With the current problem of lag from clutter, I’ve been trying to pare down my base. I cheated in a steel recycler (pretending that I broke one down and moved it to my base), but even after burning what could be burnt I was left with thousands of items I just can’t get rid of, short of loading it into a vehicle and driving it a few cells away to dump. For example, I’ve got a whole table filled with nothing but engines from lawn mowers, circular saws, and the like. They can’t be disassembled, they can’t be burnt, they can’t be cut up, and they’re a royal pain in the ass to move anywhere.
My suggestion is containers of nanodisassemblers. To prevent a “grey goo” disaster, they’re hard-coded to self-destruct after a few seconds, so how much you could destroy would be limited to whatever happens to be in the single square you use it on – but it would reduce everything there to component materials in whatever quantity was the original weight of the item, less perhaps 20% for inefficiency and contaminants. So a 50 pound engine would get transformed into 40 pounds of scrap metal. It would also add some exciting new loot to labs. To prevent it from being (ab)used to disassemble Jabberwocks, just say that there’s a built-in failsafe to prevent it from disassembling organic matter. (Though robots are enother story. I like the idea of transforming chicken walkers into a massive heap of useful scrap. Or stripping a soldier zed naked.)
