So I finally saw the Ghost Ship. I've had the OXP installed for ages, and have sometimes seen the notice that it's been sighted, but this time I was wandering along when I saw a big fleet of Vipers apparently escorting a Cudgel Class Battleship. I flew around the mass of purple flags for a bit, trying to see if I could figure out what they might be up to, when I saw something else..
I can tell you what the Vipers were doing: they were hunting you. Just like the missiles, the pirates, and the Q-mine, the Vipers are ghost Vipers created by the ghost ship. The ghost ship will also create one other class of object out of nowhere: an asteroid about 100m in front of your moving ship. If you were watching the missiles in aft view, that might have been what got you. I won't drop any more spoilers, but I have experienced at least two other tricks from it.
I'm surprised you say you had the OXP "for ages" before it appeared, I removed the OXP because it was appearing so frequently.
Nicely told, but I have one question:
Are those icesteroids I see in the picture... and a tagged one in the bottom right
Indeed they are. The Icesteroids and the tagged asteroids do add quite nicely to the interesting eye candy of the spacelanes. They're maybe showing up a bit often right now, but they're a new item and it'd be tedious to see only one every once in a while this early in their development. I'm a bit of a sucker for interesting and/or cool-looking eye candy.
I downloaded Planetfall yet, but i think There is a OXP that added landing Gears to all Kind of Ships for Planet Landing.
I used the Deepspace Ships OXP.
Planetfall adds the planetary landing capability equipment (needed to actually make a landing), but that's as close as you get. No OXP can add an additional sub-entity item to an already existing ship model.
Encountered not one but two of these titans flying side by side!
You might notice I had a go at reskinning it. I had a problem with the raised areas on the dorsal and ventral surfaces, though: The textures for these are on a separate .png in a different pattern to the holes on the main one. I did manage the ones on the front-dorsal section by making a marquee of the holes and cutting out the texture then dividing it up and placing each little bit where it seemed to fit! Took ages! Still think they look OK though.