[@DeadbeatWalking]

Yeah man, of course. 
So the idea I'm planning to go with is that all the ships they use are found crashed out in the great wastes, which rangers would drag as close to the mountains as they could. The ships would be from when intergalactic civilization was a thing. While most of the hermits probably couldn't tell you what a cylinder head looks like, there is a specific path that studies space ships, and people on this path would go salvage from some ships and put them all into one until it maybe works one day or they give up. [s]Definitely not by flying the corpses of their mothers given vehicular form.[/s] Naturally, it won't be the most spaceworthy vessel, more or less like driving a pre-95 car held together by duct tape except in space, so it might be a goal for the party to find an actual ship and/or engineer somewhere.

The first ship they sent out may have very well been one they were holding onto, but that one never came back.