distress beacons are items that sometimes drop from larger enemy ships... the little crates you sometimes see left over after you've collected all the resources.
they're unique to each enemy race (wanderer beacon / tralgar beacon)
if you have one in your ships inventory, you will have the option to use it from the map screen... use it, wait a turn and you'll see them come running.
took my a while to figure out that those crates that didn't get sucked up into my ship after battle are available from the ship screen in the red boxes... your ships inventory is the green boxes... you can carry weapons and your beacons there, and use that interface to swap weapons to and from other ships in your fleet...
also, some of the weapons you pick up are seriously upgraded, so selling them nets you a decent profit... my last playthrough, i had over 10K bolts and over 100 upgrade packages left.
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as for strategy, carrier class ships are dominant for sure... once you beef up those drones, you're set.
i just beat the game on hard with the Nightengale (scored 3857), two Genesis wingmen, all equipped with bolter drones and some seriously upgraded weaponry... it was actually pretty easy once I had one wingman with 5x bolter drones... the extra wingmans bolters just made it too easy really.
with three sets of drones i could just roll over a fleet of 6 or 7 large ships and an enemy battlestation without breaking a sweat.
i'd just warp into the star system into the furthest possible location from the large ships and send just my drones out after the nearest one... rinse and repeat until it's clear.
by the end map, my three fleets of 5 bolter drones with maxed out hull damage would just annihilate anything quite rapidly, while my ships would just circle around the outside avoiding most incoming fire, and anything that got close, would have two energy cannons with maxed out shield damage / fire rate and two flak cannons with maxed out hull damage to answer to.
all in all, some epic battles - i wish it could go on longer, like more maps to run through or some kind of sandbox-ish mode, and higher difficulty so that even when my ships are heavily tooled up, it still presents a challenge.
this game is awesome though... i hope it remains profitable for the devs so we can see some feature updates and longer term support... but the android gaming market is a fickle beast.
