this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2024
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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.
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.
Sure, I mean, anything you need a spacecraft to do but that you can accomplish without adding extra equipment, you should probably do it that way, because it means less mass to accelerate and less equipment to test and certify and so forth. It's definitely not hard to imagine getting this functionality without adding equipment. The question is whether the ability to do this in the rare scenarios that call for it offset the drawbacks of having a system in which the protections against such failures can be disabled. Which means you then have to include a bunch of interlocks and crap to ensure it's as unlikely as possible that the ship can get into that mode without someone being very sure they want that. I think OP is probably right that on, say, a cargo ship, it's pretty unlikely that "also, the engine can explode!" would be seen as a feature rather than a wholly alarming bug.
I'd assume there are those safeties and interlocks, you'd always want that, a thumbdrive with a program that disables it is just as easy and not a "bug" which is what I was getting at. But yeah, it's unlikely most cargo ships would want that probably. I'm simply playing devils advocate because they do seem to have them, so how or why in the most reasonable sense is all I'm arguing.