A Starfleet general order requiring that a ship whose entire crew has died be destroyed within a day, invoked when a plague sweeps the Enterprise in Albatross.
General Order 6 provides that if everyone aboard a Starfleet vessel has perished, the ship is to destroy itself after twenty-four hours so that whatever killed the crew cannot spread to others.
It is cited in the Animated Series episode Albatross. Doctor McCoy is arrested on Dramia for supposedly causing a plague that devastated Dramia II nineteen years earlier. While Kirk investigates, the same disease breaks out on the Enterprise and the crew, apart from the immune Spock, begin to change colour and weaken.
With the ship quarantined and the order hanging over it, Spock frees McCoy from his cell so that he can search for a cure. McCoy realises that the plague is brought on by auroras and that a survivor's antibodies will defeat it, which clears his name.