User blog comment:Zaneto/Dear Admiral/@comment-25779449-20150109175748/@comment-24978536-20150111065142

When you reach a certain point in the game, you'll find that there is no one left to modernize anymore, except those ship girls you are never going to use in combat. Regarding weapon modernization, screws are difficult enough to get so weapon modernization is not done that often. The actual equipments needed for weapon modernization is not a large amount either.

Also, one can view modernization and scrapping as the same thing - in both ways, the ship girl is ultimately removed from the fleet, and it could be said the resources one gets from scrapping is used for upgrading another ship girl when using modernization. Personally though, as I have somewhat of a Shinto-like view on the ship girls and the Kancolle world itself, and view of the ship girls and the shinkaisen as the kami (or spirits) who resided in the war ships, my view of what actually happens in modernization and scrapping is a bit different. In short, I see that in modernization the spirit (the ship girl herself) is fused with another spirit (ship girl) - the spirits exist as one in a large pool of spirits in the first place (from where the ship girls somewhat randomly appear with things such as construction,) so fusing to them is something natural. Scrapping on the other hand, is something similar to purification, and the spirit (ship girl) is removed from existence, but that same spirit still exists within the pool of spirits and can be obtained again, even if you keep one of that ship girl in your fleet in the first place.