Derelict Graveyard

aka: Shipwreck Graveyard

This place doesn't exactly float my boat.

"Yikes, did we get blasted into the Bermuda Triangle or somethin'? You see all that gnarly wreckage out there?"

— Funky Kong, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze

An area (could be an abandoned harbor, the bottom of an ocean or a Lagrange point) which contains a number of craft (sea, air, space or otherwise) in varying states of disrepair. It might be just a few sunken ships lying near each other on the ocean floor, it might be a giant conglomeration of space derelicts rammed together in horrible ways over thousands of years. The crews of all these vessels long ago died or abandoned their ships... probably.

Of course, all sorts of important plot-related things could be hidden in such a place — pirate gold, the lost plans to a Forgotten Superweapon, spare parts for the heroes' own badly damaged ship, an unexplainable Distress Call — and there is no end to the possibilities of having mutant enemies or ancient security systems that get between the heroes and their goal.

Between the idea of exploring tumbling derelicts crammed with ancient technology, apparently dead hulks suddenly coming to life, a hidden base made of ancient battleships linked together, a potential Cool Plane or Cool Boat for the heroes to resurrect, the explorers running into weird indigenous creatures or the mutant cannibal descendants of the original crews, the kind of dread powers that can gather all these vessels together in the first place, and simply the whole idea of abandoned, empty derelicts, the Derelict Graveyard is insanely cool.

Compare Ghost Ship. See also The Bermuda Triangle and Saharan Shipwreck. If the vehicles are awaiting disposal and not just left there, you're Down in the Dumps. If you're looking for a graveyard for humans, chances are you're looking for Creepy Cemetery or Big Boo's Haunt, although there's certainly room for overlap. May also overlap with Elephant Graveyard if we're dealing with Living Ships.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Ape's Concert in the Rainbow Mist filler arc of One Piece, which was contained within that world's version of the Bermuda Triangle.
• Transformers:
  • The Autobots encounter one in the Transformers: ★Headmasters episode "Mystery of the Space Pirate Ship".
  • Transformers: Cybertron has the Autobots eventually explore the resting place of Starship Atlantis itself, which also turns out to be the Bermuda Triangle. Naturally, it's this trope.
• The "shoal zones" in Mobile Suit Gundam and its sequels are debris fields of wrecked space colonies, spaceships, mobile suits, etc. Since the space colonies that these wrecks are primarily comprised of were built at Lagrange points, the debris doesn't really have anywhere to go, creating what amounts to an artificial Asteroid Thicket in stable Earth orbit.
• The debris belt from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED qualifies. Arguably, the L4 colony cluster does too.
• Tenchi Universe has episode 18 where Yagami breaks down at the Sargaso, an area in space that is supposed to be where broken and/or abandoned spaceships ends up in, and discovers a derelict gigantic spaceship that is seemingly empty to everyone except Sasami who befriends a girl her age that no one else seems to be able to see. When Sasami disappears and they go into the derelict ship, they find glimpses of Sasami playing with an outline of a girl in light.
• Ushio and Tora: Inside the Ayakashi's belly are all the ships he's consumed. Once he's killed, all the ships in his stomach are released.

Comic Books

• In one issue of Ramba, the eponymous heroine goes scuba diving in a graveyard of sunken ships from a World War II battle. She encounters villains attempting to retrieve a huge shipment of morphine that was on one of the supply ships.
• In Star Fox, Fox finds many other floating ships that have gotten lost in the Black Hole.
• In the Firefly comic adaptation "Those Left Behind," the crew searches one of these for a hidden stash of money, which turns out to be a trap by Dobson and the Hands of Blue to get their hands on River.
• In an issue of Star Wars Empire, Luke Skywalker meets his old friend, Tank, in a dumping ground of ships. Star Destroyers of various classes, TIE fighters, LAATs, and even Jedi starfighters are shown.
• In The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones #1, the fog shrouded island that is home to the temple that houses the Ikons of Ikammanen is surrounded by the wrecks of ships that have been lured in and run aground.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: In issue 115 a mysterious current sweeps a bunch of miraculously intact ships from over the ages off the ocean floor to float on the surface, one of which has a figurehead that looks mysteriously like Wonder Woman.
• Green Lantern #3: Alan Scott discovers a bunch of derelict ships some floating some half-sunk and trapped in the middle of the Atlantic. It's filled with ships from across the centuries who have become trapped there, and the descendants of the original crew still live in and around the ships. Things are great until the Nazis try to take over the area...

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): A fresh one consisting of downed snowmobiles and helicopters has formed outside the abandoned Monarch outpost in Chapter 7.
• The Butcher Bird: The Nightmares spend a short time shipwrecked on Ivankinraion island, an example that used to be a World Government shipyard until their attempt to copy Pluton had a serious reactor failure and messed up the entire island while killing or mutating everyone on it. They eventually use the derelicts and a ghost-based Devil Fruit to resurrect the hull of the Pluton copy as a Sapient Ship to get them off the island.
• Dungeon Keeper Ami: The Dreadfog Isle Exclusion Zone, where ships disappeared, due to priests of Crowned Death and other servants of that god sinking them.
• Seventh Endmost Vision: One of the rare examples of one of these doubling as Holy Ground; the Train Graveyard, as in canon, is where numerous rusting hulks rest, but the locals of Sector Seven consider it a sacred place of great peace. They speak of a Lady who watches the area and the souls of children murdered by the area's former inhabitant, the Eligor; she protects them, and the people bring them toys from time to time. It's Ifalna's ghost, and it's where she hid Holy from Lucrecia, explaining the sacredness of the place.
• Son of the Sannin features one of these as the site if the second phase of the Chunnin exams. It used to be a fleet that Konoha ninja used for naval combat and transporting troops, but the Fourth Hokage had all of them decomissioned due to the fact that the sheer rarity of their use (even during times of war) made it more practical to just use civilian ships.
• Played with in Rocketship Voyager with Space Pirates hijacking spaceships and bringing them back to the Array, a Big Dumb Object that's the terminal for a galactic Portal Network. The spacecraft are then stripped of their technology and fastened to the outside surface of the Array, where they're converted into habitats for the colonies that have evolved around the portals, usually from the various species captured by those same pirates.
  Thousands of derelict spacecraft—ranging from tiny lifepods to colossal generation ships—had been permanently moored to makeshift docking cradles and converted into trading posts and habitats and manufactories. Their portholes and beacon lights cast a baleful lumination in the absolute dark of the black star, ugly and beautiful as an anglerfish in the sunless ocean depths.
• In This Bites!, for her training during the two-year Time Skip, Kuma sends the humanized Merry to Davy Jones locker. Of course, since she had barely avoided ending up there thanks to Cross's efforts, she considers this a Fate Worse than Death and has an Anything but That! response.

Films — Animated

• Atlantis: The Lost Empire: The first sign of trouble for the expedition is when they find a stretch of the sea floor carpeted with the wrecked remnants of ships from all over history — they were sunk by the Leviathan.
• In Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island, after Sanji pulls Luffy out from the ocean, neither of them notices the numerous sunken ships, hinting at the island's sinister nature.
• Doraemon:
  • Doraemon: Nobita and the Castle of the Undersea Devil has Doraemon and gang exploring a shipyard underneath the Bermuda Triangle, where ships of both humans and Mu origin litters it's surface. Turns out those ships were destroyed by the robotic Sea Monsters of Poseidon's army.
  • Doraemon: Nobita's Drifts in the Universe has a scene in which Doraemon, Nobita, and their new friends Lian and his team of space cadets ends up in a spaceship graveyard, filled with floating wreckage of various alien ships. Stopping over to investigate, the later find out the reason behind the derelicts' existence when they're assaulted by an entire horde of power-consuming parasites that comes at them in entire swarms.
• In Finding Nemo, the sharks all live in a sunken submarine surrounded by thousands of naval mines (which, according to Dory, are "balloons"). When Dory and Marlin flee Bruce the great white after he goes crazy with Blood Lust, they accidentally cause him to ram the ship's torpedo bay and send a torpedo flying into one of the naval mines.
• In the Heavy Metal segment "B-17", after bailing out of his B-17 bomber, the pilot lands on a tropical island and finds it filled with crashed airplanes. Unfortunately, the pilots of those planes are still around, and they're angry zombies.
• At the beginning of The Little Mermaid (1989), Ariel and Flounder recover objects from a graveyard of sunken ships inhabited by a shark. Later, the now gigantic Ursula creates a whirlpool that exposes several of the damaged ships. Prince Eric boards one of them and uses it to dispatch Ursula.
• The Memories segment "Magnetic Rose" takes place in one.
• WALL•E features a line of abandoned cargo ships docked on a dried-up river.

Films — Live-Action

• Avengers: Age of Ultron: Ulysses Klaue makes his base inside an abandoned ship in a salvage yard that's a few Hulk-bounds away from Johannesburg, apparently.
• In The Best Years of Our Lives, ex-USAAF bombadier Fred Derry walks through a graveyard of warplanes being stripped for materials to make prefab housing, entering a B-17 nosecone where he's momentarily lost in his memories before being startled out of it by a worker demanding to know what he's doing (as Fred is out of a job, he ends up working there too).
• Blood Machines: The crew wind up following the Humanoid Abomination to a space-ship graveyard.
• The Dark Side of the Moon (1990) has one on the moon's surface, of all places, filled with ships from the Age of Sail to the present day.
• MonsterVerse:
  • Kong: Skull Island: The north shore of the island, which the cast spend most of the movie trying to reach, is shown at the climax to be dotted with decaying shipwrecks from various centuries in human history. Whilst they're not the only shipwrecks seen on Skull Island by a long shot, the north end of the island is the only part of the island which has so many shipwrecks in the same place.
  • In Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), the crew of the Cool Submarine pass through one of these on the way into the Sunken City deep within the Hollow World, where Godzilla makes his lair.
• In Pacific Rim a Jaeger graveyard known as Oblivion Bay is mentioned in the background material as a place where heavily damaged or destroyed Jaegers are stored as memorials, located in the place where the first Kaiju attacked. Gipsy Danger is recovered from the graveyard and restored to functionality for the movie.
• Paranormal Asylum: While boating around in the Hudson River, Mark and Andy get some shots of a bunch of derelict ships out on the water.
• Pirates of the Caribbean
  • In the first film, the heroes sail through a narrow, foggy passage littered with wrecks of numerous ships in order to reach Isla de la Muerta, where the cursed treasure and the villains are hiding out.
  • In the third, the meeting of the Pirate Lords takes place in the town of Shipwreck, within Shipwreck Cove, on Shipwreck Isle... "You know, for all that pirates are clever clogs, we are a terribly unimaginative lot when it comes to naming things." To be fair, the town is a giant ''stack' of wrecked ships from all over the world, sheltered from the outside by high cliffs.
• The film Real Steel features one. Charlie and Max break into a robot junkyard to find parts to build a new robot boxer. After a near-death experience, Max discovers the film's robot protagonist, Atom, buried in the mud.
• The crew of the Serenity fly through one of these on their way to and from the planet Miranda, except that many of the ships are functional and inhabited by Reavers, who don't pay much attention to their ship after they disguised it to resemble one of theirs. All the while the Serenity is picking up communications from the Reaver ships, a lot of screaming from all of the people trapped on board. Or the Reavers. They're not exactly the sanest bunch.
• A late scene in Siren (2010) has Rachel and Ken discovering multiple shipwrecks just off the coast of the island: having being lured in and wrecked by the siren. The protagonists had not seen this graveyard earlier as their yacht had approached from the other side of the island.
• In Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Rey lives on Jakku, a site where a climactic naval clash between the Rebellion and the Empire occurred in the interim between the latest and original trilogies. On the surface is at least one crashed Star Destroyer listed to the side, and a completely capsized Super Star Destroyer of the same class as the Executor from the Original Trilogy. Crashed fighters also litter the ground too, and she lives in a wrecked AT-AT.
• Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen featured an airplane graveyard during Jetfire's introductory scene.
• In the opening scene of Deep Rising, before we switch to the main plot the creatures are seen travelling through a deep sea ship graveyard, some of them hundreds of years old, all of which they presumably attacked, ate all the people on it, and sank the ships afterwards. There are even the remains of whale skeletons besides the derelict ships.

Literature

• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: The Nautilus passes the wreck of the Florida, and later, a graveyard of thousands of Spanish galleons, which is where Nemo gets his wealth from (and the money to fund resistance fighters he likes.)
• The Nartec city in Animorphs #36 is built from wrecks recovered from the seabed.
• The climax of the third Artemis Fowl book takes place in a radioactive submarine graveyard.
• The Diving Universe novel Boneyards has the Boneyard, a massive derelict graveyard full of ancient spaceships.
• In the New Series Adventures novel Engines of War, the Doctor finds his TARDIS abandoned in a field of TARDISes destroyed in the Time War.
• In the Dream Park South Seas Treasure Game, some important items are found amid a collection of abandoned ships and planes, which the villainous Fore sorcerors had summoned to New Guinea with their Cargo Cult magic.
• In The Dreamside Road, Enoa and Orson hide in one after their escape from Fort Mayhill. It doesn’t last long as the Liberty Corps bombards the graveyard to find them, despite causing civilian casualties.
• He Fell Into a Black Hole, by Jerry Pournelle. Starships traveling a hyperspace route are being pulled into normal space and trapped by the black hole in question.
• The Alexander Byelaev novel The Island of Wrecked Ships mostly takes place on, predictably, an island in the middle of the Real-Life Sargasso Sea that is composed of millennia-old wrecks of everything from Egyptian oar boats to (then-modern) passenger liners.
  • To clarify, this isn't an island with a lot of shipwrecks on it. So many ships have drifted there that THE ENTIRE ISLAND FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR UP is made of decomposing wrecks. Considering the 'sea' ranges between 1.5 and 7 kilometres in depth, that's quite a few watercraft.
• Jack Ryan:
  • Old World War I transports that were left abandoned form the production headquarters for one group of drug dealers, in Tom Clancy's Without Remorse, a prequel in the series set during the The Vietnam War.
  • "Bronco", in Clear and Present Danger, speculates that the Boneyard in Arizona is where the a captured druggie DC-7B will eventually be dumped, given that one more old aircraft in storage there won't be particularly noteworthy.
• Andre Norton's novels contain several:
  • Forerunner: the desert north of Kuxortal holds a field of Forerunner spacecraft contaminated with radiation.
  • Sargasso of Space: a Forerunner installation on the planet Limbo had dragged many ships to their destruction over the eons.
  • Web of the Witch World: The harbor in Sippar.
  • The Zero Stone: In the sequel, Uncharted Stars, the Thieves' Guild base at Waystar, mentioned in a number of other books, turns out to be a space station now surrounded by closely packed derelicts apparently towed into place as a kind of camouflage.
• Lilly and Fin: A Mermaid's Tale: It's stated in chapter 3 that Mermaid City is made up of a bunch of sunken ships that were wrecked by a coral reef.
• Old Kingdom: Sabriel lands her Paperwing coincidentally in a ship's graveyard. But not any ship's graveyard: this one is not underwater, but underground, and enchanted heavily to protect it, because it is full of the burial ships of kings. As such, there's nothing harmful lurking in the ship grounds itself, but she does find a Human Popsicle that needs rescuing while she's there.
• Railsea has several bone yards of wrecked trains and carriages through out the end of the story.
• The Redwall book The Bellmaker has a Derelict Graveyard of old wooden ships, which the heroes cannibalize for parts.
• In Poul Anderson's Sargasso of Lost Starships, the nebula.
• The Sargasso of Space, a 1931 pulp sci-fi tale by Edmond Hamilton. The 'wreck-pack' forms in a langrage point with all the spacecraft drawn together by the mutual attraction of their own gravity.
• The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester has Gulliver Foyle encounter the Sargasso Asteroid, a body in the main asteroid belt built entirely from the hulks of abandoned spaceships.
• Star Trek's Dominion War series placed one of these in the Badlands.
  • In the Star Trek: The Original Series novel The Final Nexus, dimension-traveling aliens created quarantine areas for any ships infected by a mysterious insanity, long long ago. No cure was ever found, and by Kirk's time the quarantine zones are filled with massive graveyards. (One ship vaguely resembles a Borg cube! Probably a coincidence.)
  • The previous novel, Chain of Attack, actually outclasses it, though—the derelicts there include lifeless planets throughout a huge sector of space.
  • In the Starfleet Corps of Engineers series, we've got the Sargasso Sector, named for the Sargasso Sea on Earth. It's a junkyard of abandoned ships floating around a collection of black holes and quasars. The protagonists are assigned to clear a path through it to allow a convoy access - one of the series' more notable cases of Space Is an Ocean.
  • Finally, to show how much Star Trek likes this one, there's the Rashanar battle site in Star Trek: A Time to..., a collection of wrecked ships destroyed during the Dominion War.
• The Katana fleet in Timothy Zahn's novel Dark Force Rising is a lost fleet of warships that had blindly jumped into hyperspace years ago, after a hive virus drove the entire crew of each vessel insane. One of the main characters knew where it was and had been selling them off one at a time, and after the heroes saved him from Thrawn he decided to show them where the others were. But as it turned out, Thrawn already knew, and had taken all the remaining functional ships before setting a trap with the rest.
• Spacewreck: Ghostships and Derelicts Of Space, one of the Terran Trade Authority books by Stewart Cowley has several examples. In one story jackers start turning up with more sophisticated weaponry, and it turns out they've discovered such a graveyard and are looting it. There's also a planet whose entire population has been destroyed in a Forever War, leaving only their derelict war machines.
• David Brin's Uplift: In the Backstory of Startide Rising, a Terran starship discovers a fleet of derelict Progenitor ships and unleashes a galaxies-wide holy war.
• North To Benjamin has the Paddle Wheel Graveyard, a place in the town of Dawson where old Paddle Wheel ships are placed after they've been decommissioned.
• In the Doc Savage novel the Sargasso Orge, an era-appropriate pirate has a base in one of these, and hijacks ships into it for plunder.
• Greg Mandel Trilogy: The protagonist mentions a field of armored vehicles at the former Imperial War Museum at Duxford, decommissioned by the extreme left-wing government that's been (until recently) running Britain. They were supposed to be dismantled for raw materials, but due to government inefficiency this never happened and they had been left to rust and pollute the ground with leaking fuel and hydraulic fluid.
• In Millennium (1983), Louise at one point looks over one of these, created when it was simpler to just grab the whole vessel instead of removing individuals from it, and notes that the Titanic is sitting next to a starship.

Live-Action TV

• Andromeda had a graveyard full of abandoned High Guard ships, captured by the Nietzscheans after the war and left to sit there for 3 centuries until they could figure out how to deal with the A.I.s defending them. Though given they were effectively crewed by their AI, it may be more accurate to call is a POW camp than a graveyard. There were also a couple of episodes where they came across single abandoned ships from the same time, generally presumed to be haunted wrecks (including the Andromeda itself in the pilot).
• Blake's 7: In "Dawn of the Gods", the Liberator is drawn into an Unrealistic Black Hole, only to find themselves on a platform littered with the derelict remains of spacecraft stripped for their herculanium by the villain of the week. James Follett, who wrote the episode, would use a similar premise in his radio series Earthsearch.
• Crusade has an episode that features an underground derelict graveyard of spaceships. The Alien race on that planet had been luring other alien ships there for centuries, so they could kidnap the crews and perform medical experiments on them in hopes of finding a cure for a bio-engineered disease.
• Doctor Who: In "The Doctor's Wife", the asteroid on which the Doctor lands contains a massive graveyard of once-alive time machines known as TARDISes, each of which has been devoured by the episode's Monster of the Week.
• The old, derelict graveyard where ghosts went to recharge in The Ghost Busters.
• The Red Dwarf episode "Psirens" featured an asteroid belt full of wrecked spaceships; it was there because the titular creatures were causing the ships to crash.
• Moonbase Alpha passes near one of these in an episode of Space: 1999; it is infested with an Eldritch Abomination.
• In one episode of Space Cases, the Christa comes across a graveyard of ships that had all their energy sapped by an entity that inhabits the region. The ship picks up echoing transmissions that confirm the entity has been at work for more than 100 years. the Christa narrowly avoids joining them.
  • The Christa encounters several different starship graveyards in various episodes, including one which was the result of a battle between the Spung and another Living Ship like the Christa.
• Star Trek:
  • In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Best of Both Worlds", Wolf 359 (after the battle with the Borg) only looks like a derelict graveyard: it's really a bunch of very recently smashed ships, though Star Trek's Expanded Universe went on to have the site of the battle declared a memorial and maintained as a derelict graveyard. Ironically, the ship models from this scene were reused in "Unification, Part 1" for another derelict graveyard which was being used as a source of Vulcan ship parts for the Romulan invasion.
  • In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "The Changing Face of Evil", what's left of the USS Defiant and 310 other allied ships become part of a large derelict graveyard in the Chin'toka system. As of Star Trek: Picard, that graveyard is still there.
  • Star Trek: Voyager:
    • In the pilot episode "Caretaker", the crew first meet Neelix scavenging the starships brought from all over the galaxy by the Caretaker. Neelix gets rather touchy until he's reassured they're not interested in his junk.
    • As with TNG, we also see the space-battle aftermath version in "Scorpion: Part I" (involving the Borg, ironically enough) and the Honest John's Dealership version in "Alice".
    • In "Collective", the Delta Flyer gets caught in a Mega-Maw Maneuver by a Borg cube, the interior of which contains several other captured spacecraft whose technology is awaiting assimilation.
  • Several spaceship graveyards show up in the third season of Star Trek: Discovery as an aftermath of the Burn.

Radio

• In the Secondary Phase of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978), Ford Prefect and Zaphod Beeblebrox come across an abandoned spaceport on the planet Brontitall where most of the craft are so old they can literally fall apart by someone looking at them. There is one notable exception, where the AI crew has kept passengers in a centuries-long state of suspended animation... because their programming won't let them take off without the required consignment of lemon-soaked paper napkins.

Tabletop Games

• Games Workshop games:
  • The setting for the Dreadfleet game is the Galleon's Graveyard, a Pocket Dimension littered with the everything that has been lost at sea. Everything from the wrecks of destroyed ships to the corpses of sea monsters and sailors are drawn into the cursed dimension by the magical currents that feed it.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • The frequent space battles that take place in the setting can result in large fields of wrecked starships that creat hazards to travel through the region.
    • Space Hulks are amalgamations of asteroids, spaceships, and other detritus that drift along Warp currents to pop in and out of realspace. Even though they're often full of hitchhiking Orks, Genestealers, or worse, the Imperium tries to search every Space Hulk it can for archeotech. It usually falls to the Adeptus Astartes to carry out these missions, which led to a whole spin-off boardgame.
  • In Necromunda, the 3rd Edition background material for the game mentions the Navis Mortis, a large area of spacecraft wreckage surrounding the Hive known as the Needle. Created from the wrecks of smuggler ships trying to circumvent the stranglehold House Helmawr has on planetary trade, the Navis Mortis is now home to numerous gangs of nomads, scavenges, religious extremists and other ne'er-do-wells who fight amongst themselves for the remains of valuable cargo and ancient technology.
  • The licensed RPG Gaiden Game Rogue Trader seems to love this trope, including at least 5 derelict graveyards in canon. One is rumored to both move around and serve as the lair of a space kraken, one the site of a massive naval battle between two rival Rogue Traders (even in-universe it's unclear if it was already one before the battle), another is created by a Yu'Vaht space station that interferes with the warpdrive of any ships passing the system, dragging them out from the Warp and preventing them from leaving, and one is located on the surface of a planet with powerful electromagnetic storms that extend to low orbit and disable any ship that comes too close, causing it to crash down on the planet. The last one is the Processional of the Damned, which is the biggest and creepiest by far. A system consisting of a single black star (which may actually be an Eldritch Abomination of some kind) surrounded by millions upon millions of wrecked vessels, some incredibly ancient and some recent (and according to legends, some from ships not even built yet), all drawn there from the Warp by some mysterious force. Though obviously a prime target for salvage operations, the Processional seems to slowly drain the sanity of those who enter it, to say nothing of countless pieces of space debris flying around, ships whose crews have been driven insane and corrupted by the dark force lurking at its heart, or the hollow men, seemingly empty armoured voidsuits that slowly dissassamble any ship they get their hands on down to its constituent parts. In short, it's not a nice place.
• The Lintha Family stronghold of Bluehaven in Exalted.
• Several locations in the Ravenloft setting qualify, including the ring of battered wrecks that encircle Monette's isle, and the kelp-mired vessels enmeshed in the domain of Saragoss.
• A graveyard of derelict ships trapped in a "dead zone" in space shows up in a couple of scenarios in Star Fleet Battles.
• There are a number of these along the Spinward Marches in Traveller left over from all the space battles that took place their.
• Post-Jihad in BattleTech, the Republic of the Sphere keeps a graveyard of destroyed BattleMechs on Earth, known as the Bone Yard. This treasure trove of technology is comprised of the machines of Republic warriors and Knights who were defeated in battle, some surviving the destruction of their 'Mech, but most not, and so most are more memorials than backup parts. Earlier in the series, there are references to 'Mech graveyards on planets like Kawich or Sian, the results of failed invasions or failed defenses, and a mention of the hulks of lost starships and fighters in various places in the Inner Sphere and Clans.

Theme Parks

• Shipwreck Rapids at SeaWorld San Diego is naturally set in an area with tons of marooned and/or destroyed ships.

Video Games

• 9 Monkeys of Shaolin have a short stage near a coastline full of wrecked ships, destroyed in a naval battle some time ago. As you try navigating around the coast, you'll be attacked by ghost mooks rising out of the water from the wreckage.
• Death in the Water is set entirely underwater, and one stage have you exploring a seemingly endless field of destroyed ships (and a plane) while fending off hostile marine creatures.
• An entire level of Gradius Gaiden is made entirely of huge wrecked ships... all of which were once bosses in previous games!
• The Final Fantasy games have a few:
  • The Ship Graveyard in Final Fantasy V.
  • A train graveyard in Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VII Remake.
  • Arrapago Reef in Final Fantasy XI.
  • Final Fantasy XII has the Ozmone Plain, which may appear to be a nice, pleasant grassland, but all around, you find the wrecks of crashed airships. This is because Ivalice's southern continent of Kerwon is mostly jagd, areas with concentrations of ambient Mist too high for airships to function properly.
  • Final Fantasy XIV:
    • In A Realm Reborn, Mor Dhona is riddled with the remains of the Garlean flagship Agrius, and its main wreck, along with Midgardsormr's corpse entwined around it, is known to locals as the "Keeper of the Lake".
    • The wreck of the Agrius and Midgardsormr's corpse were in Mor Dhona in V1.0, too. In fact, V1.0's opening cutscene featured the Agrius and Midgardsormr destroying each other to establish the backstory.
    • Stormblood introduces the Sirensong Sea, which combines this trope with Big Boo's Haunt. It’s a chain of small islands linked together by the wrecks of ships that have run aground against them. The islands are enshrouded by a supernatural fog, and their shores are haunted by demonic sea creatures and the undead.
  • In Final Fantasy Tactics, the final battle map is a "Graveyard of Airships".
• Star Trek: Elite Force: In the first game, a space station made of the spaceships of various alien races makes an appearance.
• Gene Troopers has Planet A412, a graveyard of gigantic alien vessels where you have an Aerial Canyon Chase against enemy fighters.
• The Homeworld games had at least two boneyards-in-space, the Karos graveyard (lightyears wide and has many still-functional ships inside) and the ancient ships in the Garden of Kadesh.
• One of the first levels of Bloodrayne takes place in a ship graveyard in the middle of a Louisiana bayou.
• Super Mario Bros.
  • Super Mario 64: Jolly Roger Bay with the lone sinker ship in the center.
  • Several levels in Super Mario Galaxy, most notably the Drip Drop Galaxy and the Deep Dark Galaxy which both feature ruined ships.
  • Mario Kart 7: The Wario Shipyard in Star Cup takes place in an underwater place with many wrecked ships.
  • The Ghoulish Galleon from Mario Sports Mix is more of a Gangplank Galleon version.
• The entire rest of the universe in Deadnaut has ended up at this state in the time it took humanity to finally leave the solar system. Individual derelict ships are ripe for investigation by you and your crew of deadnauts.
• In Knights of the Old Republic, the planet Lehon becomes a ship graveyard due to an ancient jamming field installed there to keep wandering ships away from the Star Forge.
  • Malachor V is this in the second game, the planet is still orbited by the wrecked fleets destroyed by the superweapon detonated there five years ago.
• Slice of Sea: One of the later, most obviously decayed areas of the game features a former port complex and enormous beached ships on the dried seabed.
• The Ord Mantell Junkyard from Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire. You jump from rail platform to rail platform, through what looks like a warehouse, a junkyard filled with derelict structures, thousands of ships smashed together, some sort of brown toxic stuff in the ground that kills you as soon as you fall from the wagons, and end up in a smelter. If you pay attention, you'll see an X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Sandcrawler, AT-AT, AT-ST, Corellian YT-1300 freighter, even a mostly-intact Star Destroyer.
• Krut: The Mythic Wings have a level set atop the seas of Himmaphan, above wreckage of various destroyed, upturned ships, where you proceed by leaping from one wrecked vessel to another while fighting Giant Crab enemies. It ends with you facing a Sea Serpent boss.
• Total Annihilation has "Dump", a moon around the Core homeworld which has accumulated four thousand years of garbage. Said garbage is the remains of Core war units and is the only source of metal in that mission. Any battlefield will resemble this given enough time. Those wrecks really do pile up.
• Supreme Commander is similar, though most wrecks don't last all that long due to ever-busy engineers reclaiming them for mass. Most missions in the game, starting near the end and in always in Forged Alliance, also start the player in the midst of a ruined base or city to provide ample resources to jump-start your economy/military.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Haunted Ship in Sonic Rush Adventure.
  • Along with Pirate Storm (though some of the ships are functional) in Sonic and the Secret Rings. Overlap with Gangplank Galleon.
• Lost Fleet in Spyro: Year of the Dragon is filled with sunken ships, but mostly landlocked...It's implied that these ships used to fly, before the magic started to fade.
• One of the more common backgrounds seen in the Super Robot Wars series has identifiable ships floating as debris in the background. Usually they'll be ships like Magellan-class, Salamis-class and Musai-class, especially if the game includes series from Gundam's Universal Century. Depending on the game, units gain improved evasion when in such squares, presumably representing the unit using such debris as cover.
• Metroid:
  • Metroid Prime: The Frigate Orpheon has seen better days. By the time Samus arrives it to answer an emergency call, it's a wrecked vessel where all machinery is malfunctioning, and the two strongest creatures in it (Parasite Queen and Meta Ridley) are about to break free. Samus manages to defeat the former, but the latter flies and the vessel crashes into Tallon IV. Later in the game, its sunken remains can be visited.
  • Metroid Prime 3: Corruption: The GFS Valhalla became a gruesome Ghost Ship after the Space Pirates ravaged it, killing all members within and hijacking their Aurora Unit to take control of Phaaze and lure its Phazon meteors into innocent planets, all under the command of Dark Samus. By the time the game's heroine reaches it, all she sees along the way is passageways filled with Marine corpses and assorted creatures. The place can only be explored in full by collecting the Energy Cells found in the affected planets.
  • Super Metroid: The Wrecked Ship, like the name suggests, is a spacecraft that crash-landed into Zebes a long time ago. It is overrun by the ghostly Coverns and guarded by Phantoon. The whole place is initially under an inoperative state, meaning the Save and Map Stations cannot be used, but this is reversed after Phantoon is defeated.
• Donkey Kong Country
  • Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest: The first three worlds. First there's a ship that's in mint condition except for a hole torn into the hull, then there's a ship that's been torn in half and is sitting in the middle of a swamp. And then there's the half-submerged ship in lava...
  • Donkey Kong 64: Gloomy Galleon, the fourth world, has a large number of wrecked ships. One of them, notably, is the Gangplank Galleon from the first two Country games.
  • Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze: The Lost Mangroves, the first world, are loosely based on the Bermuda Triangle and as a result feature a ridiculous number of shipwrecks (mostly of more modern, World War II-looking battleships rather than the piratey masted ships of previous games), crashed planes and abandoned submarines. One of the secret levels at the end, Crazy Clouds, features a whole graveyard of crashed planes on the side of a floating mountain, with a few stray propellers and other bits still, barely, airborne.
• You can discover one of these in Skies of Arcadia for profit.
  • There is also an entire region you can explore named the Dark Rift, (Sargasso in the original Japanese release) which is probably a Shout-Out to the Bermuda Triangle and Sargasso Sea. The area is littered with scores of ruined ships, many you can loot, and one with a survivor you can recruit.
• Endless Ocean features one of these for its final bonus area. You can pet baby great white sharks there.
  • Endless Ocean: Blue World has the Ciceros Strait region, which hosts quite a few shipwrecks. Adult great white sharks will attack you there! (Well, at a couple of wrecks on the edges. And there are a couple of one-time dangerous shark encounters at wrecks closer to the middle.)
• An area aptly called "Ship Graveyard" in Notrium.
• Fallout:
  • Fallout 3 has a few derelict graveyards of nuclear cars - a few stray shots can start a spectacular chain reaction. Meanwhile the town of Megaton is built from the hulls of planes salvaged from a nearby airbase, plus other assorted vehicles. Also, Rivet City is built on a beached aircraft carrier, which in turn houses many derelict planes. The Point Lookout DLC has numerous derelict boats, including a Chinese spy submarine that is part of one of the side quests.
  • Fallout 4 has Libertalia, a Raider fortress built on a flotilla of derelict boats, with a capsized supertanker as the centerpiece.
• Freelancer plays a variation of this, where some asteroid fields are actually junk fields. This one is played totally straight, however, with a debris field littered with the remains of a battle between Rheinland and the Kusari-backed Gas Miners Guild.
  • It also features a literal derelict graveyard in a nebula in the Omicron Alpha system, where Outcast ace pilots are buried along with their ships and their most prized possessions, those being some of the strongest weapons in the game, which the player can loot if they don't mind doing a bit of the old graverobbing.
  • And the Nomads crawling about.
• Halo features several:
  • Halo 3 features a level that includes fighting across dried lakebeds and the derelict shipping supertankers that now rest there.
  • The final level of Halo: Reach requires fighting your way to and through the Ship Breaking Yards to reach the Pillar of Autumn. As a place typically only for non-functioning ships it remained the only reasonably safe place for a planet-side ship to hide.
  • Halo 3: ODST features encounters with numerous derelict locations, with flashback levels and audio logs showing how they got that way.
• Hero of Sparta has a level called the "Sea of Dead Ships", a shipyard filled with capsized vessels that you must navigate your way across. Besides being attacked by the Colossus nearby, you also face off against hordes of hostile Fish People and a Sea Serpent.
• Level 5 of R-Type Delta is an interdimensional derelict graveyard, containing random scrap and enemies from the first R-Type. While most of the derelict ships can't manouver anymore, they do have operational weapon systems.
• Star Fox
  • The Black Hole in the original Star Fox.
  • There was a 'starship graveyard' in Star Fox 64.
• The 'main' quest of Age of Pirates 2: City of Abandoned Ships involves traveling to the eponymous conglomeration of derelict ships fastened together, forming a floating town. Well not really.
• Sir Raleigh's level "Gunboat Graveyard" in Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, with the graveyard being deliberately created by Raleigh himself.
• EVE Online has a few of these. The City of God is a rather prominent one, formed from the remains of ancient city in space. Another more recent on is the remains of the battle of B-R5RB, a player battle that broke the record for biggest battle in MMO history. After the battle, wrecks of the 75 titans and various other capital ships were permanently added to that spot.
• Ratchet & Clank:
  • The Spaceship Graveyard in Ratchet & Clank (2002).
  • The latter half of Octonok Cay in Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One.
• The Ship Graveyard level in Hydro Thunder.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • The Keyblade Graveyard in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep.
  • Port Royal in Kingdom Hearts II features Isla Del Muerte from the first movie and a second area filled with shipwrecks when Sora and co return to the world.
• Far Cry 2 has the Train variety in multiple areas, and a multiplayer map. Also Saharan Shipwrecks of a sort if you follow the tracks into the desert.
• Mass Effect:
  • Mass Effect 2 has Korlus and the far-side of the Omega-4 Relay. The former is a planet-sized landfill, the latter an Asteroid Thicket made up of derelict ships lacking the IFF transponder that tells the relay to send a ship through safely instead of shooting it. If you can get past the black hole flanking its exit point.
  • The Mass Effect 3 DLC mission "Leviathan" ends on an ocean planet dotted with spaceships knocked out of the air by Leviathan's last line of defense.
  • 3 also has the wrecks of a huge number of space stations, including the shredded remnants of the geth megaproject that the quarians destroyed. Some of them, like Pinnacle and Arcturus, provide unique war assets or intel packages; others are just destroyed fuel depots that let you refuel.
• The Sirius star system in Sol-Feace has several ship components — including a large sheet of fuselage — that come careening towards the player's starship, all of which can be shot back and redirected with opposing fire.
• The Pirate's Fate has the Cursed Coast. It's not literally cursed, but it is filled with the hulls of ships hunting for the rumored treasure there and wrecked on its many reefs.
• Prehistoric Isle in 1930 features this in the second part of the underwater level, showing all the ships that have gone missing in the Bermuda Triangle.
• Seventh story mission in Jaws Unleashed has you chasing some divers into a lagoon filled with partially and completely sunken ships.
• The level Pirate Bay in Jitsu Squad is set in one such shipyard, full of wrecked ships, but also populated by leftover pirate mooks and ghosts.
• The Ship Graveyard Simulator series has your character tearing apart derelict ships of varying sizes including tugboats and freighters, with DLC including old submarines and warships, selling the scrap for profit.
• Starfleet Adventures, a TOS-based fan conversion for EV Nova, has one of these in the system Surplus Depot Z15.
• In the X Universe, the sector President's End has about a dozen burned out capital ships and space stations floating around, leftovers from a Kha'ak attack in X2: The Threat. Many other sectors have smaller graveyards.
  • The aptly-named zone, Wrecksville, in X: Rebirth, is full of shattered capital ship hulls, mostly Balor missile frigates and Taranis destroyers. It's never stated where all the ships came from, though it's likely from the Plutarch Mining Corporation overthrowing the Argon Federation remnant in the system.
• Uncharted:
  • In Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, Drake is kidnapped by pirates and has to fight through an entire ship graveyard that the pirates have made their base, and climb over the decaying husks of the boats. The first fight arena here is That One Level for many players on the harder difficulties.
  • And in Uncharted 4: A Thief's End Nate goes through one of sunken galleons near the end of the game, possibly as a Call-Back to the Uncharted 3 level.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom has The Flying Dutchman's Graveyard, which is full of broken ship parts.
• Tau Volantis in Dead Space 3 has the remains of the SCAF flotilla sent there, including 4 intact ships.
• The Fallen Arm in Xenoblade Chronicles 1 which also has a bit of Palmtree Panic thrown in because of the setting in place before it fell.
• Sunless Sea has the underwater port of Wrack, which is essentially a gigantic pile of sunken ships the dwellers have joined together to make into a proper habitat. They are always looking for more ships to add, and enlist poets and other persuasive individuals to captivate captains that might sail close by, to sink them and add them to their city (and loot their stores, of course). They also occasionally use one of the broken wrecks as an improvised combat zubmarine when they want to be more active about it. There is also Khan's Shadow, a Wretched Hive where all criminals and rejects from the New Khanate live, which is build on a myriad of old, wrecked and decommissioned ships.
• Sunless Skies has the Flotilla, which can be found near the Avid Horizon in Albion. This aggregate of roped-up ships are floating on the water that spilled from the Unterzee into the Heavens after the Horizon's gate were opened. Three different communities live on those decommissioned ships.
• Barrelbottom, in Alice: Madness Returns, is an underwater town surrounded by various sunken ships, and is itself built on one.
• In Foxhole, component spawn sites are filled with tank debris; the rusted out treads and oddly solid hulls are window dressing, but the bombed out tanks with wrecked turrets can be harvested for components and occasionally tech parts.
• Quite a few maps in World of Tanks are strewn with the wrecks of destroyed tanks. Kharkov is a particularly notorious one, with the wrecks of Panzers and T-34s all over the place. Alternatively, any particularly brutal chokepoint quickly becomes one of these. "Heavy Alley" on Himmelsdorf, the castle on Erlenberg, the killing field on Westfield, the valley on Lakeville, the city on Highway, and the hills on Karelia, Malinovka, and Mines are all notorious for quickly becoming choked with burning tanks.
• An easily missed location in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is The Pilgrim's Trench. It's pretty deep so you'll need waterbreathing, either via magic (i.e. spells, potions, or enchantments) or a racial ability (i.e. play as an Argonian) to explore it.
• Deep Sky Derelicts takes place inside a giant spaceship graveyard.
• FAR: Lone Sails takes place After the End in a world where the seas dried up leaving a lot of shipwrecks on now dry land.
• Warframe
  • The surface of Europa is dotted with numerous wrecks of Corpus obelisks that crashed during the many Corpus-Grineer conflicts, one of which you can still see above the horizon. These wrecks are far from abandoned, however; the Corpus has set up outposts to scavenge whatever they can to recoup the losses.
  • Eris is surrounded by derelict spaceships consumed by the Infestation.
• In Suikoden V the graveyard of ships is a reef where many ships have been run aground by a monster that lives in the area. The prince comes here with members of the Island Nations Federation Navy, after seeing a rune cannon shell being fired into the air.
• Splatoon 2: Salmon Run mode takes place in a restricted ocean zone, full of polluted water and rusting debris. Among the wreckage that can be found here are the remnants of a hydroelectric dam, a derelict ship marooned on a sandbar, and curiously, the ruins of a space shuttle that seems to have crashed into the sea millenia ago. This area, of course, appears to be completely uninhabited — barring the territorial mutant Salmonids that make these waters their home.
• Pokémon Legends: Arceus has Deadwood Haunt, a location filled with shipwrecks and crates the player can get items from. At night it fills up with Ghost-Types.

Webcomics

• In Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger, the pirates are going for the old "Sargasso of space" trick, which would produce this in due course.

Western Animation

• Ben 10: While visiting Cape Canaveral, the Tennysons happen upon a "Ship's Graveyard" for NASA's old projects (while fighting aliens that resemble your conventional movie monsters). Note that there is such a spacecraft cemetery in Real Life but it is not, as the show suggests, in NASA's backyard.
• Final Space: In episode 4 when the group travels to the dying star, it is surrounded by wrecks and debris from destroyed space ships.
• The Bermuda Tetrahedron in Futurama, also including the first Planet Express ship.
• One episode of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero has one. The Joes have to rig up a sail on the aircraft carrier to get out.
• Hilda and Frida find one while looking for Wood Man’s body. They later tell the Kraken about it so her children will have enough to eat without her having to attack more ships.
• The first episode of Megas XLR had Kiva fighting Glorft patrol among the wreckages of Earth Coalition ships from Battle of the Last Stand with the Earth Coalition logo serving as Dramatic Space Drifting in the opening shot.
• The classic Popeye cartoon Goonland has the shore of Goon Island littered with derelict ships - Popeye has to ram his way through to dock.
• An occasional spooky spot in Scooby-Doo episodes and films; the first was haunted by Captain Cutler, a Vengeful Ghost in a Creepy Old-Fashioned Diving Suit.
• Star Trek: The Animated Series: "The Time Trap" features a "Bermuda Triangle IN SPACE!" ("the Delta Triangle"). The Enterprise and a Klingon ship are both drawn into a Negative Space Wedgie, where they discover a whole fleet of trapped and seemingly derelict ships, some of which have been there for centuries...along with their crews, who have created an entire multi-species society.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: In "Mystery of a Thousand Moons", a Separatist weapons system implied to be a prototype for the Death Star's superlaser has left a whole lot of destroyed spaceships amidst the thousand moons of Iego, a planet that really doesn't need the extra orbital clutter.
• Star Wars: The Bad Batch: In "Battle Scars", the Bad Batch travel to meet Rex on Bracca , where the landscape is dominated by the hulks of Venator Star Destroyers awaiting scrapping, in order to find one with a working medical suite so they can remove their inhibitor chips.
• The "Other Railway" from Thomas & Friends, which is for some reason full of rusted and decaying steam locomotive parts.

Real Life

• As well as numerous fictional depictions as a Derelict Graveyard, the Bermuda Triangle and in particular the Sargasso Sea have real-world reputations for being perilous areas littered with the wrecks of ages. However, analyses have shown that the only reason the Bermuda Triangle accumulates shipwrecks is because so many shipping lanes pass through it. Statistically, it's actually safer than the rest of the ocean.
• Scapa Flow, the primary anchorage of the Royal Navy's Home Fleet, was full of shipwrecks after the German High Seas Fleet was scuttled at Scapa Flow at the end of World War I. Few if any of those ships are still there now, however; thanks to the shallow water of the harbor, most of the scuttled ships were cut up for scrap between the wars.
• World War II produced several ships' graveyards around the world:
  • Pearl Harbor has a small graveyard of sunken ships, the USS Arizona and Utah, that have remained there since the Japanese attack on the harbor during World War II. There is also an LST from the West Loch Disaster and a pair of Japanese midget submarines, though one was buried as fill during the construction of a landside pier.
    • The Arizona is an actual graveyard. 1,100 dead sailors still remain in the submerged wreck, and survivors are being buried there as well.
    • The reason there is not more ships on the harbor bottom is because the US Navy undertook an extensive Salvage operation after the attack; the intent being to try and restore them to working order, recover equipment for use on other ships, and/or to free up valuable berthing space. Not only were they able to bring life back to the old battleships California, Nevada, and West Virginia; they even managed to recover the USS Oklahoma, which had rolled after being torpedoed, using the blunt method of attaching a bunch of cables and winches to her and just pulling her back upright. They tried the same trick with the Utah, but the ship got stuck in the mud and the effort was abandoned. Arizona, however, was not a part of these efforts, as the damage she sustained ment it was practically impossible, not to mention dangerous, to conduct salvage operations^note The ship's ammo magazine exploded and blew the ship in half, and turned the parts still above the water into a burning charnel house; few of the ship's crew made it off the ship.. Thus, aside from a few trips to recover smaller items (like the Ship's Pay Chest), it was largely left alone. During the war, many men going to and from war zones would gaze out and see her remains jutting out of the water; a haunting reminder of why they were fighting, and a remembrance of those who lost their lives.
  • "Ironbottom Sound" between the islands of Guadalcanal and Tulagi was the site of five major and countless minor naval engagements during the six-month-long Battle for Guadalcanal in 1942-43. At least fifty vessels of both sides, ranging from PT boats to battleships, were sunk or blown apart during those battles, with tremendous loss of life. A sailors' legend claims that a magnetic compass is useless there because of all the wrecks.
  • Certain points off the East Coast of the United States were slaughtering-grounds for patrolling German U-boats in 1942, after the US entered the war but before any antisub defense had been organized. The Outer Banks off North Carolina are especially infamous for this; close to four hundred merchant ships were sunk in that area between January and June 1942.
  • The Japanese Navy used the atoll of Chuuk (then called Truk) as a major naval base during the war. Two massive American strikes against the atoll carpeted the lagoon seafloor with sunken Japanese warships and merchant ships.
• The area off Cape Hatteras in North Carolina is referred to as "The Graveyard of the Atlantic" with good reason. Between the depredations of U-boats in World War II, the ever-shifting sandbanks known as Diamond Shoals, and desctruction wrought by Atlantic hurricanes, that area has over 600 known shipwrecks.
• Bikini Atoll was the site of several atomic bomb tests involving a "fleet" of derelict ships, many of which now lie in shallow waters on the bottom of the atoll lagoon. Since 1996 it has been possible to go diving among the wrecks there.
• The US military maintains several large bases with old and decommissioned war machines:
  • The Boneyard is a vast stock of decommissioned and semi-functional aircraft at Davis–Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Arizona. The Boneyard is a prime source of spare parts for aging USAF aircraft.
  • The US Navy maintains hundreds of old ships in many bases and naval shipyards around the country. Some are part of the Reserve Fleet; others have been stricken from the Navy List and are awaiting disposal.
  • Tooele Army Depot in Utah was the land-based version of this for the U.S. Army for many years, hosting derelict tanks and other combat equipment. It's since been realigned as an ammunition depot.
  • The China Lake Naval Air testing facility was like this for decades. Starting in WWII, it was used to develop weapons, and obsolete vehicles were brought in to be used as testing targets. Over decades of testing quite a number of airplanes, tanks, and jeeps were simply left in the surrounding desert because they became obsolete even for use as targets. However after a while people realized that many of the derelicts there had weathered the ages extremely well, and that many were among the last of their kind and thus were hauled off to museums.
• The Deadpool, also called the Staten Island Ship Graveyard, on Rossville, Staten Island, New York. Called an "accidental maritime museum" because of the collection of historical ships, such as the subchaser USS PC-1264, the first US Navy ship in World War II to have a predominantly African-American crew or the firetug Abram S. Hewitt which was the floating command post at the General Slocum disaster. Parts of Salt were filmed there.
• All vehicles used in cleaning up the Chernobyl disaster quickly became too contaminated to ever use again, and were abandoned in the Exclusion Zone, resulting in several of these. The river near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is littered with the half-sunken remains of ships contaminated by the 1986 disaster. One of these wrecks, the Skadovsk, is featured as a stalker base in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat.
  • Many areas in the former Soviet Union contain plenty of abandoned vessels. This is not because of any kind of contamination - the previous owners just found it easier/cheaper to get rid of old and/or damaged ships by simply going away, rather than paying for a proper decommissioning. Considering that law enforcement can be very lax in certain areas, and that nobody ever complains (the former Soviet Union is a big place - a few dumped ships are unlikely to mess anyone's backyard), it's hardly a wonder that many wreckages are still there today.
• Historically, Namibia's Skeleton Coast is one of the deadliest coastlines for ships in the world. Dozens of ships have been wrecked here, with the oldest one dating back to 1533.
• Paracas, a bay in Ica, Peru has sunken ships in what's now a national reserve, they are wooden and much joy for children...
• There are several derelict boats along the sloughs of the Snohomish River near Everett, WA, including some that are high and dry.
• Dai Woodham's scrapyard, Barry Island, Wales. It was filled with hundreds of retired steam engines, several of which Dai Woodham and his family sold to the British steam preservation movement.
• In the fifties and early sixties, many railroad yards in the United States and Canada contained long lines of condemned steam locomotives awaiting their final journey to the scrapper.
• Some parts (or most) of the Aral Sea, in Kazakhstan, have come to resemble a strange variant of this. Due to various factors, the sea has dried out, leaving vast areas that were once submerged now resembling a desert. As a result there are rusted ships that have been left stranded on the now dry land. The towns that were once ports have no more use for them, obviously, so there is little bother to move them.
• The Chittagong ship breaking yards in Bangladesh look the part, though most of the vessels there have been partially or largely dismantled, and new ones are added periodically. The ships are hauled up onto a broad shallow tidal mudflat and broken up by hand. The site is over two miles long, so there's plenty to see.
• The Goodwin Sands, a sand bar off the south coast of the UK, boast one of the highest numbers of shipwrecks anywhere in the world; many of the wrecks have now broken up, but more than 2,000 ships have gone down there.
• The Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay, in the Potomac off the coast of Maryland. The majority of the wrecks are leftovers from a large number of cheaply, hastily-built boats commissioned for the United States' entrance to World War I but never finished in time for service; although the government and the contractors did try to find homes and uses for them (particularly when more kept being built for some time before the contract was finally ended), for the most part the fleet was allowed to sit and rot. Eventually burned, scuttled, and abandoned, it became a place for any ship no one wanted any more to be dumped, and today is an overgrown haven for many river ecosystems.
• Any preserved railway will have one or more long sidings filled with rusting locomotives and rolling stock, awaiting their turn for restoration. Some may well have been bought from the Barry Island scrapyard mentioned above. There are also pictures of the sidings at Horsted Keynes (now part of the Bluebell Railway) showing that long before their sale to the preservation movement, they were used to store locomotives awaiting overhaul or scrapping.
• The Fourni Ship Graveyard off the namesake archipelago near Turkey is considered the "Ancient Shipwreck Capital of the World." Countries and city-states from nearly every human era ran their shipping lanes right past the islands, and when combined with the forces of underwater currents and geography, this led to an extremely dense area of shipwrecks with incredible variety between them—the actual "graveyard" is just 17 square miles, but as of October 2018, 58 known wrecks have been found within it; for comparison, this is nearly double the amount of known wrecks in the entirety of the 875-square-mile Lake Michigan, giving the Fourni archipelago a 76 times higher shipwreck density per square mile.
• Lake Washington adjacent to Seattle contains the wrecks of over 400 vessels, either accidentally sunken or intentionally scuttled, including three Navy minesweepers, a number of passenger ferries, and a barge carrying rail cars still loaded with coal.

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