The salvager in me cries at the waste of sending all those THOse ships, those multi-tons of metal and machinery, into the sun. Couldn’t they be torn down, melted down and re-manufactured into Catian ships?
Without leaving traces a forensic metallurgist could find, might be difficult.
Also, the closest facilities capable of doing it are probably in Sol’s (major)
asteroid belt. But I understand your impulse. Necessary or not, such a waste.
I’ve always been a fan of recycling… Shouldn’t be too hard to break them down for use as sandcaster mass, or middle mass… Flechettes would be nice too…
At the rate things will likely be going, they might want to invest in a mobile ship breaker yard… (besides, it’d give them a chance to study the opposition’s technologies and their racial specific slants on how they approach problems. For example; some races ships would be ill suited to handling different sized passengers, while some may not see into the same color ranges as others, and others may have manipulative origins that wouldn’t work well with buttons, switches and haptic reconfigurable touch panels. (tablet computers). And let’s not even get started with telekinetic and telepathic races… And then, there are the hypothetical organic starships…
These are just some of the MANY issues I have with trying to reverse engineer alien technologies. It wasn’t until the Rosetta Stone until we could translate Egyptian hieroglyphics to something we could understand… Imagine dropping an SR-71 into World War I. They might figure out the engines, but the radio or onboard computer? Yeah… It’d probably take until the 1950’s for them to even begin to understand the tech, let alone reproduce it…
But in this situation, do they have the time and resources to do anything
other than hit and run?
If they hadn’t been damaged, it might be fun to leave them empty, floating
in orbit around the planet, with no sign of their crews.
Oops! Where did all the prior comments “POOF” to?
The salvager in me cries at the waste of sending all those THOse ships, those multi-tons of metal and machinery, into the sun. Couldn’t they be torn down, melted down and re-manufactured into Catian ships?
That was me again. I was getting rid of spam comments and mistakenly dumped Monday’s comments.
Without leaving traces a forensic metallurgist could find, might be difficult.
Also, the closest facilities capable of doing it are probably in Sol’s (major)
asteroid belt. But I understand your impulse. Necessary or not, such a waste.
I’ve always been a fan of recycling… Shouldn’t be too hard to break them down for use as sandcaster mass, or middle mass… Flechettes would be nice too…
At the rate things will likely be going, they might want to invest in a mobile ship breaker yard… (besides, it’d give them a chance to study the opposition’s technologies and their racial specific slants on how they approach problems. For example; some races ships would be ill suited to handling different sized passengers, while some may not see into the same color ranges as others, and others may have manipulative origins that wouldn’t work well with buttons, switches and haptic reconfigurable touch panels. (tablet computers). And let’s not even get started with telekinetic and telepathic races… And then, there are the hypothetical organic starships…
These are just some of the MANY issues I have with trying to reverse engineer alien technologies. It wasn’t until the Rosetta Stone until we could translate Egyptian hieroglyphics to something we could understand… Imagine dropping an SR-71 into World War I. They might figure out the engines, but the radio or onboard computer? Yeah… It’d probably take until the 1950’s for them to even begin to understand the tech, let alone reproduce it…
But in this situation, do they have the time and resources to do anything
other than hit and run?
If they hadn’t been damaged, it might be fun to leave them empty, floating
in orbit around the planet, with no sign of their crews.
The old Bermuda Triangle gambit, or the “ghost ships”
that are never figured out. Gives the core the worry 😉