Reasons For And Against Rescuing Derelict Spacecraft in Scifi

[magnemoe]

3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Yes, and it's a good chance to get a tattoo "Government Property" on the forehead and be rewarded with food, bed, and clean clothes for free.

Who don't work so well after people find out and rather sell this to others. 

[Treveli]

Reasons to respond:

1. Salvage money. Imagine how much you'd get for a spacecraft. A shuttle may not be much, but it's still something more added to what was gonna be earned on your original journey. And imagine a space-faring version of modern day container ships, and their cargo. A couple hundred million dollars (at least) bonus would make both crew and owners quite happy. 

2. Survivors. There's various maritime laws and guidelines about rescuing vessels in distress. If you can respond to a call, without endangering your own vessel and the souls onboard, you do so. The sea (and space) don't care about schedules or fuel and overtime costs. They will kill without mercy or hesitation. Even U-boats during both world wars were known to try to help survivors from ships they had just sunk.

Reasons not to respond:

1. Effectiveness/Safety of your ship. A small shuttle can't do much to help a multi-million ton passenger liner, potentially carrying thousands of people, other than relay the situation to other vessels. And a vessel falling out of orbit can't be rescued if your ship lacks the equipment and/or horsepower to either tow it higher (AKA the Illus maneuver) or dock and take off the crew and passengers in time. Sometimes all you can do is sit there and watch.

2. DID YOU NOT SEE THAT TRAINING VIDEO IN SPACE CADET SCHOOL?! ALIEN! YEAH, THAT ONE! REMEMBER THE NOSTROMO, HOLDEN!

[kerbiloid]

Also what if they need our transponder to clone it on their torpedoes?

Spoiler

And our QR code to pass through the quarantine

 

Edited May 25, 2020 by kerbiloid

[KerikBalm]

In this thread, there seem to be 2 distinct situations being contemplated.

One is a derelict/disabled "human" (built/operated by humans, or for humans in the case of non-rogue-human-developed AI) spacecraft. In this case, there's probably laws about a duty to assist if practical. Even greedy companies understand that there may be rewards, or cooperation is mutually beneficial, and if one of their craft has trouble, they would benefit from such laws.

As to whether it would ever be practical, that depends on what the tech in use can do.

And...

Alien spacecraft.

In the case of an Alien one, first contact protocol would overrides other considerations, if the alien race is unknown.

If the Alien race is known... What should be done would massively depend on what the relationship is between humans and those aliens.

[Nuke]

17 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Yes, and it's a good chance to get a tattoo "Government Property" on the forehead and be rewarded with food, bed, and clean clothes for free.

(Epilepsy warning)

  Hide contents

 

 

if you want to procure alien tech and in tact artifacts are hard to come by, then why punish those actually trying to recover it? incentivization seems to be the better approach in this case. now if say recovering alien tech resulted in a treaty violation or some such it might make sense. of course then there would be a black market. in either case i dont think it would be that hard to offload your goods. 

[Nuke]

12 hours ago, Treveli said:

Reasons to respond:

1. Salvage money. Imagine how much you'd get for a spacecraft. A shuttle may not be much, but it's still something more added to what was gonna be earned on your original journey. And imagine a space-faring version of modern day container ships, and their cargo. A couple hundred million dollars (at least) bonus would make both crew and owners quite happy. 

2. Survivors. There's various maritime laws and guidelines about rescuing vessels in distress. If you can respond to a call, without endangering your own vessel and the souls onboard, you do so. The sea (and space) don't care about schedules or fuel and overtime costs. They will kill without mercy or hesitation. Even U-boats during both world wars were known to try to help survivors from ships they had just sunk.

Reasons not to respond:

1. Effectiveness/Safety of your ship. A small shuttle can't do much to help a multi-million ton passenger liner, potentially carrying thousands of people, other than relay the situation to other vessels. And a vessel falling out of orbit can't be rescued if your ship lacks the equipment and/or horsepower to either tow it higher (AKA the Illus maneuver) or dock and take off the crew and passengers in time. Sometimes all you can do is sit there and watch.

2. DID YOU NOT SEE THAT TRAINING VIDEO IN SPACE CADET SCHOOL?! ALIEN! YEAH, THAT ONE! REMEMBER THE NOSTROMO, HOLDEN!

i seem to recall the german officer who was in charge of uboats got off at nuremberg for war crimes regarding failure to rescue survivors, mostly on the grounds that we did the same thing. last thing you need on a sub is a prisoner clanging on the hull and giving away your position to an antisubmarine boat. not to say rescues didnt happen, but likely in situations where it did not interfere with the mission (say it was due back in port) or pose a threat to the sub. 

lol i could totally see alien be used as a training film in the future. 

Edited May 25, 2020 by Nuke

[Treveli]

1 hour ago, Nuke said:

i seem to recall the german officer who was in charge of uboats got off at nuremberg for war crimes regarding failure to rescue survivors, mostly on the grounds that we did the same thing. last thing you need on a sub is a prisoner clanging on the hull and giving away your position to an antisubmarine boat. not to say rescues didnt happen, but likely in situations where it did not interfere with the mission (say it was due back in port) or pose a threat to the sub. 

lol i could totally see alien be used as a training film in the future. 

Didn't mean to make it sound like I was talking about all U-boats (or subs in general). The story that stands out in my memory is a U-boat in the early days of WWII sinking an allied merchantman, then towing the life boats closer to shore so they had a better chance of surviving. But, they had to cut the lines early when allied patrol planes spotted them. The two crews were at war, but the sea is still the enemy of both of them. The u-boat's skipper did what he could to help, but when it came to deciding between helping the life boats or saving his boat, he wished the allies luck and submerged to safety. And I can't think of any time a sub took prisoners on board the boat itself. No room.

[kerbiloid]

6 hours ago, Nuke said:

if you want to procure alien tech and in tact artifacts are hard to come by, then why punish those actually trying to recover it?

1. Because when Schliemann had discovered the location of Troy and started his amateur digging, he removed over twenty of cultural layers, including the most important ones.

2. Because the amateurs can trigger something causing the alien ship destruction or another kind of its devaluation.

3. Because they can be infected/infested and bring this to home.

4. Because they can be captured by a hostile race and interrogated, while their ship gotten studied to know our weak places, and/or used as a fireship (biological or antimatter).

So, any amateurs should stay away from the (as they think) derelict alien ship. They can send supplies (except food, but it's anyway inedible for them).
If they ensure that the aliens are wounded and not hostile, they can get them onboard and isolate, disable/destroy the propulsion and communication systems of our ship, enable the self-destruction triggers, and wait for the rescue team. AI should control.

In case of abandoned friendly or neutral ship of a known race, they should just follow usual protocol.

Edited May 26, 2020 by kerbiloid

[Nuke]

5 hours ago, Treveli said:

Didn't mean to make it sound like I was talking about all U-boats (or subs in general). The story that stands out in my memory is a U-boat in the early days of WWII sinking an allied merchantman, then towing the life boats closer to shore so they had a better chance of surviving. But, they had to cut the lines early when allied patrol planes spotted them. The two crews were at war, but the sea is still the enemy of both of them. The u-boat's skipper did what he could to help, but when it came to deciding between helping the life boats or saving his boat, he wished the allies luck and submerged to safety. And I can't think of any time a sub took prisoners on board the boat itself. No room.

i didn't mean to invalidate your statement either. it just reminded me of a historic factoid. it makes sense as they were merchant marine and not navy. even a 1940s german officer might, on occasion, do the right thing.

[Pds314]

1. Presumably your employer either cares about positive propoganda/humanitarian interventions or this is some sort of ruthless neo-feudal space frontier. If the former then unplanned rescue missions are very likely desired. If the latter, then offer aid for a king's ransom. A price their employer will surely be willing to pay for saving their ship and crew and your employer will surely be willing to pocket.

2. Realistic scenarios are hard to trap because of the extensive monitoring likely occurring on all interplanetary and interstellar travel. In some cases such as the "interstellar laser highway" approach, this tracking is strictly necessary for the operation of everything involved. In others, extensive monitoring radars and thermal, visible, radio, and X-ray imagers will be constantly scanning the sky and tracking everything. As well, surely all commercial long range, high velocity spacecraft or other significant size vehicles would be filing a flight plan and crew and cargo manifest with the organization that runs their site of departure and that which runs their destination site, to be sent to said organization at light speed. Indeed, there may be requirements to publish information to those who will have their territories passed through, those behind the destination where debris will potentially be going, and even those which the spacecraft trajectory will temporarily intersect. This level of surveillance is highly desirable for anyone who doesn't want a cargo ship to show up unannounced, with not enough fuel to leave, no money, still enough nuclear propulsion units to be a genuine threat, and cargo you never agreed to pay for. A side effect of this is that if someone breaks down. You probably have a database pre-downloaded on your ship's archives saying exactly what is supposed to onboard, who they are, where they're going, why they're going there, and probably observer accounts of the breakdown. You're almost never gonna get distress calls from ships nobody knows about. And if you do, then they're probably military or smuggling ships and you know not to mess with them.

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

"SOS! BH!"
"+1!"

 

[Kerbart]

On 5/23/2020 at 3:00 AM, Scotius said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_salvage

Don't think there will be no space equivalent. We already have international treaties governing the use of space. In the future there will be more.

Now you're opening a can of worms!

Maritime law is opaque, baroque, and probably a few other words with the letter Q in it. There are reasons for that though:

1. Maritime law works better when harmonized - eg. it's the same or comparable from country to country (especially origin/destination)
2. Because of (1), maritime law tends to change very slowly. You changing a law doesn't mean a lot if your overseas trade partner doesn't change it either. Think an "act of congress" is hard? How about an "act of two congresses?"
3. Many rules, regulations and customs have therefore been on the books for decades, even centuries.
4. Therefore, a lot of maritime legal procedures date from a time before radio, telephone, mail or even banks existed

A lot of that can be applied to commercial space flight. Law is only meaningful when it is enforced—and a solid chunk of that is if it can be enforced. Suppose H₂O is used as a propellant and the UN comes up with laws, or taxation, to regulate mining the rings of Saturn. If you have a controlled market with known entry points (heavy metals, a limited number of space ports on Earth) you have a shot a regulating it, but how to stop ship-to-ship transfers in deep space?

We've gotten so used to real-time communications that we cannot imagine a world where we go back to telegram deliveries and physical proof (in Ocean shipping, until very recently, the Bill of Lading was the actual document showing ownership of the cargo) but that might be the very thing to reoccur in space commerce.

As for piracy; there are two reasons navies exist. International politics is one, piracy is the other. If there is a belter culture in the future, e.g. people able to live in space indefinitely with dozens, if not hundreds of asteroids filling in a role of "ports in space" then it is unimaginable that piracy does not exist. And all the ideas we have about 17th/18th century piracy will apply, I suspect.