Astronaut Sacrifice [Pitch Black]

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I don’t think you can even make missiles without self destruct. If you can, what’s the point?

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To be fair, I think there’s a distinction to be made between “something is wrong, blow up the missile before it hits the wrong target” and “target reached, blow up the missile”

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sets down a pack of chips in front of your door, knocks and leaves silently

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The self-destruct does not activate the main weapon.

AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet

A naval ship can’t destroy an entire planet with orbital bombardment.

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you can’t really do anything to a spaceship to “disable” it and prevent it from ever being used

Except for

slowing down and hitting the closest sun/planet(even has a “countdown” as it takes a while)
hitting the nearest asteroid
Attaching or enabling anything that causes cascading vibrations (cause almost any source of wobble can cause the ship to break)
…hitting full burn in any direction, making anyone follow it burn a lot of fuel just to slow it down (would still be recoverable though)
probably a few more

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Yeah, so in summation - blow it up.

Buglefingers

I always though the point was “This is secret/must not be given to the enemy” so destruction is a better option than having it seized

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Sends a screaming horde of children in with multiple bags of chips and soda

Laughs maniacally

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I’d take the hug.

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Sure thing.

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Who says it’s a bomb? In most cases self destruct is overloading the reactor, or something similar.

Decoy321

Artillery?

Decoy321

For the first one, you can use a smaller boom.

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Protomolecule

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Most of your suggestions require working engines. Shaking the ship apart might make the ship itself unusable but doesn’t do anything about on board equipment or intel. A “scuttling” equivalent needs to work when the ship is barely, or even completely, non-functional, and needs to either destroy everything aboard or make it not worth the effort of recovery.

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If you have a second ship then you could use its thrusters.

I also doubt that any explosion short of nuclear is going to destroy most equipment and intel considering the ship is in space and has large parts vented to space (due to combat damage or design). Maybe if you line or fill all the things you want to destroy with some explosives but I wouldn’t want to be on such a ship. More likely you’d manually lay down explosives from the ammunition if scuttling is required and then detonate it but not have it already there at the push of a button(assuming you’re not using a nuke for every ship).

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short of nuclear

In Star Trek at least, where this trope is probably the most firmly established, the self destruct involves antimatter annihilation, which is arguably in excess of nuclear.

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Didn’t German u-boats get sunk by their crew rather than allow that tech to get into the hands of the Allied powers?

I would think self destruct is the same concept.

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…not really the point, the point is that either you have a nuke (or better) or an explosion isn’t going to be sufficient to destroy Intel and machinery.

Unless you can justify having a built in nuke/antimatter bomb in the ship then it’s not something a real world ship would have(excluding things like special military ships maybe).

Even if you have an antimatter reactor then it would still have to be a procedure on the order of “we’re welding the safety’s shut and overriding everything we can give us a few hours to rig the ship to blow” not “whoops pushed the self destruct button”

Point being, a colony ship or some science exploration vessel doesn’t have a built in antimatter bomb at the push of a button.