Where are the Pandora engine and rudder tuning crates?

In X3 Albion Prelude, you can find crates containing engine and rudder, collecting which can overtune your ship, increasing its speed and handling far beyond what is normally possible for a given model. Where can I find them? If they are random, is there a trick to locating them, like the BBS of X3 TC?

Solution 1:

The pandora crates are randomly generated during a new game. There are a total of 8 crates per game, and they always spawn in pirate sectors. Their locations are totally random. And as far as I know, there are no in game hints to their whereabouts. Worst yet, some of them may end up being destroyed so you lose the contents.

There's a script on the egosoft forms somewhere that can locate them for you, but that will result in having a *modified* game.

As a semi-cheat:

If you save your game then run the script and write down the coordinates you can then go fetch them without being flagged as such.

Other than that, I suggest taking a fast M5 (like a kestrel) and then run the "map sector" command centered on 0,0,0 with a radius of 200km. Keep the sector map open and keep an eye on the list of items, if your Kestrel is close enough it'll pop up there as containers.

Also, someone on the forum noted that some crates might not show up when you are at the coordinates until you drop an advanced satellite nearby.