…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.

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).

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