Scrap Metal
| Scrap Metal | |
|---|---|
| |
| Category: | Ore |
| Status: | Functional |
| Function: | |
| Scrap metal appears when components have been destroyed | |
| Mass: | 1 kg |
| Volume: | 0.25 L |
| Data Controls: | [edit] [purge] (?) |
Scrap Metal is a low-value item. Usually you can salvage all components from blocks, but if blocks were damaged, scraps drop in place of components. Scrap metal serves no direct purpose other than being a warning sign of destroyed blocks: Its presence indicates that you have just lost some valuable components.
Usage
How to recyle it
Scrap metal can be refined in a Basic Refinery or Refinery to get some of the destroyed metal back. A basic refinery produces 0.56 
Iron Ingots per 1 Scrap Metal, while a refinery produces 0.8 iron ingots, or 1.6 with four 
Yield Modules.
How to pick it up
If your scrap metal is floating in space, suck it into an inventory using a 
Collector.
You can also pick the pieces up into your personal inventory by pressing F key (or 
-click while not holding a tool), from where you can manually transfer it into a refinery or another block with inventory space, such as a Cargo Container.
How to detect damage with sensors
Sensors can be set up to detect floating items — including Scrap Metal. Outside of active mining operations and battle fields, no items should be floating, so you can use the presence of floating scrap as a damage indicator:
- Set up sensors with ranges covering individual sections of your ship or base.
- Name them after the section they watch, so you can tell them apart.
- Set up the sensor to toggle an orange light in sections where floating items are detected.
The light warns working crew of local hull damage and helps repair crew identify sections in need of repair.
Triggering more advanced emergency responses (such as dispatching autonomous repair drones, activating welders, playing siren sounds and automatically decompressing the area to preserve oxygen, displaying warning text or images on LCD displays, ...) is possible using AI blocks, Timer Blocks, or Event Controllers.
Sources of Scrap Metal
The following events or actions result in dropped components being turned into scrap, and should be avoided:
- Damaging or destroying blocks using weapons, collisions, or drills
- Grinding damaged blocks using the Hand Grinder or the ship-mounted Grinder
- Destroying or grinding Batteries makes scraps drop instead of the power cells
- Light and Heavy Armor blocks destroyed by a weapon or drills drop Scrap Metal upon their destruction no matter the stage of construction. Only the amount of scrap dropped depends on the amount of steel plates still welded into the block.
Note: Power Cells are turned into scrap because Batteries start out with a small amount of free charge, and if there would be no cost to destroying and placing Batteries, you could get free energy out of continually grinding down and rewelding batteries. The power cell in a Hydrogen Engine does not turn to scrap, as the engine is not created with any stored free charge.