Stranded Freighter mission, can't find Shackleton

[Psycho 78]

I'm doing the Free Worlds missions and am supposed to find and repair and return a stranded freighter called the Shackleton in the Lestat (something like that) system. I'm in the right system but I flew all over scanning ship names and fighting off pirate attacks for 10 minutes but can't find the Shackleton. What am I missing?

[Grathagis]

Does the quest state the ship is IN Lestat or in the vicinity of Lestat? Most quests of this type, the target is within 2 jump radius of the target system.

[Psycho 78]

It says: "Repair the F.S. Shackleton, which is stranded in the Lesath system, and escort is safely back to Longjump in the Sabik system."

But good idea, I will look in nearby systems.

[Psycho 78]

I managed to see it once in Lesath but couldn't get it without a lot of losses. I reloaded a previous game and now it's on the ship list in the lower left listed in the Lesath system, but I still can't select or find it when I'm there. Weird.

ETA: Tried it a few more times and got it to work. It gets added to your fleet and Shift-N cycles through ships in your fleet, then once it shows up in the upper left you can hit B to repair it.

[1Z Rison]

Hmm that does sound strange and more like a bug. Which this game has relatively few of, to my knowledge. Compared to whats "normal" for games nowadays.

That sort of mission is not the only mission of that kind in the game and normally you get the ship added to the list on the lower left corner right away in that sort of mission.

Missions where you need to investigate a ship, without it being added to your list and hence immediately giving away where it is, are also in the game.

But from the sounds of it, it should be the former type of mission. Though I have not checked the game files for that particular mission yet.
In the future, if you are ever uncertain where a ship actually is (for any kind of mission or purpose, really.) you can always check your save file.
As in, literally open it like any sort of .txt and look around in it. If you know a ships name or the name of the mission, you can ctrl+f search the save file and try to find the data.

I say try, because even in plain text, it can still seem a bit confusing to those not used to "code logic"

[callmetrivial]

"stranded" ships always park on the systems sun "gathering fuel" i suppose. or just getting sucked into its gravity well... which is a fun dynamic i wish was active across all the systems not just the few that have it