Help with old ships

[Shadowfire95 (OP)]

Hello, I recently started playing and had a fair deal of fun simply watching lets plays and reading through the wiki.  I started my first game and I am doing rather well, I have scouted out most of the solar system and went to send automines / mass driver to a very attractive location when I encountered a problem.  My cargo ships were horribly designed and stupid me thought 100 km/s would be fast enough to reach the outer solar system.  I also forgot to tell the crew they would likely be gone 36 months instead of 3.  Realizing this problem I recalled the ships to earth and fixed the designs, which included resizing the ships to be smaller and designing better engines and of course informing the crew of proper departure / arrival times (fixing the months expected to be departed to 36). 

Now here is where I encountered a problem.  Refitting the old ships to the new design is 500% the cost of simply building new ships.  That said, What on earth do I do with the old ones? the "Destroy" button warns of a wreckage which would, as far as I know, cause problems for anything sharing an orbit with them.  It would also cheat me of the resources used to build the ships.  Do I send the ships to a useless celestial body for destruction and laugh at the helpless crew stuck aboard? Or do I use the "delete" button which will also steal the resource costs? Is there any way to retrieve the resources put into those ships? I know its minimal but cmon man I spent ages preparing for those ships, would be nice to at least get the resources back.  Also I enjoy the roleplay aspect of this game and find it abysmal that a resource starved humanity would simply detonate old/stupid-to-refit ships and scoff at recycling.

Sorry if the answer to this is posted elsewhere, I scoured and used the search function but couldn't find anything that seemed related.

[Whitecold]

You can scrap them in shipyards. In the shipyard menu where you can toggle between build and refit there is also a point 'scrap.'
Also for freighters 3 months deployment are enough, they are not affected by morale, and 3 months is the minimum for civilian designs.
In general refits are only worth it if you replace a few key systems and don't change size by much. Freighter costs are almost exclusively engines, so putting in bigger engines is very expensive.

[Cheet4h]

To add to what Whitecold said: Scrapping doesn't only give minerals back, if it does at all, it mostly returns the components of the ship to the planetary stockpile, which makes constructing ships with these components cheaper and faster.

[alex_brunius]

To add to what Whitecold said: Scrapping doesn't only give minerals back, if it does at all, it mostly returns the components of the ship to the planetary stockpile, which makes constructing ships with these components cheaper and faster.

Or often more relevant with old design, the components can also be scrapped for some minerals returned.

[Shadowfire95 (OP)]

Thanks for the great replies guys, I didn't even see that option.  Thanks so much for the help!

[Arwyn]

500% sounds like you had these ships in service for a long time with a lot of tech development since then. Upgrades at that point can be expensive, but it CAN be worth it if you have an elite crew on the ship.

Check the "Grade Bonus" on the fleet display, if it is really high, you may want to invest in the upgrade, just to keep the crack crew around. That crew grade makes a HUGE difference in weapons accuracy.

The other use for old ships is to park them over planets demanding protection. The population is too smart, so they don't care if the system defense fleet is ancient, only that it is there.

Scrapping a ship does break it down to components, and once they are in the stockpile, they can be scrapped for actual minerals. So if your looking for the minerals back, its a bit long to do, but it does work.