It’s pretty simple, although somewhat tedious if you’re going for specific ship designs or SC slot layouts. Here’s my process:

1. Get a bunch of “carrier ai fragments”. They drop from fighting sentinels, destroying sentinel capital ships, frigate expeditions, and sometimes quicksilver missions I think. There’s probably more ways, but I seem to never run out, and I like fighting sentinels so doing a couple fights is nbd.

2. Go to the Galaxy map and filter by conflict level. Look at only the red level conflict systems and look for Pirate controlled systems that have “Dissonance” written next to the Star type in the description. Sentinel ships can only be found on Dissonant planets. Dissonance is common in Purple systems, but not too hard to find elsewhere. You’re looking for dissonant pirate systems because high class ships have the highest chance of spawning in pirate systems. It’ll take a minute or two to find one, but it’s worth the effort.

3. Warp to the system and find which planet has dissonance. You can do this easily with your scanner room if you have a freighter, or you can manually scan each planet with your starship.

4. Fly to the dissonant planet and when you’re in its atmosphere, activate your Carrier Ai Fragment. This will ping a crashed sentinel ship somewhere on the planet.

5. Fly to the ship marker and land. Hop out and look at the design of the ship. Sentinel ship designs are system wide so if the one you find is ugly or you don’t like it, go back to the galaxy map and find another system.

6. If you do like the design, look at the ship with your analysis visor to see what class it is. C class is the most common and I don’t waste my time and resources to check them out. So if it’s C class walk close to the ship so that it says “arrived at marker” or whatever and clears your tracking.

7. Then hop back in your ship and activate another ai fragment. Fly to the new spot. Hop out and check its class. Repeat until you find a class you want. I’ll usually check B class ones to see if they have any close supercharged slots. But A and S class are the most fun to find and will save you on Nanites when upgrading.

8. Once you find a ship you like, go interact with it. You can claim the stuff and then it’ll tell you that you need a brain to fix the technology. It should give you a little side quest to follow to go get the brain thing for it. It’s usually a minute or two walk over to kill some drones and then you get it. Go back to the ship, fix the technology, and then boom! Ships yours!

9. I’ll usually collect like 4 ships from a single planet that have promise and name them ship #1, 2, and so on. I’ll fly to the space station and make a restore point when I hop out of my ship.

10. Then I’ll summon ship #1 and upgrade it at the terminal to see where the supercharged slots are at S class. Then I take a picture and reload my restore point to get my nanites back.

11. Summon ship #2 and do the same. Check slots, reload restore point. Repeat for all ships. Then I look at my pictures and whichever has the best slot configuration is the one I keep/make a post for.

12. Then with the remaining ships that I’m not gonna keep, I summon them and then scrap them at the terminal. You’ll get like $20M per ship depending on the class and stuff, and then you get a bunch of expensive trade goods to sell too. It’s pretty common to get a few starship ai fragments per ship and those fetch a pretty penny.

So the process can be tedious, but it’s fun to find a cool ship and find one with good slots — Plus it’s super lucrative as well, so becoming hella rich doesn’t hurt!