Scrap Salvager

The economics of interstellar warfare are brutal. A single Patrol Sentinel costs more to manufacture than most frontier settlements earn in a year, and losing three in a single engagement can bankrupt a sector garrison's operating budget. The Scrap Salvager program was born from that cold arithmetic — a fleet of autonomous recovery bots designed to reclaim as much material value as possible from the wreckage of battle.

Salvagers are deployed in the immediate aftermath of combat, scuttling across the debris field on six articulated legs. Their sensor suites can distinguish between twenty-seven different alloy compositions at a glance, and their onboard smelters reach temperatures sufficient to reduce duranium plating to workable ingots in under ninety seconds. A single Salvager can process roughly its own weight in scrap per hour.

The bots operate under a simple priority hierarchy: rare materials first, then structural alloys, then electronics, then organics. This last category was a controversial addition — early Salvager models ignored biological material entirely, but field commanders discovered that medical-grade compounds could be extracted from fallen biomechanical units. The ethical debate around this practice continues in Terran parliament, but on the frontier, pragmatism wins.

Salvagers have no faction loyalty. They will strip a fallen Terran mech with the same efficiency as a destroyed Caxion construct. This neutrality makes them universally useful — and universally distrusted. More than one commander has watched a Salvager begin dismantling a damaged-but-functional unit and had to issue an emergency recall.