Yeah, an ejected data core is something that I think has been on the wish list for a long time. It would provide an alternate to the "lose everything" scenario, without eliminating the death penalty, or permitting suiciding back to the bubble to sell your data, or anything like that.
Even if there was a time limit on it, after all you wouldn't want the galaxy filling up with abandoned data caches, that would be ok, you can buckyball a long way in a short period of time.
Anyway back to my story, an intersting turn of events has found me backtracking a couple of hundred light years.
The most amazing coincidence happened, I picked it up after a short while but I am still stunned at how it could happen. It appears that one of the stars I visited before I destroyed my ship had actually been visited by me on a previous trip, an old trip as you will soon find out. So there I was following my "previously visited" trail scanning all the systems to gather my lost data when suddenly my jumps seemed a lot shorter, around 25ly. Checking in the gal map for a reason I could see a trail of short jumps heading off into the distance in roughly the direction I was intending to go, and for each of these systems I could view the full system layout, this just didn't seem right.
I backtracked along my current course and suddenly came across an area where there was an overlapping trail of visited stars, it seems I have been this way once before on a forgotten expedition and mapped a path through and one star was visited both trips, it must have been in a pre-engineering ship due to the short jump range of around 25ly, so I was following the wrong "previously visited" trail of stars, isn't that remarkable, of all the luck, so I am backtracking a few hundred light years to get back on course, I can only think I have been out this way one to many times when that sort of thing starts happening!
Still, I have another trip planned this way, back to the crystaline forest planet, there must be more around that area, I can't believe this one planet is the only site so I am going to do a quick survey of the area to establish a rough region for them.