Is it possible to find a crashed ship before first visiting a Transmission Tower

Basic Strategy

The easiest way is to use beacons which are located on or near many of the "points of interest" on the planet. (I'm talking about the beacons that have the orange beam of light coming from them, NOT the large pole beacons). When you find a beacon, you'll have to craft a Bypass Chip in order to use it. When you do, select to view nearby transmissions. You will get a new waypoint that will either lead to an Observatory, a Beacon (the pole kind), or a Transmission Tower. The only one you care about when looking for ships are the Transmission Towers.

Once you get a useful waypoint, make your way toward it. Solve the puzzle in the tower to reveal the ship's location, them had over to the ship. The number of slots in the ship you find seem to be directly related to the number of slots on your current ship - it will have plus or minus 1 slot.

That's the basic strategy of how to find crashed ships. It's tedious but it works, and it's a heck of a lot cheaper than shelling out 100+ million for a larger ship.

Optimizations

There are three ways to make this process a little less painful.

1. All Transmission Towers looks the same. What the building looks like depends on the home race of the current star system (Gek, Vykeen, or Korvax), but once you've found one TT, you'll know what all of them in the system will look like. As a result, you don't have to use the beacon to locate TTs - I often just fly around randomly until I find a TT, then land and collect the prize. Technically, this actually slows down the process, but doing it this way prevents your map from getting cluttered with waypoints you don't need, plus you get to do some sightseeing while you search.

2. There seems to be a bug with Gek TTs that allow you to "solve" their puzzle multiple times, thus revealing the location of multiple crash locations. Whether or not this bug will be fixed soon is unclear, so if you want to exploit it you should do so now.

3. You don't need to fix every system on a crashed ship - only the Launch Thrusters and Pulse Jets are required to fly a ship. This saves you some time and effort, since you can scrap/salvage all the other upgrades on the ship while you look for the next one.

Source: I found this info during my research for my question here.

It seems that one of the ways of finding a Transmission Tower (and thus possibly a crashed ship) is to perform a scan in your ship while in space. This is what one Reddit user suggested:

Transmission towers and crash ships still exist, however there is no way to find them except for sheer luck in a system scan, or just fly around and see it.

Perform the scans while looking at a planet. I can't tell for sure if this matters or not, but I seem to find more locations via this method while looking at the planet I want to scan.

You can also try this method one user posted on a Steam Forum:

1. Build a Signal Booster
2. Select Colonial Outpost. This has the chance of finding a Transmission Tower. If you don't find one and find something else, you have to go to the waypoint found and discover the location with the save point before you can re-scan again.
3. Place a Beacon at the Transmission tower once found. This will act as a place holder for you so you can return to it easily.
4. Solve the puzzle in the tower and go to the crashed ship
5. Repeat steps 3 and & 4. The tower should reset after traveling to the crashed ship and discovering the location using the save point. If it didn't you can go into space and go to the space station as well to reset it and then come back.

You may not be able to reuse the towers as they stated however. Other users in the post found that they could not.

A third method which was posted in the same Steam forum as above states:

...Scan the planets from space and pick the ones where you get Abandoned Building or Trading Post. Those seem to be the planets with the most buildings. Some of them have a much higher density of buildings than before the update, there are crazy numbers of towers. Then just fly over the planet at 150 clicks or so and look for towers.