Me personally? I don't see a reason why it needs to drop anything. It does have defensive weaponry, so it could drop parts of it, or simply scientific data material, as there is no reason it shouldn't be able to. It's a generator, of course you can gather data about it. Doesn't matter anyway, as I don't believe it will ever drop anything or have a more specific reason from the devs without Treewyrm continuing the work on his vision.
Removed the dying now you can explore as much as you want well almost sometimes you still randomly die in some areas
also don't connect to the server with the replaced file.
place in Freelancer\DATA\UNIVERSE\SYSTEMS\ST03
Several references were to "Nomad Boss" so I think it has something to do with the Nomad Sun Crusher or planet destroyer thing. Which you can find and fly in:
I guess it wouldn't matter now to say what plans were, so here's a bit postmortem trivia. The picture is of the tunnel behind dyson main gate, and Sombra Hookier had a correct observation that it fits no2_boss ship size. The tunnel itself however is more of a visual decoration, as main gate is technically a custom jumpgate which has opening animation, effects and all that jazz.
The exterior system was to have additional layer of large platforms in the area between upper level where you see starscape and the surface itself, also there were to be various more structures on the surface, three of planned six 'skyscrapers' models were made and was thinking making them destructible but scrapped the idea as amount of work was already extremely overwhelming by that point. It was kinda alien-like cityscape, a bit blade runner-esque with lots of light projectors.
Cavern with reactor was someone elses addition, probably KingBoo or Maurice, I don't know, that was done after I quit. The interior blocks you see there however were made in mind for a separate interior system, also accessible from smaller gates (that were restricted to snubs only) some distance from the main one at the surface system. The interior system was much like Nomad lair mission in vanilla and especially the extended version in beta. While interior systems wasn't fully complete it had several rooms, various tunnels and other areas of interest. These type of assets were quite challenging to make to due glitchy and unpredictable nature of FL physics, a lot of time went into testing hitboxes, and I mean LOT, a week could easily be spent to iron a single part to make sure all convex subparts did work in game. The purpose of interior system was for players were to harvest keys that are required to use dyson gate. There were no flying NPCs as AI simply cannot navigate interiors, but there were various turrets and stationary larger ships in bigger rooms to provide challenge, also environmental hazards like heavy radiation areas you had to use cruise to get through (while avoiding obstacles in tunnel). Keys were one-time use items, removed when a carrier player activates the dyson gate "jumpgate". Key-locked jumpgates are doable as I believe there's hook plugin accomplishing exactly that functionality. That fancy rotating reactor was an object you had to destroy to escape from the system (it has a distant special hardpoint to which a 'blastdoor' object was attached to and removed upon playing death animation fuse script), its function was a nod at Descent (where you had to destroy reactor and escape mine in allocated time).
The third system representing the hollow part of the dyson sphere was remade from ground up with a custom animated starsphere showing moving segments (which were essentially cleverly masked panning textures with tiling disabled). In the center instead of the star was a weird black hole. Black hole design and effects were showcased long time ago in my works thread, so if you wonder what that was for there's the answer. There were also pretty cool floating extremely slow but invincible obelisks that would snipe you with a beam but only if you were in line of sight which was visually represented by glowing cone effect player had to look out for and avoid. Of course you had much harder NPCs there, we had loadouts for them too (well, the boring numbers work was done by Maurice mostly). If you look at ship models you may notice they have unused turret hardpoints, those were for higher tier NPCs, for example level 23 fighters had special turrets mounted on those giving them ability to shoot players who'd try to lock on tail, and level 24 had custom engines giving them maneuverability boost. In my tests these little extras gave a nice bump in challenge to otherwise anemic NPCs everyone was shooting down too easily, and I didn't want to make them bullet sponges or one-shot killers either. They also had some special equipment like thrusters that gave them boost to cruise speed allowing interceptor-style NPCs to pursue players trying to flee. But the system was missing some other assets I was hoping to make, namely the fortress with destructible segments which had nifty loot to drop (among which a capital ship codename beam turret) and an obligatory boss fight (unreleased model, not no2_boss) I had been struggling to make given very limited AI customization in FL, but it was drop a key required to escape the system with your raid loot. About half of planned content for it was produced but ultimately it was fully scrapped and never got into the game.
Overall it was a very ambitious design and goal we had there, that is relative to FL's modding limitations. Personally I really enjoyed making it, it was interesting and quite challenging to do. Digging deeper into data formats, learning things that weren't explained anywhere else before, it was a journey in many ways and I don't regret trying. But unfortunately things happened and so I never got to finish it. Half of the stuff made by that point got thrown away. Some assets were almost complete by not fully and as such were also thrown away. I reckon about 60-65% of the overall intended content was made by the time. Of which in game there's may be just half used in any capacity, may be even less. Kinda sad story but that's it.
Perhaps start by finish integrating ships and associated content to mark that off the list. Disco had pretty much all the stuff needed for those a very long time ago. I know it always been a "struggle", but not for technical reasons.