stragglers

Largest droneships ever built. Autonomous deep space black ops vessels, operated by the Shadow Masters. Less than 20 were ever built and it's possible that some of them had survived to this day, hidden in interstellar vacuum.

They weren't designed and manufactured by the Old Corporations - there was an external contractor. A mysterious entity that probably was the most technologically advanced human faction in history^.

Cloaking devices, extremely sensitive passive sensors and low energy output missile systems. 

Typical Straggler was more similar to a huge, elongated space station than to a space vessel, yet alone a warship. The known Stragglers were enormous - 200 to 500 meters of length in total. Engines were heavily shielded and located far astern. Antennas and sensor arrays were everywhere. Artificial Minds of the Stragglers were very complex - maybe the most complex ever made.

• It's interesting that almost no droneships were affected by the Ascension. What if all Stragglers had disappeared because they actually Ascended and became self-aware? 

^ when the Old Order crumbled to dust, they left to follow the Chaos Path (?)

 

the xenophobic swarms

There are at least few conglomerates of rogue droneships that hunt down any other space vessels. They comprise of small M-class Asteroid Survey Drones, armed with probing lasers and microwave emitters. Each swarm seems to be made of hundreds of those ships, much more than should be deployed in any given systems, even during the golden age of exploration, when the Old Corporations were dispatching countless manned and unmanned ships.

There is a theory that some kind of automated factories or maybe drone-carriers (most of them have manufacturing capabilities) are present within the far reaches of the 'drone-invaded' systems, which would explain the sheer numbers of the droneships.

So far, no one was able to explain the hostile behaviour of the swarms. No traces of tampering or viruses were found in the destroyed droneships. Of course, there are several hypotheses:

1. The virus is too sophisticated to be detected with current technology;
2. Whatever the nature of the 'hostile subroutine' is, it self-deletes when the drone's systems cease to function; 
3. The droneships are possessed by the Void; 
4. They are controlled by some kind of extremely evolved biological entity, similar to a fungus;
5. The drones possess some kind of hive mind that is semi-conscious, treating mankind as a competition.

The first report about a human being controlling the Swarm (without any apparent equipment). 

explorer droneships

• Fleet of autonomous exploration units, built by KATHODOS, the one of the Old Corporations.
• They all are of one pattern, albeit with slight variations between the units.
• 93 meters of length is the standard for each unit (variations doesn't apply to the dimensions of the superstructure or general shape).
• Ion propulsion. 
• Heavy ceramic armor with additional magnetic coils and swarms of maintenance bots to take of drone's outer shell. Even the antennas and sensors are armored.
• No weapons, although the microwave measuring lasers could fry other ships' sensors if used at full power. Nevertheless, droneship's systems do not possess any instructions allowing them to use the inboard systems offensively.
• There were probably thousands of them made (or the numeration was incredibly inconsistent).
• Modern humans managed to reconnect with some of them to download data. Some other 'went insane' - whatever that means, considering rudimentary nature of the Explorers' onboard computers.
• Droneships gained sentience due to the exposure to the Deep Void. The same thing caused their minds to shatter. 
• What happens when a sentient being becomes exposed to the Deep Void for decades, even centuries? 
• There's also at least one successful attempt of 'hacking' the droneship's system to give it new set of instructions.
• Seems that their main goal was to detect anomalies, according to the 'Eldgarn's Charts' - a particular set of star maps uploaded to each Explorer's core memory. Charts are encrypted or just presented in way incomprehensible to any system other than ship's navigational computer.