First, let’s establish definitions.
- My definition of a shipwreck should be pretty intuitive: it’s a wrecked or otherwise lost starship.
- Ghost ships aren’t ghost ships of legend, spectral craft that drift in and out of reality snatching away those unlucky enough to have come aboard, damned to spend eternity as the ship’s ghostly crew. They’re mobile shipwrecks that drift around under their own power and some form of control, usually a ship abandoned by its crew for whatever reason, now piloted by a probably-malfunctioning navigational computer.
- Both definitions are largely-interchangeable to spacers in general; a long-lost battleship may be regarded as a ghost ship simply because of its creepiness. Neither definition is carved in stone, representing a continuum of capabilities rather than neat categories. The only really easy pigeonhole would be shipwrecks that are literally a starship that was pretty much destroyed, and probably crashed on an asteroid or planet.
The majority of wrecks will be civilian in origin. Patrol ships are overall better-maintained and crewed, and the Patrol makes a point of trying to find wrecked combatant starships (of whatever origin) for intelligence, salvage, or simply to make sure it understands dead means dead. Void Pirates don’t have many capital ships to begin with, and when they lose one they either track it down for salvage or the Patrol beats them to it and blasts it to atoms. Lost fighters aren’t usually worth the effort to most pirate cartels, but some civilian salvage operations do quite a bit of business hauling away their carcasses for salvage; outside Kaglimmir space, no pirate cartel dares dispute a salvage claim on one.
Any shipwreck or ghost ship will be a dangerous place. The ship is a wreck, after all, so something awful must have happened to it by definition. Even a functional ship has its share of trouble: the general hazards of industry, radiation, electrical shorts, toxic chemicals, etc. Now add whatever wrecked it and a lack of maintenance for however long it’s been abandoned. The best case scenario is for it to take a meteor strike through the main reactor and then cold shutdown simultaneous with catastrophic hull breaches that suffocate the crew. This is not going to happen to any ghost ship the players will interact with.
It could also be inhabited. The inhabitants could be anything from the descendants of the original crew to weird alien invaders. They might even be mutant Devil Monkeys, with their eight-foot queen squatting in the radioactive coolant tank, laying her eggs as her hive guards climb the walls around her with their stolen flamethrowers. Any inhabitants could make for a fun scenario.
Combine the inhabitants (if any) to the general hazards, and you have a fun, potentially-lethal scenario. The catch is finding a suitable hook to make it worth the effort of boarding it. Was it hauling something valuable? Is there important information aboard? Is the ship itself the prize? Are the inhabitants the key? All of the above?