On 31 Oct 2017 at 22:02, Kurt Feltenberger wrote:

> One of the common adventure hooks that I've seen is the "lost ship";
> it could be a rumor of a ship from centuries past, a derelict that's
> found drifting in an asteroid belt that has no clues to its origin or
> age, or any one of a number of different plots, but they all have a
> common thread that the ship has been in space - vacuum - for a
> considerable amount of time.  Which leads me to wonder about what
> damage prolonged vacuum exposure might result.  What would weaken or
> fail, what would be ok, etc.  Granted, the materials science of the
> various empires, and Imperiums, probably found a solution, but what
> about the lower tech societies or if they didn't?  We know that some
> ships have been in service for decades or more, and then they're put
> in mothballs and stored at a depot, so something must have been
> developed.  I'm curious what this might be or the effects.

Actually, there are a few problems that get overlooked. First of all
if it's been there for a really long time, you can get a different
sort of contact welding even between dissimilar materials as the
atoms slowly diffuse across the boundary.

A related problem is that semiconductor based electronics will have
the dopants moving across the PN junctions that make them work.
Doesn't take a lot of that to render a chip useless.

It's worse the higher the part density is on the chip, because the
smaller they get the easier it is for the diffusion to ruin the
junctions.

Also, unless the ship is really well shielded against cosmic rays,
they'll be damaging the solid state circuits as well. A level that's
safe for humans could still damage the chips over a century or more.

so that ship that's been sitting there for a few hundred years may
not have any usable electronics. And it's not like you can get
replacements at the nearest port's suppliers either.

Well not unless it's a "standard" ship type that's still in use.

--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com