I've been trying to complete the lost hydrospanner mission in Itan, but haven't been able to actually find the durn thing. I go to the sector where it's supposed to be, and blast all the Orun collectors to little tiny bits until the system reports "Great, you've found it...". I target all of the debris, and none of it is the hydrospanner. Any hints on how to get the hydrospanner to actually drop?

It doesn't drop. This mission is bugged... and it has been for a very long time....

Oh wonderful. No one has submitted a support ticket for that problem so we didn't know about it.

ray, if we submitted support tickets for all of the minor problems we had with missions and the like, your mail server would run out of hard drive space. Twice. Be thankful that most of us focus on the bigger issues when worrying about what to report.

Even the minor problems need to be reported, otherwise they would never get fixed.

This a very good lesson: never assume a bug has been reported. I tried that mission my first time around -- September/October '09 -- and was told it was busted. I just figured if everyone knew it, the devs must know it.

so....has this been fixed?

Not yet. I'll see what I can do about it today.