I was playing through this recently and thought I'd post a note regarding some things I noticed about this mission. Pardon the thread necromancy and the long post, wanted to get all my notes down.
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First, the mission 3 out of 3 tries bugged for me and did not equip the Acinonyx with the updated detector. To fix this I had to dock the ship on which I already had it (the one I got during the mission to find the missing Dragon) and transfer it over manually. This despite the message text clearly indicating that the new ship had supposedly already been equipped with one. This is a goof on Egosoft's part, they should have caught and fixed this.
Once I fixed the above mistake the mission became entirely doable and with a bit of preparation was actually fairly easy for me. Here are my notes for whomever may find it useful (and may it spare you some frustration).
First, before even undocking from the shipyard at Family Pride update the prototype ship. I brought in a cheap freighter I'd bought and outfitted with things like video enhancement goggles, exploration software, turbo boost Mk 1, etc. I also loaded the ship with 20 hammer heavy torpedoes, 50 mosquito missiles, energy cells, 50 Mk II drones, and 10 Adv sats. All this got transferred over to the prototype, after which I just sold the freighter.
REMOVE the guns and shields from the prototype, they just get destroyed anyway so you might as well put them on another ship and save them as freebies.
Don't bother adding duplex or triplex scanners, they will be destroyed.
Do not add any other shields or weapons, even if they're just left in the cargo bay, they will all be automatically destroyed (this part is a bit cheesy if you ask me, but it is what it is). Missiles, energy cells and sats all seem to survive just fine. I did not try loading any hull plating, so I don't know if it will survive or not. If it does survive it might be an easy and quick way to repair your ship later (see below).
Now you're ready to jump, so either jump directly to Lost Order or jump nearby, refuel and then jump (explanation as to why below).
When you misjump into the unknown sector drop one Adv Sat immediately. Then eject and begin repairing your ship. This is where it would be worth seeing if you can eject and scoop up hull plating you brought might work (I didn't think of this til after I was well past this point and honestly didn't feel like going back and redoing it). Otherwise wedge the Left Windows key down on your keyboard with something (so your repair laser keeps firing) and go watch a TV show or something, come back in about an hour real time. Your ship should be fully repaired by that point. One way or the other make sure it is FULLY repaired before doing anything else, this makes the whole thing MUCH easier.
Ignore the lone Xenon that downloads your database. You cannot destroy this ship (and I tried) and it will not attack you so just ignore it and work on those repairs.
With your ship repaired do the scanning bit. When the 2nd scan gets to 90% make a save. You will get one of several possible puzzles, I found 3 different types. One requires you to match one binary string to another from a list in 10 sec or less, never got this one but that's okay you can just cancel out and get a different puzzle. Another type requires you to unscramble a sector name, the sector name chose is random but they're all pretty obvious if you know the X universe decently well. The third type of puzzle requires you do a bit of letter swapping following a math string, read the instructions and its not hard to do either. BTW, any of this "hacking" is far and away better than a soduku puzzle... just sayin (I still have a hate on for that thing).
When you solve the puzzle, you get a new message with an option at the bottom to set your detector to find jump components. BEFORE you click it, save again. This is an important point to save at. You don't need to close the message, just Shift+S and save (I bought about 50 salvage insurance before doing this mission). Now click and drop another sat. Wait a few seconds and some loot should appear on your map. See what you get. Generally there will be 1-2 200 MJ shields, 2 boxes of hammer heavy torps, some mass drivers and ammo, 2-4 PACs, 0-6 PALCs, some MK II drones, 1-5 adv sats and some hull plating (8-10). Hidden drops may include ISRs, another 200 MJ shield, engine tunings, and rudder tunings. Since you've already fully repaired you can ignore the hull plating. I ignored the mass drivers as well. Got the shield first, then the PACs, then started looking for engine tunings and ISRs. I left the sats, torps and drones to pick up later since I'd brought 20 torps, 50 drones and 10 sats with me. I use these up first.
*NOTE* Be careful you leave room in your cargo hold to pick up. If not you can kill yourself. These are not normal cargo crates, they are indestructable! If your cargo bay is full and you hit one at full speed with no shield you WILL blow up! This is why I left the torps and such til after I had used my supply up first! I brought over 400 energy with me, first thing I did was drop 3 caches of 100 each so I had room for other stuff. Then as I used it up, I picked up 100 at a time.
Now start finding stuff. Don't be in a rush. Either in finding jump components (try to find ALL the hidden stuff you can) or in killing off all the Xenon. Killing the xenon is easy, spam torps at them. I rarely fired my main guns and let my PACs deal with incoming missiles (which they love to fire at you). Don't freak when Qs show up, 10-15 torps and they die nicely. I frequently had caches of torps waiting to be picked up, more spawn when you pick up cargo components. Drop lots of sats so you have good coverage (some will get destroyed by the xenons) so you can find what you need when you need it (nobody is paying you to bring any of those sats back so use'em and lose'em. plus you'll want the cargo space for more valuable stuff like ISRs, PALCs, and hammer torps). Same with the drones, use'em up and free up the space.
Use your Turbo to get around faster, rather than SETA. I hit over 400m/s with turbo going and that got me from one cache of goodies to another pretty quick. This also got me ahead of Xenons so I could pick stuff up without being shot at while I did so. This is why I brought all that extra energy and why refueling before the final jump might be a good idea. Clouds of drones are handy for keeping them off you as well (plus it improves the hit rate of torps against PXs and Qs considerably if they're busy with a swarm of 20+ angry drones).
Note, special command software to let your auto pilot scoop up goodies can be handy. Example, pick up the PACs, locate the ISRs, let the autopilot scoop the ISRs up while you install the PACs and configure the turrets. Multitasking for the win.
Save before picking up each jump component. You will need to pick up 3 to fix your jump drive.
Each time you pick one up, you get another random spawn of loot and hidden stuff. Check out what you get and look for engine tunings. If you don't get any, reload your save and try again. The default speed is 190m/s but this is NOT the top end. When I finished I had a max speed of 320m/s, which is a very pleasant cruising speed (until your autopilot splatters you into a station...). So the more engine tunings you find, the faster you go. No idea what if any max limit there is. Extra PALCs seem rare but if you get some of those, good for you.
When you pick up the third jump component, it starts a timer. You get NO warning about this, and there is no on screen count down or anything. But after a short time you get an announcement that your jump drive is operation, jump beacon detected and your drive spins up. You CANNOT abort this jump, so make sure before you pick up that 3rd jump component you have everything else you want cause you'll only have a short time after picking up the third part.
An that's about it. The Js, Ks and Is were a bit of a joke really, by that point I'm zipping around at 320m/s cruising speed and they can't begin to keep up with me, not counting an insanely fast turbo speed.
One more thing I discovered. If for some reason you need a safe spot to park and take a break, fly inside the main body of the Xenon M0. You can enter from the south end, just slow down to 60 m/s or so and fly in carefully until you are in the forward part. Its glowing inside, not sure why, just is. The body is also rotating, but this doesn't affect you. For whatever reason the Xenons cannot figure this out, cannot attack you (they stop firing missiles and they don't even shoot), and cannot figure out how to follow you inside, so you're entirely safe. You can even eject and work on your ship and be safe. So if you find yourself pressed for time and want a safe spot to make a save to come back to later, this might be of help to you.
Hope that was helpful. This can be a frustrating mission, mainly because its bugged at the start regarding the detector not being installed. There's a reason I had to try this 3 times before getting it done...
Also, I kept wanting to tell the NavCom AI "Let's take that humor setting down to 75%"
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Tropguey (5)
They could just have started with one Xenon fighter, then add another every minute or so but instead the bad guys finally do it right and send their whole fleet at once this time.
Trueguey (22)
Rookiguey (4)