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 (?)

 

euclid surveyor

A most famous non-autonomous exploration ship, presumably built in the Old Days. Its history spanned hundreds of years. At the beginning it was just exploring the vicinity of the Base Worlds, mapping everything. This was before the first Primary Vectors were given.

When everything fell, the ship was forgotten. It was abandoned orbiting the Emerald II. Then, who knows how many years later, it was rediscovered and restarted without almost any refit. Most of its tech was still more advanced and in better shape than contemporary equipment.

The Surveyor's crew found something in the ship's logs.

They started visiting the Old Sectors, traveling to the 'Symmetrical Coordinates' (eg. -76,-76,-76 or 13,13,13). It's said that they were the first to visit the Origin Point.

And then, somewhere between the eras of Primary and Secondary Vectors, the Surveyor vanished. Some say that they it's still there, with its crew in in Deep Cryosleep, slowly heading towards 9999,9999,9999 (or its negative counterpart). Others speculate that the ship was either ripped apart by a primordial black hole or swallowed by an uncharted Stellar-mass one.

Maybe the Euclid Surveyor is waiting for the Tertiary Vectors to come. The ones that will lead us to the Core.

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.