What the hell is this, and what can I do with it?

[2Karl]

So I'm near the end of my trip to colonia and decide to go exploring on a planet. and I run across this thing:

Spoiler

I'm pretty excited about this so I scan it with my data link scanner in the hope I can maybe fuind out what it is.... So the scan's complete and... now what? Any idea what this is? Or what I can do with it? Am I doing this wrong?

 

[son of khzvoltz]

this is a crashed Navigation beacon, good find CMDR

there isn't too much you can do with these I belive

 

[2Karl]

Which begs the question, what's a crashed nav beacon doing in an undiscovered system, on the planet furthest from the star?

 

[Cpt Shadow Wolfe]

I've actually encountered those pesky skimmers once out in the black, was out prospecting for some jumponium and saw movement out of the corner of the scream and my heart skips a bit because there ain't supposed to be anything that far out, turned out to be 3 skimmers guarding a crash site or something. Its a procedural thing so its likely to happen anywhere I guess. Just recently found a crashed SRV with about 6 cargo pods around it, I'm 10k Lys from Colonia, and the question I had was, how could one SRV have 6 cargo pods, and where is the ship that the SRV belonged to?

 

[Redfox]

Which begs the question, what's a crashed nav beacon doing in an undiscovered system, on the planet furthest from the star?

TIL: If you google "illuminati confirmed space" the first image you get is a Elite Dangerous screenshot - make of that what you will.

 

[Major Klutz]

They are random spawns that can appear in deep deep space. Even all the way on the far side of the galaxy.
Just random "flavor" sprinkles the game throws in on virtually any planet with the chance being reduced the further away you are from populated space. AFAIK though the chance is reduced, it's never reduced to zero.

You can scan them for intel packages and that's all. They are not persistent, so if you return to the same spot later or log out and back in right next to it, it will be gone.

 

[2Karl]

You can scan them for intel packages and that's all.

Ah yes I scanned it and it told me an intel package had been produced - I assume that's not something I can read? Apparently it's worth about 2700 credits to the empire...

 

[Major Klutz]

Ah yes I scanned it and it told me an intel package had been produced - I assume that's not something I can read? Apparently it's worth about 2700 credits to the empire...

Yeah. All you can do is turn it under the contacts page at an Empire controlled station.

 

[Sapyx]

It is a non-permanent POI. Which means that, unlike things like the Thargoid wrecks, Dav's Hope and Jameson's Ship, this wreck will disappear if you log out and log in again.

There are numerous similar randomly-generated wrecks and ruins. There is a small but nonzero chance of finding them anywhere in the galaxy. You can also find crashed satellites, space probes and wrecked SRVs and ships, as well as the typical skimmer-base cargo cache. And yes, you can sell the data to the named party, who will reward you for doing so. And that's about all you can "do" with them.

Another small piece of trivia. Non-crashed, fully functional beacons, up in space at Nav Beacon and Checkpoint POIs, emit in Morse Code the name of the object which the beacon is within the gravitational sphere of influence of. For Nav Beacons, this is the name of the star. But for these crashed beacons, they emit the letters of the word BROKEN, in random order.

 

[varonica]

I just look at these as, many years ago humanity sent thousands of probes out into space, some of them returned information, many of them just vanished, so there will be a scattering of them across the galaxy. I have found a few but I don't generally look for them so may have missed many.

 

[2Karl]

... and Jameson's Ship.

Well that's something I need to find.