The Hyperdrive thing always makes me think of a quote from Watto in Episode I. "Thee in luck, I'm the only one hereabouts who has one...but thee might as well buy a new ship. It would be cheaper" I think that right there sums up why hyperdrives are so often seen to be recycled. Seems like constructing hyperdrives is extremely complicated and expensive, to the point where it would probably be cheaper to take an older model of hyperdrive and just stick it onto your new ships. That would probably be why we see the NR recycle so many hyperdrive parts from SSDs (because why let such valuable things go to waste, especially because the government that would have created replacement ones is now gone?)

[@akraan4563]

Well if you think about it, it is the part of the ship, which makes iit go faster than light. So probably pretty valuable.

[@UCannotDefeatMyShmeat]

One of the most notable ship breaking companies in Canada has a location in my town, and my dad, doing security there, gets to just take stuff from the ships all the time. Usually just cool trinkets, but you’d be amazed how much food they store in those things, *completely* untouched

[@irystocrattakodachithatmooms]

I really like how in Hardspace you have to put things in the correct place; softer materials and glass in the furnace, harder in the processor and stuff that can be resold in the barge. You also have to be really careful due to all the hazards like fuel lines that still have fuel in them.

[@Cyberspine]

And the laser cutter is such a satisfying tool to use!

[@irystocrattakodachithatmooms]

@@Cyberspine It is, especially when you manage to do something like perfectly remove a window.

[@ivanpetrov5255]

​@irystocrattakodachithatmooms I wish they kept the old Mackerel design, where you had to melt some very specific beams to dislodge the cockpit from it's nanocarbon shell. It was satisfying when the community found out that little trick. It felt like an actual worker ingenuity for unexpected barriers. Now it's just two cut point and the glass.

[@irystocrattakodachithatmooms]

@@ivanpetrov5255 I bet that a small number of players complained and so they went with the negative ones.

[@ivanpetrov5255]

@@irystocrattakodachithatmooms Do you remember the key for the thruster? In the early stages, you needed a key to disconnect the thruster via the console. That was also a nice little bit of complexity. Also, nice user name 😄

[@justinjacobs1501]

7:18 This ship is such a huge mystery in the Gundam fan base. It appears to be a Pegasus class assault carrier from the same line as the Gray Phantom. But, the Gray Phantom and its sister ship the Stallion were lost when they were caught in a nuclear blast roughly nineteen million miles from earth. This means that it has to be a third ship of that line which is unaccounted for. An oddity because the Pegasus class ships were extremely limited in production.

[@justinjacobs1501]

Weirder still is the question of how Zeon remnants managed to occupy it and convert it into a base capable of maintaining mobile suits right under the Federation's noses.

[@Tuning3434]

@@justinjacobs1501 Well, we know for sure it isn't the only space wreckage on earth. Not after Operation British, Stardust and the Neo Zeon's colony drop on Dublin. There is something to say that it might not be that visible by being 'out the standard route's', in an area with Anti Federation sentiment and sufficiently shielded from long range sensors by Minovski fields. But it remains weird that it was taken by Zeon sympathizers and presumably got some Minovski generators online before the Federation could stage a search effort. Most likely period would be during the Stardust drop, because that was a bit of an hectic period for the Federation.

[@Wingnut00-zero]

​@@Tuning3434 Not to mention the seemingly endless supply of junk and still usable stuff floating around the Loum area where entire fleets were lost along with a few dozen kilometers long space colonies.

[@federationprime]

Maybe it’s the Albion (Stardust Memory) after the Titans scooped it up?

[@Wingnut00-zero]

@@federationprime No. It is distinctively different than the Albion. They can not be the same ship.

[@ImperatorZor]

To prevent bits from getting all over the place in orbit, ship breaking in space should happen in an enclosed envelope. Basically a big tarp tent around the craft.

[@BlandSpagetti]

That’s kinda what i imagined to, a ship pulls in to a large rectangular box and giant doors at the front and back close once the ship is parked, best part is depending on your setting you can “flood” the dock with air so you don’t need EVA suits

[@colormedubious4747]

Just set up shop on an airless moon. No floaty bits.

[@battlesheep2552]

​@@colormedubious4747might cause problems considering that larger spacecraft aren't built to handle much gravity, especially when you start cutting pieces off of it. Even in low gravity a ship can easily have enough weight to crush a person.

[@colormedubious4747]

@@battlesheep2552 Depends on the size of the fictional ship.

[@RorikH]

​@colormedubious4747 Those might have their own concerns. I think the dust on our moon is really sharp and clingy since there’s been no wind or rain to wear it down, and that might be an annoyance to shipbreakers or a danger to some components. I'm not sure if all moons are like that though.

[@darthhodges]

My understanding of (old) Star Wars lore was that hyperdrives were invented many thousands of years ago and no one alive actually understands how they work, just that they do. No true breakthroughs have happened in millennia and building new units requires copying an existing working unit. That would certainly contribute to the appearance of technological stagnation and support the idea that recycling hyperdrive units, especially very large or powerful ones, is cheaper than building new.

[@Octarinewolf]

IIRC the Hyperdrives date back to the Rakatan Empire. So the originals probably include darkside force tech.

[@lifevest1]

“How does this work? I don’t know, and frankly I don’t want to know. Just connect this dohicky to the quantum compressor and stop asking questions.”

[@DrakeAurum]

Shout-out to Firefly, for the Ariel heist which involved restoring a scrapped ambulance to working order for the infiltration phase.

[@mikoirl]

Meticulously taking apart the ship part-by-part vs. Chucking the entire ship into a giant furnace vs. Yeet it into the sun

[@tearstoneactual9773]

Or a black hole.

[@HumbleFoxGaming]

Yeet😊

[@frederalbacon]

Personally, I think the Galactica method of shipbreaking is the best: Beat the ever loving hell out of it. And when that fails and the ol' girl refuses to die, THEN the sun. lol

[@HumbleFoxGaming]

@@frederalbacon yeah i personally can't imagine how hard it is to build a ship that can withstand a nuclear blast let alone can i imagine dismantling and recycling the ship. Just yeet it into the sun

[@BlubLab-i6w]

You aren't a true shipbreaker until you've chucked an entire Mackarel into the Barge.

[@NeoTechni]

The Star Trek: DS9 tech manual actually covers this a bit. Tech on starships that have aged/degraded due to the stresses of space travel, are eventually shipped to use on starbases for the remainder of their lifespan as there's less stresses on them there.

[@Majere613]

An interesting real-world example of ship 'recycling' that could be adapted for sci-fi is the trade in pre-WWII battleship steel. The atomic bombs used and tested in WWII put miniscule amounts of nuclear fallout into the atmosphere which was then present in all the steel manufactured since. This caused problems with hospital radiography equipment, which is incredibly sensitive, and so steel from ships sunk before the bombs went off became a necessity for making that equipment, leading to both authorised and unauthorised salvaging of the wrecks. Battleships, with their thick armour, were a prime source.

[@pretzelbomb6105]

Luckily, background radiation is close enough to pre-Trinity levels nowadays that all but the most sensitive of radiation detectors can use modern materials. Some of those detectors get so sensitive that even low-background steel is too radioactive for them!

[@jakeaurod]

That reminds me of a scene in _The Mote in God's Eye_ where "crystal" drinkware was made from the window material of a starship that was built ages before and whose manufacturing process was lost, even though they were able to re-use it.

[@adambielen8996]

There are methods to completely clean modern steel of that radiation. But it is such an expensive process that it is just cheaper to source pre-WW2 steel.

[@QuarterDollarKing]

I'm disappointed you didn't have a clip of the salvage station in Titan AE. Carving off huge chunks of old ships in zero g while listening to cosmic castaway.

[@retrosquadchannel2.050]

Or clip from "Hidden Rose", first chapter of Otomo's "Memories". It also begins as salvage run.

[@Aragorn7884]

Imagine the clean up from the Death Star 😬😳

[@beaudavis3808]

No, thank you.

[@enoughothis]

Star Wars Empire at War: Forces of Corruption had a level where you had to pick through the debris field to find the black boxes

[@onthefence928]

probably would have been an economic boost for several years (decades realistically, but everything seems to be an order of magnitude faster in SW) like a whale fall in the deep ocean, imagine a swarm of constant activity as thousands of scrapping/salvaging, foundry, transport and supplier operations spring up to clean up the wreckage around Yavin

[@benjaminhayward5921]

Those contractors would have work for generations 🤑

[@enoughothis]

@@nunyabizniss4087, DS-2 yes but not the OG

[@madrabbit9007]

I did a pre-breaking inspection on the USS Tarawa down in Brownsville some years ago. Its a very sad thing to see these once proud ships being broken up. The saddest one was the USS Newport News being broken up in the early 90's down in New Orleans...her big guns had been cut off and her turrets had nothing but stubs protruding from them. A breaker's yard is a sad place for a sailor.

[@Tigershark_3082]

Tarawa especially makes me sad. It has a connection to one of my favorite planes, being one of the first ships to ever have Harriers in its arsenal (specifically AV-8A/C Legacy Harriers)

[@mattwilliams3456]

Losing the Newport News was a sad day, the end of the big gun navy.

[@evanperes7382]

Another stressor that can degrade spacecrafts is the extremely tenuous upper atmosphere in low orbit. There is a little bit of air still up there and it has an impact. Of note is monoatomic oxygen because oxygen is very reactive and can corrode/react with the spacecraft.

[@mitwhitgaming7722]

We need more games like Hardspace: Shipbreaker! Imagine an RPG with a similar if not as indepth mechanic!

[@SubHypno-p6z]

You should try Ostranauts

[@genericasianperson6405]

I feel like they ruined the game by trying to force a story into it I liked It better when you were just working for a corporate company trying to work off a debt

[@battlesheep2552]

​@@genericasianperson6405I like how you hear people complain about the debt, claiming that it's impossible to pay off and basically slavery, but in-game you earn enough from working 15 minutes a day to pay it off in like two years

[@FlorianD30]

@@battlesheep2552 Indeed. I mean what do they expect. They just give you all the equipment, the hab and then transport you to the site for a job that is very sought after all for free. Then you just start raking in millions on day one without any strings attached. Personally I think the deal the company gives you is pretty good.

[@autochton]

@@battlesheep2552 Yeees... You can assuredly pay it off, and they won't suddenly find a whole bunch more debt to saddle you with between the couch cushions., Surely they're honest and wouldn't do that, right? Surely.

[@0xdeadbeef444]

I'd like to metion graveyard orbits as another option. I could invision a scrapyard planet using rings of scrapped ships. A newly decommissioned ship is placed in the outermost orbit. The ships then get broken up in space and smaller components are moved into a closer orbit for further processing.

[@billyheaning]

Whoa whoa whoa, you're gonna have a video about shipbreaking and you didn't include the beginning scenes from Titan AE?!?!?!

[@王征服]

They should really do a breakdown in the "Titan" from that movie! Underrated gem.

[@TheLordNemesis]

That laser chainsaw to chop up huge ships in space is soooo cool!

[@QuarterDollarKing]

Cosmic Castaway was a banger!

[@plzletmebefrank]

That is a good one. I was also thinking about the colony ships in Freelancer being used as buildings once they landed, still being part of the cities during the events of the game. Which is a cool way to repurpose ships.

[@saberwing7930]

I know, I thought for sure that would be included. That movie deserves so much more love. I was low key disappointed that it was not used at all in this video.

[@taitano12]

If real life is any indication, the ships on Coriscant would be shipped to the breaking yards after being stripped down. IRL, a ship spends months to years dockside, sometimes in drydock, being stripped of anything valuable and/or still in good working condition. They also are sanitized - anything dangerous and toxic is also removed. Then they're brought to the breaker and torn down. Since they usually wear out around the same time as the main vessel, a lot of times the engine is left in and the ship has just shy of enough fuel for the journey. The breaker is usually allowed to use the engine as if it was scrap, and they sometimes refurbish and auction the engine. Most times, the owner will remove the engine once it gets to the breaker, and sell it as scrap metal.

[@Uzarran]

Probably falling under the "dangerous and toxic" category, but removal of classified technologies the military wouldn't want in the hands of someone else would also be a big reason.

[@SkyHawk2137]

Makes me wonder if they remove the 'primary' hyperdrive at Coruscant and just leave the back-up hyperdrive which is really slow. But also near certainly a lot simpler and cheaper to manufacture. After all, it's not like the ship needs to travel that fast on the way to the breakers and the primary drives are the important ones to remove for 'security' purposes as well as cost concerns.

[@zed12-ui4jy]

@@Uzarran I imagine most military ships would be legally untouchable unless the military gives permission to ship breaking corporations, This rule is used so that the military First off takes a punch of classified things out and then it checks it adds to breaking corporations and just says "Here's your money now do your job"

[@fatcoyote2]

There should be a sci fi series, shot in the same manner of Deadliest Catch, about crews of zero-g scrappers breaking ships down. A Chinese crew, a Hindi crew, an American crew, a European crew, etc. Follow the crew members around as they scrap the ships, avoid getting killed, avoid avoiding getting killed, and maybe have a sub-sect of spacers who go around collecting space garbage in between visiting each station to deliver mail and supplies, or acting as an ambulance.

[@rorythomas9469]

You may want to watch the 2001 anime Planetes, which is about a Japanese corporate satellite disposal team, with lists of this sort of thing.

[@thomasfplm]

Well done zero-g scenes are hard to shoot. You either need planes, or special harnesses with most of the movement happening horizontally, but being filmed from below (I suggest looking at how The Expanse was filmed).

[@fatcoyote2]

@@rorythomas9469 Seen it.

[@fatcoyote2]

@@thomasfplm Maybe make it entirely CGI? Not photo realistic, but something akin to like The Roughnecks: Starship Troopers or RubixRaptor's HAARP series, only professionally done.

[@thomasfplm]

@@fatcoyote2, good CGI can also be expensive and takes quite a bit of time.

[@leebone1]

Also in the Sojourn, older warships are repurposed into exploratory vessels because they may not be good for frontline service, but their sturdy frames make them resilient when charting unknown space.

[@templarw20]

I imagine the furnace in Rebels that the Y-wings were getting tossed into was closer to the processor in Shipbreakers. There is precedent for that with the World Devastator's omnomnom supertech.

[@Boxfortress]

Saw the thumbnail and I immediately remembered some of my favorite KZbinrs including Daniel talking about Hard Space Shipbreaker back in the day. It wasn't until recently I got my hands on it and it's a beautifully relaxing experience.

[@gabrieldarcy9067]

In one of the newer episodes of red dwarf, it's mentioned that the JMC flies decommissioned ships into stars to comply with space pollution laws

[@PetersonZF]

In Space Engineers you can grind blocks down to their base components and reuse them over and over again. You can even disassemble components down to their base refined materials.

[@readingking1421]

I liked that one bit about mothballed ships being 'lost' in reserve for decades/centuries. Imagine a 'salvage' team sneaking in and carrying off military-grade weaponry and other components.

[@Bogdan221192]

I f-ing love salvaging and scrapping in games! I was so excited when heard about a concept of strategy about salvaging shipwrecks on the desert planet (it later becomes Deserts of Kharak). It didn't worked out like i imagined, but still decent!

[@Starwar111ITA]

The one thing I've always wanted in the X-universe series of games is a functioning shipbreaking industry. Yeah once you blow up an enemy fleet you can turn it's remains into scrap with specialized miners, but if you manage to, say, capt- ahem, "salvage" a carrier which was definetly abandoned and absolutely not jumped on by marines, the only option you have is to sell it to a station, which will then just dematerialize the ship. I get that in the x-universe everyone has some form of programmable matter or super malleable alloy, but I wish we had more options to strip and decompose ships, if only to turn them back to base materials.

[@sargon6000]

The Expanse had an interesting take on shipbreaking; while the main hulls were only good for their raw material, everything related to the ship's systems, be it navigation or weapons were highly prized by terrorist factions: stealth paint to mask asteroids and missiles, tightbeam emitters that use military encryption (making them near-impossible to hack or determine their origin) to evade detection by UN military, Epstein drives salvaged from hijacked freighters get turned into propulsion for the asteroid projectiles, etc.

[@SwiftGundam]

7:20 Ah, the Gray Phantom. Gundam fans still don't know how it ended up there but it certainly wasn't cause it was mothballed.

[@pedanticperson1149]

David Brin's Uplift saga would have been a good series to mention as there's a lot of recycling, reselling & converting of ships in those books, many of the ships turn out to be millions of years older than humanity, which really puts things into perspective. Think I'll add the series to my TBR pile, it must have been a good decade since I've read them.

[@AlleonoriCat]

Hardspace: Shipbreaker is such an amazing game! I loved coming from my job and getting to work on a yard dismantling ships all evening, what a vibe! 😂 Floating between support beams between outer shell and inner compartment of a Gecko, cutting everything precisely so that it will just come apart with a tug and a push... Loved it, too bad there's literally nothing left for me to do in it 😭

[@igncom1]

Much like with the TV shows about finding incredible antiques in peoples abandoned storage. The main thing that draws me into salvage settings or scenes, is the potential to find some incredible stuff! A scrapped fleet, an old battlefield, a long lost civilisation. Let's strike gold!!!!

[@AbbreviatedReviews]

Hardspace: Shipbreaker was wonderful. I wish that it had gotten most post-campaign love, but I think the issue was that the engine didn't really jive well with the design and it made it harder to scale ships and add new elements to ships. I really hope they follow it up one day though because no other game of that type comes close to it.

[@42meep13]

I personally read the shipbreaking on Coruscant more along the lines of decommissioning rather than shipbreaking. Put them into proper maintenance facilities and take out all the delicate parts properly before towing it off to a more traditional shipbreaking world to be scrapped fully. Either that or these were star destroyers under construction that are now being deconstructed to clear the drydocks for new ships.

[@jimmymcgoochie5363]

There’s a difference between salvaging high-value components and just scrapping a big pile of metal. The former would be much more profitable and Coruscant would probably have a large pool of skilled workers to pick from, unlike a random backwater in the Outer Rim where they can just rip an empty hull apart for scrap and the labour is cheap (or free…)

[@42meep13]

@@jimmymcgoochie5363 That too is an excellent point.

[@plzletmebefrank]

In Freelancer, humanity was in a civil war and one faction just up and left in colony ships which were used as central buildings where they landed and can be seen incorporated into the cities in the game. Which I think is a cool one.

[@akiramasashi9317]

The scene where we're introduced to an adult Cale in Titan A.E was also a shipbreaking asteroid.

[@jaycie5021]

One you kinda touched but not really is the boneyard in Arizona. The us maintains an absolute crazy number of plains in various states from ready to fly to being parted out. The interesting ones are the plains kept at a stable level so that within days or weeks it could fly again.

[@uberpinkwarrior]

There's a sci-fi isekai series i read, middling quality but fun enough, about a guy who wake up in a sci fi setting inside his top tier corvette class not-elite-dangerous ship. Later on he gets a big mothership with a decently large hanger bay (thing is a freighter with a hanger bay rather than a big warship, still has giant guns on it). Ship has 2 space engineers on board, and he makes a lot of his money by fighting pirates, disabling their ships, dumping the smaller ships in the freighter, and having his engineers combine parts to make a functional if shitty ship to sell off. Anything remaining they just vendor off. I always like that, cause it just makes sense.

[@senatorpoppinfresh]

What's the title? Sounds neat. Sci-fi isekai are something we need more of, imo.

[@uberpinkwarrior]

@@senatorpoppinfresh "Reborn as a space mercenary". Decent enough series, can get dark at times. Overall I enjoy it. Definitely not for kids, but overall it's a fairly lighthearted romp. I recommend the light novel (bookwalker has it), but you can also try the manga (which is like, 4-5 volumes worth of content behind where the LN is).

[@PraetorPaktu]

Homeworld Mentioned, Yippy!

[@isned2000]

A big cause of spacecraft war and tear on the harder sci-fi side of things that wasn't mentioned in the video is neutron radiation. (gamma rays can also cause issues, but neutrons tend to be the biggest problem) Fission and Fusion reactions inside of a ship's engines or power plant will produce large amounts of neutrons, which will damage shielding and exposed components. Neutrons can transmute stable elements into radioactive isotopes if they get trapped inside a nucleus, and just the passage of neutrons through a material can disrupt the crystal structure and make the material more brittle. Any design would have to account for this, but at some point large parts of the engine (or the entire craft, depending on its design) will have to be dismantled, the parts reprocessed, and the radioactive material sequestered. Fission engines will additionally produce spent fuel that will need to be removed, reprocessed, and stored as high level radioactive waste. Some fission based designs, like gas core nuclear thermal rockets, and Orion drives will even deposit layers of radioactive dust and fission fragments onto parts of the spacecraft, making those areas extremely radioactive. From a writing/worldbuilding perspective this means that ship graveyards or shipbreaking yards might be incredibly dangerous places full of extreme radiation hazards, and ship hulks slowly eroding from the continuing radioactive decay of their components. Shipbreaking sites that handle fission engines would probably be the worst, and would most likely have very tight security to prevent the theft of the dangerous nuclear materials being handled there. I can imagine a sort of two tier system, with high level yards handling the radioactive components, before shipping the hulk to a lower security yard to strip the rest of the ship cheaply. Trying to track down a decommissioned ship that erroneously didn't have its radioactive engines removed for some reason before being sent to a graveyard could be an interesting plot hook.

[@pretzelbomb6105]

That's about how real shipbreaking tends to go, especially for military vessels. First the ship enters drydock and gets scoured: radar, computers, radios, etc- anything worth reusing or retailing. This can take months, if not years, during which the ship is not being maintained beyond the bare minimum. Once it has been stripped clean of everything worth not leaving, it gets moved by some means to a breaking yard to be unceremoniously cut apart.

[@hanzzel6086]

I highly doubt any advanced space faring species would be using fission reactors that have significant leftover radioactive waste, since we already have reactor designs that don't (they just didn't see much development because idiots wanted Plutonium for bimbs).

[@cybernomad5971]

Another consideration of shipbreaking in space would be right of salvage out in the void away from civilised worlds and routes. I.E. is it worth patching up and hauling back, taking the best bits or even if it's a plague ship

[@veeot_dragon300]

i have always liked the concept of independent salvagers/ship breakers in sci-fi. a small crew with some kind of outdated hauler that goes around salvaging the most valuable bits from derelict ships to make cash. (i actually did a Forum RP with just that concept. the crew used a very old and much modified mining vessel as their home base with modified worker pods that could double as crappy fighters in a pinch. the ship itself was mostly a pair of massive cargo holds, big engines, and some small bays for the pods. the Captain/owner had even modified the pair of heavy mining lasers on the bow into something that could be used quite effectively as an offensive weapon) if i remember right there was a sci-fi anime i once watched that centered on a company who's job it was to clean all the space junk out of Earth orbit. i saw the Thumbnail for this vid and was was like yes *Hardspace: Shipbreakers* i love that game. there are just so many cool ways that breaker yards can be used in story telling. can you imagine getting an enemy fleet to follow into an orbital scrap yard so your smaller and less heavily armed ship can do sneaky hit and run raids on them. there is always the ragtag crew just looking for spar parts or even a group using multiple hulks to create something new and interesting in secret so they can escape borderline slave labor in the yard itself. so much can be done with something as simple as a scrap/breaker/mothball yard.

[@sundragon7703]

In Star Wars, quite a few ship designs basically last for a 1000 years. The second-hand market may be larger than the new ship market. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the Star Trek universe has designs that last from 5 years to a few decades. Consumerism must do pretty good in Trek. (Look how many times the USS Enterprise changes in the JJ Abrams films.)

[@dogloversrule8476]

The US navy also tests out weapons on their old ships & as a result sinks them in things called SinkExs.

[@lifevest1]

Very cool to watch as a civilian, but if you served onboard I’m sure it’s gut wrenching.

[@dragonblaster-vu8wz]

I'm loving this series about realistic science fiction stuff. Do you think you could do a video about unmanned drones and ships at some point?

[@thefob9675]

I first heard about Hardspace Shipbreaker from a promotion you did for it in one of your vids, when it had just started early access and long before it got popular. Bought it right away and to this day it's one of my favorite zen games. By the way, The Expanse had an interesting narrative use of ship breaking, when Bobby Draper, former MCRN Marine, can only get a job in breaking down basically the same ships she used to serve on and - understandably frustrated by all of this - gets embroiled into some shady business going on. Was also a great way to showcase Mars' changing (and declining) economy in the setting.

[@HawkTheRed]

also, planetary shipbreaking yards make for awesome areas to fight around, like in Mechwarrior 5, where your usually massive 6-15meter tall mechs get absolutely dwarfed by the towering remains of ancient rusted ships. Even off in the very distance, they are still very imposing.

[@warmstrong5612]

Finding a giant weapon buried in a scrapyard reminds me of the tv show 'Megas XLR'.

[@jessicamirror4161]

Thank you for this video! Call me a nerd but I *live* for the scrapyard vibe and even made that a jumping point for the book set Im writing. Intergalactic wars are big, brutal and ugly affairs that always creates lots of debris. Somebody has to clean that up!

[@Gaarafan007]

I love these more world buildy videos and seeing visuals from a wide array of Sci-Fi shows and games. One game I'd love to see footage used is a Nintendo DS game called Infinite Space. Even better would be a video about some topic relating to the game, though I'm not sure what topic would fit without retreading other videos. Faction design philosophy? The use of independents in navies or diplomacy? Laws in space? Intergalactic travel? Extradimensional observation/invasion?

[@SourSix]

I like how in multiple universes they have a somewhat complicated way of destroying the left overs instead of just chucking them into a local sun. You know, that giant free fusion thingy that can destroy anything...

[@alderwolf7687]

Recycling depends on what tech is available. If nanotechnology develops like depicted in many SiFi series, there would be no need for scrapping. Ships can be continuously repaired like new and/or redesigned/rebuild on the fly while nano disassemblers could brake anything down to their base elements for future reassembly. No mess no fuss. For story telling and world building that's just no fun though...

[@martinjrgensen8234]

The Frankenstein fleet in Deep Space Nine are partially constructed from boneyard and scrapped ships

[@charliepotatoes001]

Uhura first job out of starfleet was decommissioning old starships. This was seen as the fastest way to gain command experience outside of a hot-zone conflict with days perhaps weeks between assignments which meant plenty of downtime. Soft job assignment with the most rewards in the least amount of time but lauded as the butt end of Starfleet.

[@iainbaker6916]

Before Homeworld Deserts of Kharak became a Homeworld game it was a shipbreakers game.

[@FiresofShadow]

@SPACEDOCK THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR THIS I WANTED IT REALLY BAD!!!!

[@andrewrobinson7774]

Thank you for mentioning Hardspace: Shipbreaker. It's a fantastic game!

[@ThePandoraGuy]

Cosmic Castaway plays in my head every time i salvage or mutilate a ship in a game. Titan AE is old and so am i.

[@FractionalMateo]

awesome work - very cogent and well presented

[@BHuang92]

It's a fascinating topic about spaceship boneyard. How would one dispose ships, floating or on the ground?

[@hanzzel6086]

Chuck them into the L4 or L5 Lagrange Point of a planet and leave them till you need em.

[@MM22966]

Honorable mention to the book Honorverse series, where mothballed battlewagons were frequently towed out to Lagrange or deep space points for storage - sometimes to be later scrapped, sometimes updated and refurbished to restore them to service. Star Trek also does this a bit (i.e. TNG and the U.S.S. Hathaway)

[@andrewcaulfield4167]

You're a fucking legend, dude. You helped me so much with my research for my own sci-fi novel. Godspeed.

[@username-hw8bu]

My absolute favorite salvage is the SDF-1 from Macross. With a salvaged aircraft carrier as a left arm and a salvaged assault ship as a right. Both of which were accidentally scooped out of the sea when the SDF turned on the fold drive for the first time and ended up at Pluto.

[@lucsoul2512]

starsector absolutely deserves a mention for this topic

[@dantetre]

Hardspace shipbreaker is a fun game. :D

[@wickerbotterthewizard707]

The scrapping and shipbreaking on such a large scale of star faring vessels reminds me of a unique ship type, the *living organism ship*. A large starship made of living tissue now dead at the end of a more literal life cycle could in theory be a source of nutrition.

[@MitchCyan]

It seems like a strangely satisfying job.

[@badmoth242xl3]

Surprised we don't see more sci-fi ships being used as target practice. SINKEX and its counterparts are vital parts of US Navy exercises as it gives engineers and crews a change to use live weapons on realistic targets and examine their effects.

[@DannyBanks-g5f]

I know others have said it, but honourable mention to Titan AE. Very under rated.

[@unknowngamer37415]

5:44 i think why the scrapping was done in a center of the galaxy influential shipyard is because of politics. The New Republic wanted all the ISDs decommissioned immediately to replace them with their own craft and didn't want to wait for the engines to manufactured. ( Not sure if it's Canada anymore but the new republics main ship was designed to use the ISDs parts and therefore made scrapping them more valuable). This would be amplified by the scale of the empire's fleet which is probably more profitable venture than scrapping anything else would be.

[@MM22966]

One of a part of the old Legends Rogue Squadron series (books, comics, etc) were the phenomenon of "Uglies"; junked starfighters that would be picked up pirates, warlords, other fringe groups, and pieces would be bolted together to get a functioning fighter. So you'd have TIE body with X-Wing wings, Headhunters with Y-wing engine pylons, etc.

[@Riceball01]

I don't recall if it was mentioned in the video or not but there's also mothballing old ships. Keeping them sitting around and preserved in case of future need later on. The best example pot his were the US Navy's Iowa class battleships, placed into mothballs at the end of WWII, they were brought back during the Korean & Vietnam wars, then placed back into mothballs until all 4 were modernized and reactivated int the '80s.

[@goblin105]

You guys gotta play "Hardspace Shipbreaker" that game is great.

[@andrewcoulthard-clark]

Thank you for mentioning Shipbreaker - hoping we get a sequel soon!

[@TheHaviocdarkmoon]

Hardspace ship braker is suprisingly enjoyable i wish there were more games like it

[@elchjol2777]

I also like the idea of yards where damaged but repairable captured vehicles/ships/mechs are stored untill they repaired and fitted to serve its new masters or to be sold off.

[@garybeller5499]

SinkExs provide artificial reefs, as well as training and opportunities to test new weapons.

[@Zeithri]

Seeing the _Grey Phantom_ crashed on Earth and being used by Zeeks as a staging base hurts my soul ;;

[@grandadmiralthrawn92]

I'm reminded of one of the beginning scenes of Titan A.E. which has some shipbreaking going on around a space station

[@whyjnot420]

A spaceship being used as a hulk in the actual sense of the term. I.e. sealed from the vacuum of space but immobile. Strikes me as a logical, perhaps even probable use for old ships. addendum: A hulk was a vessel that simply put, due to being big enough but not worth the effort of making it all nice again, would be moored in a sheltered location and provide everything from berthing for troops, to storage, to being a prison, to simply being a giant billboard (literally).

[@paytonturner1421]

There has to be a limit on the recyclability on certain parts of the starship.

[@Metal_Maoist]

About the "No rust in space thing": Most spaceships have air inside them so the crew can breathe. So don't they still rust on the inside at least?

[@iainballas]

One thing my friends and I came up with doing some star wars RPGs was that if we wanted a military-grade ship, it was easier to bribe an underpaid scrapyard security guard than to steal one from a high-end shipyard like Kuat or Fondor. I'd imagine that in a setting with plenty of rusting hulks in unwatched junkyards, it'd work... but in reality, I imagine there'd be a fairly supervised infrastructure around scrapping military hulks.

[@Frizzleman]

I love the idea of a couple hundred thousand cubic miles of space in the middle of a system with hundreds of huge abandoned ships that were to impractical to recycle or destroy so they were just chucked into space and abandoned.

[@resurgam_b7]

Maybe the reason Star Wars has so many stories focused around hyperspace drives breaking is because they have all be recycled a zillion times and new ones are to expensive/complex to produce for wide spread use. If I ever write a sci-fi setting with an ancient, galaxy spanning empire, I will need to find a way to include scrap planets. Not planets that have had scrap dumped on them, but planets or moons made of scrap. Where the recycling is done not by workers breaking apart old ships individually, but rather by gravity. Millions upon millions of derelict vessels are gathered together until there are enough of them to crush one another together under their own gravity, gradually heating up and melting the core until it is a homogeneous soup of alloys and raw materials. Then a few millennia in the future, someone will come along and "mine" the artificial planet for all the metals that once made up the ancient ships.

[@Br3ttM]

It could also be that in Star Wars, most of the other parts of ships are just easy to manufacture and fix, while whatever keeps people from repairing their own hyperdrive also makes them expensive to manufacture in the first place.

[@ethanrappolt6528]

For ships with REALLY long service lives, vacuum erosion is also a worry.

[@sethb3090]

Regarding the coral reef thing, you might take decommissioned ships and couple them together into makeshift space stations. Those don't have to worry about much stress or anything

[@mickeyhage]

Also, atomic oxygen in the area above planets can react with and eat away at materials.

[@danbell3827]

Testing weapons on old ship hulls still goes on to this day. The US usually supplies one (or more) decommissioned ships to the RIMPAC exercise, and then the fleet fires various weapons at it, seeing the effects of each.

[@thomasfplm]

7:03 One of the reasons for the cleanup is exactly to remove the environmentally dangerous stuff. They take away the electronics, fuel tanks (or clean them up), most stuff with lubricant, etc. If done properly, it becomes more beneficial than damaging, as it creates a good environment for many species.

[@WillKeaton]

I get the feeling that the reason the Empire disintegrated the Y-Wings rather than recycle them was because they Empire had a grudge against them, since Y-Wings are a core component of the Rebel Alliance.

[@robertdrexel2043]

Not at that time they weren't. That was from before the Rebel Alliance was actually formed and mainly vastly different cells or groups rebelling across the galaxy.

[@davehood2667]

It was being done for 2D visual effect. You put way more thinking into it than the actual writers did.

[@jrkorman]

From the book; "2001 - A Space Odyssey" "It was upon him with unexpected speed; and he saw that it was not a world at all. A dully gleaming cobweb or latticework of metal, hundreds of miles in extent, grew out of nowhere until it filled the sky. Scattered across its continentwide surface were structures that must have been as large as cities, but which appeared to be machines. Around many of these were assembled scores of smaller objects, ranged in neat rows and columns. Bowman had passed several such groups before he realized that they were fleets of spaceships; he was flying over a gigantic orbital parking lot."

[@patrickdusablon2789]

Also, in the Honorverse, Manticorans in particular are known to recycle ships at the end of their service life to serve as raw materials for new constructions. Or, in the aftermath of the Second Battle of Manticore, they're using the surrendered Solarian fleet as raw materials and components (ie: fusion reactors and energy weapons mounts) to rebuild their spaceborne infrastructure since they just got bushwhacked by the Mesan's Operation Oyster Bay.

[@221Mckay]

I feel like halo reach should have got a mention. At the end the pillar if autumn takes off from ship breaking yard

[@padawanmage71]

In Alien: Isolation, you travel on the Torrens, a freighter the same model as the Nostromo. The captain mentions that the ship was 'a wreck' when she purchased it, but she built it up to the point that the ship pays for itself. One wonders if the ship was originally decommissioned and some people thought scrapping took too long and sold it to someone to see what they could do with it?

[@FearlessSon]

As I recall, the Torrens was originally a bulk cargo tug. The captain's conversion switched it up into a light passenger craft for making express trips. Maybe the old powerful tug engines were stripped and replaced with lighter, less expensive engines that better fit its new role?

[@padawanmage71]

@@FearlessSon Possible? I replayed recently and Samuels mentioned that it was 'M-Class', the same as the Nostromo, through you can definitely see changes: the engines, for one, have what look like some form of vectored thrust nozzles, different than the original rounds ones.

[@cp1cupcake]

Regarding real world equivelents, it is worth thinking of, especially when thinking of smaller ships are aircraft boneyards. Sometimes, its just not efficient to recycle the whole thing.