That's what I was doing. The IGN guide said you could buy the goods from the traders on the landing deck and then run upstairs to sell them at the console at a profit. Except that I did that and came out 20,000 units poorer.

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, heard all before, I have managed to find all of three crashed ships. Don't tell me about finding them with "transmissions" "colonies" or any of the of the other bull. I have tried it all, it very rarely works. (3 times).

No, it works. Gek transmissions are (if they didn't fix) bugged to just work indefinitely.

Look for buildings with a tall antenna, unlocked, different for each race. Inside, a terminal talks about a distress signal. Solve the problem (google...) and it shows you a ship. A single Gek planet can give you MANY to choose from, to shop around for a nice-looking one.

The small finders will find these sometimes, I think? I mainly used the small finders just to find operations centers for atlas pass 2/3. Manufacturing ones are good for making stuff, and more importantly, assembling warp cores from materials. The ship-finding buildings are more common than ops/manu buildings.

And every damn planet has the exact same random distribution of buildings.

You tried 3 whole times.
That's not enough of a data sampling to declare that searching for crashed ships doesn't work.

If you go to one of those things that beam the red/orange beam up into the sky, you can keep making Bypass modules and keep selecting "Transmissions" over and over and over again, you can use them more than once to fill up your HUD with markers.

For the longest time I thought you could only use each option (Monolith Colonial building, Transmission, Shelter) once, and that using it again would just find the SAME 4 points, but it doesn't.
It keeps finding new points