They say that scrapyards and boneyard’s can be the perfect place to find spare parts. If you are lucky you might find a vehicle that isn’t actually in bad shape, and was just put there after only a few years of service due to perceived obsolescence.

The Iridescence is definitely using scrapyards to put it back together! It's a gutted ship that has unique technology, so it needs lots of repairs. The builders were defeated so there's a lot of jury rigging.

I wonder what kind of time limit they are under. I once heard a story that a group of people managed to completely restore a large vehicle in scrapyard condition in just 30 days but this necessitated a large amount of people doing it pretty much 24 seven not even taking a break for Christmas. Essentially what would happen is that people would work as hard as they could for as long is as they could and when they were so tired that they couldn’t do it anymore someone came to replace them until they need to be taken over by the previous person after they had been rested. What makes this even more amazing is that all the people who were doing this we’re all volunteers, and it was essentially a labor of love without any expectation of reward. They were under a big time limit, although eventually, they actually managed to pull it off. This was in the 1970s and I forget what vehicle they were repairing but it was something pretty big.

Not that urgent of a limit.

It can't be safe to handle live wires bare-handed. (Bare-taloned?)

Wires that thick? Higher current, lower voltage - probably 48V. Fire hazard, not shock.

Thanks.

Engineering training. 48V is common in DC distribution, because it's just below the limit considered a shock hazard - which means you don't need especially trained and certified electricians to come in every time you want to move equipment around. Also red-blue is a common color code for DC wiring. You can't send high power over any great distance that way, but sometimes you will find a rack full of equipment (usually communications) all fed off of 48V supplied by a power supply at the bottom of the rack or end of the row - it's more energy efficient that way, as you don't need to have your UPS convert DC to AC only to immediately turn it back into DC again.

Whatever those wires power, it's probably medium power - no more than half a kilowatt tops - and somewhere in that room or an adjacent one. Lighting, in-ship intercom, ventilation fans or valves, coolant pumps, mag-locks for the doors, something like that. There will be a service panel nearby where they originate. Not turning off power at the panel first suggests this is a very urgent repair, and there isn't time to follow proper safety procedures.

Artistic license. I didn't specify live wires, but it'd look silly with gloves.