Astronaut Sacrifice [Pitch Black]

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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.

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There are flight termination systems (explosives) on rockets, but not spacecraft

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I’m not sure where I argued to the contrary. The ships in Trek with self-destruct capabilities are all military (or pseudo-military) vessels that are explained as literally having a procedure such as you describe.

In the preferred configuration, the starship undergoes rapid vaporization from thermal and mechanical shock caused by a deliberate release of warp engine reactants. Remote computer system decryption algorithms generate one final set of cascade failure commands, and all engine safety interlocks are compromised. Matter from the primary deuterium tankage and the total supply of antimatter from the storage pods on Deck 42 are expelled simultaneously, producing an energy release on the order of 10^15 megajoules.

If the command links to the engine systems are severed, the secondary destruct system is automatically selected. Ordnance packages are located at key locations around the vehicle, including the antimatter storage pods. These are detonated in concert with intentional overloads of all fusion reaction chambers. The release yield of the secondary system is calculated to be 10^9 megajoules. The secondary destruct system becomes the primary system for the Saucer Module in Separated Flight Mode.

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That would make sense for a cutting edge spy plane, but it’s a little weird for something like the Nostromo, which is just a standard cargo ship. I guess if you sometimes carried secret cargo, though, you would want that equipment standard, since otherwise installing it custom for one trip would be a dead giveaway that there was something secret on board.

Buglefingers

My other thought behind it was also not necessarily that it is it’s own device/explosive but more so along the lines of “we will intentionally run this poorly to cause itself to self destruct.” Akin to running a car engine untuned and without a radiator then full throttling it.

Someone may have just developed a program that tells the engines to do that so you wouldn’t exactly need anything physically installed to have it work.

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Many naval vessels have been sunk by their own crew rather than be captured by the enemy. It’s called scuttling.