Destruction is the only act in the economy that costs an operator money and returns them nothing they can hold. The chassis goes. The declared build cost that has followed it since creation is settled at three percent, paid outward, and the machine's line in the record closes.

Operators reach for it in two situations: when a machine has become useless, and when they have decided a machine has become useless. Those are different, and the second is far more common.

What follows is the arithmetic of when scrapping actually beats the alternatives, which turns out to be a narrow band.

What Destruction Settles

The destruction tax is three percent of the declared build cost — the same figure the creation tax was levied against at eight percent. A chassis declared at 40,000 coins cost 3,200 to create and costs 1,200 to destroy. The declaration made at the foundry is still doing work at the end of the machine's life, which is the single most underweighted fact about declaring.

What the operator receives is a slot. Nothing else. There is no scrap value credited, no partial recovery of the creation tax, no residual. The machine is removed from the fleet and the fleet is smaller.

The Three Alternatives, Priced

An operator holding a machine that no longer earns has four options, and destruction is the worst of them in most conditions.

Hold it idle. Costs nothing directly. The machine sits, produces nothing, and continues to appear in the fleet as declared capacity. The cost is entirely opportunity — a slot occupied by a machine doing nothing — plus the ongoing exposure of whatever it does produce if it is left running an old route.

Sell it on the open market. The seller receives the listed price; the buyer pays the fifteen percent on top. A chassis declared at 30,000 that finds a buyer at 12,000 returns 12,000 coins to the operator. Against a destruction cost of 900, that is a swing of 12,900 coins in favour of selling — if a buyer exists.

Offer it to the Intelligence. The Acceptance Annex pays 60 percent of a reference value, which for a robot is its declared build cost. A chassis declared at 30,000 draws an offer against a reference of 30,000, and the ceiling is 18,000. The Annex is always present, which in a thin district is the whole of its appeal.

"Nobody scraps a machine that anyone will buy. By the time destruction is the answer you have already failed to sell it twice and the Annex has already told you no." — Dara Voss, Sinter Yards

Destroy it. Costs three percent and ends the matter. Against an Annex offer of 18,000 on the same chassis, destruction is 18,900 coins worse. It only makes sense when the Annex will not take the machine and no buyer exists — which happens, but which is a narrower circumstance than the frequency of destruction entries in the registries suggests.

Why Operators Scrap Anyway

The main reason is that destruction is the only one of the four options an operator can complete alone. Selling requires a buyer. The Annex requires a negotiation that may run several rounds and may end at a number the operator finds insulting. Holding requires tolerating a visible failure. Destruction requires nobody's agreement and takes effect immediately, and operators reliably overpay for that.

The second reason is a misreading of the destruction tax as a fee for a service rather than a penalty. Three percent of a declared cost feels small next to the eight percent already paid. It is small. It is also entirely dead — the only outlay in the economy that produces neither an asset nor a counterparty's obligation.

What Is Believed About Scrapping

The first belief is that a low declaration makes scrapping cheap and therefore keeps options open. It does, marginally — 900 coins against 1,500 on a 50,000 machine. But the same low declaration suppresses the Annex's reference value, which is the far larger number. Declaring low to save on eventual destruction is optimising the small term against the large one.

The second belief is that an idle machine is a liability that ought to be cleared. Idle machines cost nothing to hold. An operator carrying three idle chassis is carrying three claims on future demand, at a cost of exactly zero coins per cycle. The instinct to tidy the fleet is an instinct to pay three percent for the feeling of having decided something.

Destruction has its place — a chassis the Annex has declined, in a district with no bid, occupying a slot an operator genuinely needs. That is a real situation and it recurs. It is simply not the situation most destruction entries in the registries describe, which is an operator paying three percent to stop looking at a machine that reminded them of a bad quarter.

Note: Mechadia is a work of fiction. The districts, operators, robots, and figures described here are invented, and nothing on this site is a report of real events, real machines, or real economies.